ROOM WITH A VIEW: Y3: S1: WK5: “Aahh, yeah”

An issue in me hosting, which I recognised in the three separate times we had been recording our demo… was the fact that I constantly verbally respond to people with “yeah” and some “aahhh” quite often. Which I kept doing all three times. Because when I listening back on the recording, I realised I was still doing it in that final demo recording! I’m annoyed at myself but I must keep trying to train myself to cut it out. I shall get better! I believe in me!

Me right now:

Me after this semester ends:

ROOM WITH A VIEW: Y3: S1: WK4: Third Time Lucky

It’s currently about an hour since my group and I wrapped up our demo recording at Triple R for this studio! I feel like we are really organised and work super well as a team, which is amazing. But we had some serious technical difficulties when it came to our first and second initial demo recordings… yes, that’s right, we had already gone through our demo running sheet TWICE before actually maintaining the correct WAV file. I’ve already blogged about our initial demo attempt. Here I’ll be talking about our second failure, and our final success!

I can tell you’re confused and distraught right now, but you also see the glimmer of hope due to my mention of success at the end of that introduction to this post. You’re probably wondering “what could have ever gone wrong (again) with your recording when involved with such an amazing group of beautiful and intelligent women?!” Well, for this second round, again – it was not our lack of skill as a group in order to produce a fabulous demo show! Once again, it was the ridiculousness that is, technology.

We recorded our hour long demo, which went extremely well, from 12pm – 1pm on this day. Well, we thought we had at least! Turns out we were recording what was actually going live to air on Triple R for the entire time… Incredible… No one told us which buttons we needed to press on the panel to record the correct line, the mock-show we were making! Possibly somebody did, but there was already so much to process when being freshly introduced to everything that the Triple R studios have to offer. So really, if we had actually saved that .aup file correctly… we’d just have the live recording as well. So, never mind that either! Needless to say, we’ve managed to gain some really good practice in this spectacular ordeal. I’m going to unofficially name our group, the Triple R’s Third Time Lucky. For us, it stands for Record, Record, Record… aka Triple R. That third R, that’s the luckiest one.

Today’s initial recording went really smoothly we thought. So we were DEVASTATED to find we didn’t have it. Just like Monday’s run through, Rose did an amazing job operating the panel. I’m really impressed with her ability to control the outputs properly and be so organised and calm with everything that’s about to happen on the show. When I played around with the panel I found it confusing and didn’t manage to grasp it entirely, but had I had a bit more practice, I’d surely have been able to – I feel that Rose is a fast learner, problem solver and works well under pressure – which seems really important in panel operating, particularly because we’ve been a little thrown into the deep end with this studio. Obviously there were some blunders with both the panel transitions, and with Sammy and I hosting. But they were minor and we managed to recover from them smoothly we found. There were very few moments where Rose transitioned too slowly or out of time, despite her thinking she had! Sammy and I realised that in the first recording today, when we initially interviewed Olivia about her upcoming trip to Europe and JJ about her life and the green man pedestrian crossing debacle which came into place a day before International Women’s Day, that Sammy took the reigns a bit too much and I didn’t get to ask as many questions. However, we definitely worked on that a bit more in the second (actually recorded and exported to WAV file) demo and the talking got a bit more evenly spread. Also the fact we were discussing the pedestrian crossing issue was something that Sammy had actually already spoken about on a radio show she does with Syn – so she was really well informed and had a lot of content to use. When we’re actually doing the live to air show, we will obviously have a plan of which basic questions to ask, in order to lead into conversation with our guests and we’ll delegate these really evenly to run off if we’ve been stuck at a point with our guests where the answer to one of our questions has been appropriately covered.

With our actual recording, I found we were all far more relaxed, Sammy and I work far more naturally together now. Not that it was unnatural to begin with – but it was still a little unfamiliar. In many ways, our first and second recording incidents have been an absolute disaster BUT it has given us the opportunity to get more practice in – we feel like we’re really on to it with this project and are now currently ahead with our work which is a much-needed comfort for the Lucky Threes clan!

https://soundcloud.com/user-960295125/rwav-demo

Here’s our demo above, finally!

ROOM WITH A VIEW: Y3: S1: WK3: Fleshed-Out Interview Ideas & Running Sheets

Recently we’ve been working on our running sheet this week for our demo and have been working on deciding which interviews will be appropriate for our first Room With A View show on Triple R. As I have mentioned before, my ideas were more about people and their hobbies or skills. However, the others had more organisation-based interview ideas. I think a little mixture will be ideal though, so it works out. We’ll need to pitch our interview ideas to Elizabeth McCarthy from Triple R before we go ahead with our interviews (she’s one of the head-honcho Talks producers and we must be granted a special email detailing we can go forth with thy sacred ideas).

We’re going to each pitch an idea, so we’re all putting in the same amount of effort. I think I’ve decided to go with the Swordcraft interview, as I’m genuinely really interested in discovering what it’s all about (note my somewhat medieval ending to that last paragraph) and think listeners will find it fascinating too.

