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Assignment #5.2 – Studio Review

As is outlined in the studio prompt, Room With A View is a studio that concerns itself with “producing compelling content for ‘live’ broadcast”. I believe that, throughout Semester One of 2022, our Room With A View cohort has been able to effectively produce radio content that is ‘compelling’ and is fit for broadcast.

One group’s work, namely Connor, Angus and Jack’s, was a very entertaining listen between both their on-air show and their radio feature. The group’s Room With A View show was very Triple M-esque, in that it felt like a bunch of lads having a fun time on the air. Their interviews were also quite interesting and shined light upon nuanced topics of different societal facets, and their talk breaks were professionally casual and super easy to digest. I believe that this type of content represents one of the fundamental aims of live radio; to draw attention to different stories, issues and pieces of information in a didactic yet easily accessible manner, something that the Room With A View course ultimately set out to educate. Moreover, the group’s radio feature took a completely different turn, opting to create an incredibly emotional and heartfelt story on grief, exploring the life of a woman who suddenly lost her mother and brother. Entitled ‘Lights Out’, I found their use of music to be a great accompaniment to the story, bolstering the emotion. As well as this, their deliberate incorporation of silence and pauses within the interview further added to the emotional weight of the piece and allowed time for the audience to ponder. As a result, I believe this radio feature was absolutely compelling and is model radio for this course.

Additionally, another Room With A View group, made up of Anika, Ethan, Alicia and Niall, also created content that addressed Room With A View’s focus on the production of compelling and effective radio. Their Triple R show was very much similar to that of the style of professional radio, with seamless transitions and effective front and back announcing. Similarly, their interviews showcased a variety of LGBTQ+ voices from Australia, and delved into different day-to-day angles of how the LGBTQ+ community interconnects with facets of life. Thus, I believe their final broadcast was successfully able to convey compelling radio through its professionalism, and told interesting stories suited towards a Triple R audience. Furthermore, the group’s radio feature, centring around the everyday life of TikTok creator Harrison Kefford, was also greatly informative and told a fascinating story. Kefford, who has been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, has been constructed in this group’s feature as a benevolent figure; as someone who remains positive and optimistic despite the challenges he faces. This has been achieved through the effective use of storytelling, in that the arc of Kefford has been skilfully crafted so that we learn of his illness before his TikTok success, allowing the audience to better appreciate his compassionate nature. Therefore, the story of Harrison Kefford has been expertly communicated by this group and is, in my opinion, compelling enough for general radio consumption.

Furthermore, I also had the opportunity to view some of the work from the ‘Doing Mobile Media’ studio of this semester. To my knowledge, the studio is centred around creating mobile applications, exploring both the technical and creative aspects of adapting media for small screens that are constantly on the go. Given this understanding, I found the majority of work on the studio website to embody this notion. One unnamed student’s work was entitled #ACTIVATEMELBOURNE, and showcased an application that shared different landmarks in Melbourne through the use of hashtags. Given the city’s decline in patronage over the last few years, I found this idea to be great for reigniting life into the CBD, accessible to anyone with a smart device. This student effectively conveyed the technical vision for this mobile media through the examples of the hashtags, which connects society, and the creative nature of the post’s supplemented imagery helped me understand how the application was to look. Thus, I believe this work effectively conveyed my understanding of ‘Doing Mobile Media’.

Another student’s work, entitled ‘Uber Customisation’ by Yizhi Wang,  similarly communicated the studio’s aims through its technical and creative composition. The application allows a user to customise their Uber experience, including what type of Uber vehicle is to pick them up, car temperature, music and driver conversation topics. I found this idea to be extremely innovative, and is perfect for mobile media as it can be accessed at any time on the go, whenever people need a lift. The technical aspects were also explored by Yizhi as to how the app would operate in conjunction with Uber, which I also found important for also addressing the pragmatic aims of ‘Doing Mobile Media’.

Dom Apolloni

Week Fourteen

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Assignment #4 Reflection – ‘Room With A View’

Group 2 Submission Folder

Triple R Show Reflection:

Room With A View is a studio that concerns itself with “producing compelling content for ‘live’ broadcast”, as is outlined in the studio prompt, and Group 2’s live broadcast on Triple R was able to effectively communicate this concern. Given our group’s several practices in the On-Air studio prior to the actual show, we were well equipped with how radio should sound, and I was also well-versed in the role of transitions in radio, given my position as panel operator. Since we were also prerecording the final show, I believe we were successfully able to convey a sense of ‘liveness’, which is the perception of sounding live and current, something explored in Chignell’s reading (2009) in how to create quality sounding radio. As a result, I believe our experience in the studio and our ‘liveness’ made us sound like actual radio presenters, and helped engage our audience and achieve what Room With A View sets out to educate.

