Hey Everyone!
Today I’m going to talk about our radio show project that was aired over the weekend. I thought that this was a pretty interesting and unique assignment, it took my group a few trials and errors to finally get things going the right way but we definitely had a good time doing it! From the very start we knew that we wanted to do an open question. We thought about a question that’s answer could go either way and we also wanted to talk about something that was relevant to everyone. It then occurred to us to talk about the parking here at Mary Washington because that’s been an ongoing debate for quite a long time and we knew that most people feel very strongly about that matter.
The first time my group and I got together, we recorded the five minute introduction and we thought that we had done a pretty good job on it. We based our intro on what was described in Radio and the advice given by Ira Glass on how to make a successful radio show. However, when we went into class the next day and hear everyone else’s introductions, we were bummed to realize that we did ours completely wrong and were super relieved that we ran out of class time that day for Jim to air ours. We noticed that everyone did their first five minutes extremely creatively and already had story lines, sound effects, and characters. During the second half of class, we re did the whole intro. This time, we added a conversation between the three of us where we discussed the issues which now included the food on campus as well and we were pretty pleased with what we had come up with in the end. At the end of the day, we all agreed on interviewing people on what they thought about parking and the food on campus over Spring Break and putting them all together when we got back from school. I decided to interview a guest who visits Mary Washington every weekend to see how he viewed the parking and how it affected him.
Once we put everything together and concluded it with a nice wrap-up, we were pretty pleased with out work. I think we worked really well as a team and were efficient with our task. We had some trouble using Audacity because it wasn’t that simple to use and it took us a while to figure out how to manipulate all of the different audio tracks and piece them together. For some reason I was never able to download Lame on to my Mac so I had to save my interview track as a WAV which ended up working pretty well in the end. The only thing I would change about the interview that I did is that I would make it longer because it was pretty short compared to the other two. It wasn’t really a conversation, it was pretty much just me asking the interviewee so I think I would include myself more in the conversation if I were to do this again.
I really enjoyed hearing everyone else’s shows on the radio because they were all so different and full of creativity. I especially liked the one that was pure commercials, I think they were in Jim’s class, and I thought they were really funny and did the job really well. It was also very entertaining to listen to the show that was full of awkward moments, some of them were quite funny! They reminded me of the magazine sections that are full of embarrassing moments and they always make me laugh and put me in a good mood!
I think our radio show was quite different to everyone else’s, I think ours was a little more serious in the sense that we weren’t telling stories or making jokes and our purpose wasn’t really to entertain, it was more to inform. It’s great to see that there was such a variety of radio shows and I can’t wait to hear what everyone else thought of them!