This week we had Penny Reading come in to talk to us about actors and Radio Drama. One thing that stuck with me was that we needed to remember that we were in charge, just because we are students it doesn’t mean that we can’t turn down an application. At the end of the day it is our production so we can choose who acts in it. She gave us some helpful tips when working with actors such as adding in how things are spoken, for example sadly, or anxiously as otherwise actors will just read it out. We also had Peggy teach us some acting tips of our own in the workshop.

Personally I don’t think that the workshop was very helpful to what we were doing as we ourselves aren’t acting in our dramas, and the workshop was based around acting techniques. However it did allow us to understand the actors point of view and what we need to put in our scripts so that we know what we want. In addition, she mentioned that we need to know what we want from the actor and make sure that the actor is sure what we want from them because the more time you spend on rerecording the more money is wasted in the industry. After all time=money.

We had our team meeting with Zara in the seminar, who gave our script the all clear, although she made us aware that another group was doing the same script as us. We have created a google document between us so that we can all work on the proposal together. We are all going to listen to a radio drama that relates to our script and see what we can implement from it.

This week we looked at recording Radio Drama on location. This can be seen as easier and cheaper most of the time as sound effects and background noise don’t need to be created. The lecture was Outside and Zara took us around campus to show just some of the sounds we could achieve. My favourite part of the lecture was when we had to act as a mob, as this was something that I feel couldn’t be done as well in a studio. It really opened my eyes to the possibilities of working on location, as it makes a lot more sense to do so a lot of the time. The script that we have chosen is called Continuum. This is based mainly in a hospital and it is possible to do this on location but it may be hard to gain access and permission.

In the workshops we went through the script that we had been given. I took on the role of the narrator, so only had a line at the beginning and end of the drama. I was told to sound more dramatic, which was hard for me to do because I had never acted seriously before and I found this challenging. I’m not very good at making sound effects either, I start laughing and don’t take it very seriously, which I need to if I want to be able to do this with my own radio drama. I enjoyed making the radio drama as a group, and am looking forward to creating our dramas for real.

This week we were introduced to the aspect of Radio Drama and the Radio Drama studio.

The Radio Drama studio is so much different to the normal studios. We were told how to set up the microphones and to make sure to turn off Phantom Power before changing them. There are boards in the studio that help separate actors up. We have all decided on roles for the next workshop and have been given a script to use as a mini-radio drama. I have been given the role of Narrator.

For our Seminars we had to listen to 5 radio dramas. Some were obviously better than others, when listening to one radio drama I found that it didnt have much to keep me interested, and I didnt like how the birds was all first person it was like the story was just being narrated. I wonder whether this is just personal preference or others feel the same. I want to avoid using a first person narrative in our radio drama as I dont feel that it entirely effective.

This week the lectures was taken by Joss Moore. Joss is a Breakfast show presenter for Compass FM, and a previous student at Lincoln. Joss’s lecture focused on commercial radio and how he got into Compass after graduating. He mentioned in his lecture that he was Station Manager at Brayford Radio, and it was through this that he was able to get his foot in the door at Compass and Lincs FM. At the moment I myself have a radio show every Monday night on Brayford Radio, and would be interested to join the executive team. This may give me a chance to show how passionate I am to get into radio.

Joss came into our workshops and gave us the task of reading out the news in the morning. He gave us a list of different news stories and asked us to only use the ones that would relate to a station and to present it in a way that would be found on commercial radio. We all gave it our best shot and put in a few national stories along with the majority of local stories. I read out the whole name of a road, such as the A342, Joss corrected me and told me to say it as the road name such as Winchester Street, instead of the letters and numbers as the audience will understand it better. Joss then read the news how he would, and it was so much better than ours. He added his own flair to it and was clear and understandable. It makes you think how much a presenter needs to put into the show, they can’t just read something off a sheet because it will sound too bland. Joss was able to make it sound like he was just talking normally, not reading off a sheet.

Me, Chloe Edwards and Chloe Abraham have decided to work together as a group of three for our radio drama project. We will be taking on the roles of Chloe Abraham as Producer, Chloe Edwards will work on Script and I will be BA.

This week we were introduced to how to properly interview live guests. Before this I had interviewed people before when creating short pieces for our last radio show, but this time we were told to research each guest for the workshop and make questions for them according to what we had researched. We were told to already get into groups for this workshop, so I paired up with Chloe and Chloe to research each person and write questions.

In the workshop we were split into 3 groups to interview one person at a time. We had 7 minutes to interview each guest. Our guests were Charlotte Broughton, Ed Francis and Paul Tyler.

We started with Ed, from Eddie and Sunshine. Ed  was in electro-pop duo Eddie and Sunshine who supported Ultravox on tour. They had some success before things began to fall apart, it was then that they moved to Lincolnshire.

As we had a bigger group we had 2 presenters, me and Aidan. I have never worked with Aidan before but we got on well and quickly worked on the task. The majority of questions we asked Eddie were based on what his life was like, where he played, who he met, whether he missed the atmosphere on the road. I asked the controversial question on where everything began to go wrong and what caused the bands split, and his body language changed. He seemed a bit upset returning to the memory, but he gave us a solid answer and was really open to the question. I changed my body language to be more open and friendly when answering the question, and understood that if he didn’t want to answer it that was fine. This was the first time I had interviewed anyone and got an emotional response such as Eddie, and I would like to do this more so I can learn to adapt and make them feel comfortable when faced with questions like that.

Our next guest was Charlotte Broughton. She has volunteered as Chairman of the Broadbent Theatre Group, north of Lincoln.

Charlotte was very calm when we walked into the room and informed us that non of the equipment had been working with the previous group. She was patient when we tried to fix it and we apologised for being so unprofessional, so we decided to just conduct the interview without any equipment. Unfortunately, and very embarrassingly we found out that one of our questions had the wrong information on it. We asked about her role as Chairman of the Broadbent Theatre Group to which she replied that she was no longer the Chairman. She did admit that the website was out of date and understood why we got this wrong, but it proves that we should have looked at more than one source to get research from as our source was out of date and so unreliable.

Our final guest was Paul Tyler. Personally I found researching into Paul very hard, as he didn’t have as much of an online presence as the other guests. Paul is a radio presenter and podcaster.

Paul was very comfortable in the studio already as he is a presenter anyway and is used to radio studios. He was able to talk on for ages and often we had to but in to ask the next question. Paul was very co-operative and was the easiest to talk to.

Surprisingly I really enjoyed interviewing these people, and I can only wish that we had some more time to talk and learn more about them. In our feedback each guest said we came across as friendly and helpful, and it was obvious that we had done our research.