This semester’s readings were instrumental in how the final broadcast came to be, most notably the Beaman reading (2011), which explored how to create a good radio interview. Following their advice to “reveal something about the subject” to make it memorable, as well as to “listen to what the interviewee is saying” and make follow up points, I believe all three of our interviews followed this model and were close to professional broadcast level. Moreover, the MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics also helped set the boundaries as to what we were allowed to say. While I was pretty sure we weren’t going to utter anything too questionable, it was important that this was read and understood in order to know what is ethical radio, and will be something I keep at the front of my mind when creating radio in the future.

While our demo recording sounded adequate, I believe our final broadcast improved upon it even further. The main feedback from the demo on my end was that the audio would often clip and peak, likely because I had the levels too high, and so I ensured that the microphones, music and interviews all sat between a comfortable -12 to -6 db throughout the final broadcast. Given the success in how the levels sounded in the final product, I am satisfied that I have improved my knowledge on audio recording and I am keen to continue this learning when recording the radio feature piece. That being said, I would further improve my part in this broadcast by timing the transitions into the music better, as while we had prepared for a song’s intro to play during the hosts’ forward announcing, I was always a bit late to start the track.

Finally, our group acted collaboratively and efficiently throughout the entire creation period, which I appreciate. When challenges did come about, such as scheduling a recording time that would suit all four of us, or working around a member being a covid close contact, our group would always keep calm, be open to discussion and work together to sort out a solution that suited everyone. In the end, we were able to conquer the challenges that stood in our way and, while we are deflated after having just completed the broadcast, I hope that our collaboration remains at this standard when creating our radio feature.

Beaman, J. (2011), ‘The Role and Purpose of the Radio interview’, Interviewing for Radio, Taylor & Francis Group, Florence.

Chignell, H. (2009), ‘Broadcast Talk’, Key Concepts in Radio Studies, SAGE Publications Ltd., London, pg. 10-13.

MEAA Journalist Code of Ethics

 

Triple R Feature Reflection:

Our radio feature piece, entitled ‘Charm’, is an audio documentary exploring the experiences of women in a music industry dominated by men. My role in the production process was mainly supportive, as I helped organise and coordinate interviews, as well as assist my group members with editing and recording their parts. I believe my role was crucial for our feature to eventuate as we experienced a myriad of challenges along the way, including unresponsive guests and a rushed production period, and so I aided in keeping my peers level-headed and ensuring that everyone had enough support to complete on time.

When creating our feature piece, our primary goal was to shed light on the experiences of women in the music industry and express their stories in their words. Our knowledge of the Nuzum reading (2019) informed us to “shut up” and listen to the women we were interviewing, so that we were able to hear every angle of their experiences in great detail. Moreover, as was outlined in McGuire’s ‘Ethical Guidelines for Editing Audio’, we ensured that we did not change the meaning of what our interviewees said in order to get a true reflection of the current state of the industry, and I believe we were able to successfully convey these notions in the final product. Additionally, we also aimed for the artists’ activism-fuelled music to play a centre role in the feature as well, as it helped break up the speaking, and I believe we were also triumphant in allowing their music to flourish.

The feedback we received from our rough cut was also very helpful in honing our final work. Our initial montage at the begging of the piece was the highlight of the session, and so that informed our decision to include more music in the piece to transition between our artists and bookers. Furthermore, receiving feedback also taught me how comfortable one can become when repeatedly hearing audio, as while I initially believed there couldn’t be any more speaking that could be cut, after being heard by others’ fresh ears, I realised how repetitive some of our speakers were. After condensing these interviews, I believe it made our final product more succinct and, fundamentally, more powerful, and this condensing is an aspect of this product that I am very pleased we were able to achieve.

Ultimately, two things I learned from this production process is; 1. only very few people you reach out to are going to actually respond to your email, and; 2. ensure I have a proper outlook on what I want the final product to be in the future. If I were to improve this feature, I would refine the narrative arc of the entire thing, as in its current state it just seems like people telling their own stories with no real connection between them. Given Biewen and Dilworth’s reading (2017) on storytelling, and how documentary radio “uses sound to tell true stories artfully”, I feel like while we had great individual stories, we fell short with the feature’s entire story. This is likely to have been more of a focus for us had we had a better vision from the start as to what this feature was to look like.

Biewen, J. and Dilworth, A. (2017), Reality radio: telling true stories in sound, University of North Carolina Press.

McGuire, M. (2007), Ethical Guidelines for Editing Audio, J-Source, Canada, available at <https://j-source.ca/ethical-guidelines-for-editing-audio/>

Nuzum, E. (2019), ‘Asking Questions’, Make Noise: A Creator’s Guide to Podcasting and Great Audio Storytelling, Workman Publishing Company Inc., New York.

Dom Apolloni

Week Twelve