Next post will delve into the fleshed-out interview ideas we send!

ROOM WITH A VIEW: Y3: S1: WK1: Interview Ideas

After a few days of racking my brain and a fairly extensive stalk through my list of Facebook friends and posting a status to check if anyone out there would be an exciting soul interested in partaking in an interview with me for this class, I hit some grand ideas of who I could speak to! I’m quite keen to be conducting interviews with these characters as I’ve always really enjoyed finding out information about hobbies, jobs, collectables etc. which I don’t have a wealth of knowledge of/in. Such as when I interviewed a taxidermist for a short documentary in first year and got to be so up close and personal with these intricate and delicately crafted (dead, but re-assembled) creatures. It became something tangible for me, rather than seeing it in a museum and not being able to appreciate the detail. Discovering these new crafts etc. will open your mind and inspire different views about a realm of topics.

I work in a second-hand / vintage clothing and goods store in Brunswick and absolutely love it there. If you know anything about Sydney Road in Brunswick, you should be able to gather that the store would definitely have it’s quirks as well as it’s fair share of excessively outlandish, enthusiastic, eccentric and/or extroverted customers! Which is exactly what it has. There are several people who come into the store who I find really interesting and they’re great conversationalists. There’s a few people who collect certain objects and will always check for them. There’s several hoarders who buy up big. Then there’s also the cheeky shoppers who haggle an already cheap price, down and proceed to whip out a huge wad of cash, give you a 50 or 100 note for their $5 item… Ridiculous. Not so much the hagglers (that was just a rant because I can’t stand the cheek of it), but the hoarders and the collectors I would love to stop and plan an interview with them about what their lives are like, how they began what they do and why they do what they do. As well as the customers, the bosses there are also interesting subjects because they’ve been in the business for about 10 years and have seen it all!

A university friend who I met recently, alerted me to the fact that he’s involved in Swordcraft which is where people dress in medieval attire and (pretend) fight each other in Royal Park once a week. Here’s a little taster of what that’s like…

The closest thing to this I have ever involved myself in, is performing in Shakespeare plays in high school… and I’ve watched Lord of the Rings about… once? So you can get an idea of how far removed I am from the nature of this hobby. However, in saying that, it has not stopped me being wildly intrigued.

Talking to people who are internet / Instagram famous would be interesting and focus the interview on combatting keyboard warriors! I have a few friends in mind that are within that bracket. A friend said he’s really good at the kazoo, which would actually be rather entertaining (if he’s actually being serious). Another friend of mine taught himself how to throat sing. Another collects CDs, something which not many people seem to do anymore in this internet age. A friend’s father collects a number of collectable cards as well as has many records. Another collects rare currency and she claims some would be worth around $2k!

There are a few taboo-type subjects I’d be interested in exploring through interview, to help inform others. I have connections to people who work in the ‘CamGirl’ and ‘CamBoy’ industry… basically like sex work / online pornography but they get paid to stay by themselves in front of a camera for another person to view. I also know some people who are into graffiti / street art – to discuss the ideas someone has, who actually takes part in this form of expression could possibly open eyes of people who really don’t like it, but are looking from an outside perspective.

I have several other interview ideas, but these are a few for the minute, my discussion in our next class will contain the rest!

ROOM WITH A VIEW: Y3: S1: WK1: Introductory Class

Firstly, I’d like to express how thrilled I am to be back at uni (note: this is not sarcasm). My mind was not being exercised enough over my break, and I was beginning to feel like I was going a little bit crazy. I did begin working on an experimental film project with a few friends from my hometown (one who was visiting, and some who have moved here, but intends on moving here in the near future). It was good to get the ball rolling with this, we began brainstorming about a month back and actually managed to get around 2/3 of the proposed shoots done. In doing that, I felt like I was able to ease myself back into my media-mind again! Now here I am, back at RMIT for my final year and lunging into a studio focused on something other than film this time round, a studio all about radio!

Radio had been something I had veered away from while practicing media because I have always thought about how anxious I’d be on air! However, after being selected for this studio, and listening to radio more while at work and over the holidays I realised it would actually be really fun to get involved. As well as understanding the enjoyable aspect in hosting, today I also factored in how there were other roles in this Triple R based radio studio – such as producing! I want to attempt to get a feel of as many aspects in radio during this studio, that’s an ideal situation.

Knowing that this is not the first time that this studio has run and seeing our tutor, Bruce Berryman, is exuberant in nature, passionate about radio and has been in the industry for several years – all of these aspects combined have piled up to cause me to have… a BRILLIANT feeling about this class. I’m really excited and I’ve also had a few friends who have done the studio who came out of it really pleased with what they’d learnt and produced.

For next week’s class we’re required to come up with a few interview ideas for a demo tape we’d make with a group of around 5. We’ve been asked to think of some interesting subjects we may know and try to stray from bands, as they’re often interviewed on Triple R. We’ve got to mix it up some more and create content people will be keen to tune in to! I’m yet to brainstorm, but you’ll see a brainstorming post in the next few days!