The Despicables

My show was Radio Roadtrip so I was assigned to critique The Despicables. This group was from the other class and their radio show was like an interview radio show where they had people call in and talk about why/why not fall is their favorite season and things they loved about this time of the year. But they mainly talked about Halloween and interesting stories people had from the past years they had celebrated this holiday. Some of these stories were crazy! For example, a girl that called in went to a Halloween party at Tech and some guy on the balcony was throwing real burgers down at people… Crazy!

I thought their idea for the radio show was a good idea, especially because we’re in fall right now and we’re right around Halloween time. Many people called in telling funny and scary stories about Halloween so anyone listening would get really excited for the holiday and start thinking about fun things and costumes they could make up. The bumper in the beginning was a really effective use of the combination of music and sound effects to draw the listener in to listen to the show. This group also used sound effects and music throughout their show effectively as transitions. This helped to pull the listener on from one story to the next and not get confused about the order of things.

Great job guys!

Radio Roadtrip

So this week we not only had to critique another radio show but also had to critique our own. So I’m always awkward about critiquing my own work… I hate it, but this one was actually not bad! I love how our radio show turned out, and of course, I think everything is SO funny because my classmates and I came up with the ideas.. so, naturally, they’re hilarious. But anyways to the actual critique part…

The quality of our audio sound was really good! We all sat close together (in the study rooms at the lib) and spoke the dialogue all in sequence. This helped the sound to be really good because we were all close to the computer that was recording the sound and because everything was spoken in direct sequence, the flow of the dialogue turned out great (instead of having to stitch pieces of separate dialogue together). The quality of our audio editing was really good. We used them behind dialogue and without it in certain spots according to the story. The sound effects were clean and had a purpose. The transitions between each part of the story was a short piano melody which functioned as the audio “paragraph” for our radio show.

The use of sound effects was FANTASTIC! We found the perfect sound effects for exactly what we needed them for. We used them all over the place! Packing the car, opening the car door, stomping up stairs, crackling fire, snoring dad, car breaking down, etc. Each sound effect had a specific purpose and was placed strategically in order to create more of a sense of story and painted a better picture for our listeners. The use of music was also effective. We found banjo music for our commercial and car fixup and used that as a segway into the next part of our story and used piano melody as the transition between each separate segment of our story.

Our show definitely has a cohesive structure. It begins with a solid introduction so the listener knows who all of the characters are and they roles they play. The story starts off with inner thoughts from each character as they begin their roadtrip and different characters give their input throughout the show and after to give insight to the listener about their thoughts on the trip. The different parts of the show, along with the transitions, music, and sound effects, pull the listener along through the plot and creates flow that helps to tell the story effectively.

I’d give us a 4/5 on this show just because there is always room for improvement. We could have created another commercial to advertise for Yellowstone if we wanted or added a little bit more real talk dialogue throughout the show to give the listeners more action. But, overall, I think we did an amazing job!