Created by Danny, Matt, Luke & Natty
Group Members: Daniel Mitchell, Mathew Heaney, Luke Hicks and Nathaniel Griffiths-Scott
Brief: You must produce a RADIO TRAILER for a radio program (imaginary or real) of your choice. The piece must be EXACTLY 1 minute long demonstrating an understanding of audio production.
Since I missed the first session, Discussion didn’t start until the next week. When we all were together in the studio, the first thing we decided to tackle was ‘what exactly do we have to do?’ Natt explained that it was a simple radio advertisement, which has to be a minute long and cover what the station is about. Seeing as we all have a pretty strong stance on today’s popular radio stations, that the music they play is very strict in its nature. We wanted a radio station that appealed to the minority, and played music everyone HASN’T heard over and over. Matt then chimed in with the idea of calling it “CTRL-ALT Radio”. He explained that the ‘CTRL’ and ‘ALT’ together refer to a pretty standard hotkey in windows. This uses the ‘ALT’ to represent the key and the “alternative music” we would offer. Everyone pretty much agreed with this name straight away.
Once we had decided on a name, Natt let us know that he already began work on a really rough drafted script. This is where I began work on Re-Developing the script and fitting it within the timeline. During the rest of that lesson, we split it into smaller groups/singles and worked on things. I tackled the structure of the timeline, what things fit where? Etc.
All of the idea inside this were pulled from a combination of, listening to various other ‘Radio Ads’ which got me a “rough” layout of ; Narrative > Sound > Narrative > Music.
(Draft Script 1)
I didn’t have a block reason for why I thought of the intro. I basically thought of all the random sounds that get played on the radio, mainly inspired by the old over the top announcer style radios. I thought of what sounds and SFX could be used that our target would appreciate. Anyone from our age group knows the Dial Tone sound, and I think nostalgia is a great way to introduce the station. After the dial tone I went mad with computer SFX and wanted a printer spooling sound and the windows boot noise to accompany it. However the boot screen sound is a physical sound owned by Microsoft, so eventually we decided against that.
After showing it to the rest of the group, everyone was happy with it. A few minor tweaks were suggested, and I took them into account as I worked on the second draft of the timeline.
(Second Draft)
This second piece was written as more of a guide for the recording and post production. I wanted to make sure I had a script written for Luke to read during recording. Along with making sure there isn’t too much ‘filler’ space which would throw the balance of the track off.
Then began PRODUCTION! Me and Matt set Luke up in the padded room with a microphone and stand. Matt and I took our seats at the recording desktop. We hadn’t really had a chance to fully control and experiment ourselves with the software and hardware.. One of the major problems began right now, as we choose our recording setup, we somehow set it to record in mono, rather then stereo. (This lead to major problems during the Post production.)
Another problem we had which wasn’t that bad in comparison to the grand scheme, But Luke couldn’t annunciate words as clear as we would have liked. After telling him about it he then began over annunciating the words. This can be heard in the final recording, whenever Luke says “…Alternative…”.
Then began the bug-filled funfest that is post-production in Adobe Premiere! Matt took over the main control of the technical editing, with me acting as more of an assistant, chiming in with ideas every now and then. We began with importing all of our Recorded Audio, checking that it all worked. As expected it didn’t. Initially we couldn’t even get premier to acknowledge there was any audio in the file. This wasn’t a major problem once Brian had shown us about the scaling function, and how it warps the audio timeline. So we fixed the scaling, Voila! We have audio, or so we thought. When playing back initially we were using headphones to edit, Matt wielding the left, me the right. During playback I noticed that as the slider went over the audio, I couldn’t hear anything. Whereas Matt could hear it fine, and continued editing. It was at this point that we realised the audio had only recorded onto the left track, Mono. We didn’t think much of it to begin with, “lets just copy the track across to the other one”… After roughly 2-3 hours spent scanning all the menus and countless websites, trying to figure out how to solve this problem, we stumbled across “Audio Options” in the top toolbar. Seeing as I or Matt didn’t know the official names for things, were just tried everything. When we hit on this option called source channel mappings. Which from the look of it, was EXACTLY what we were after.
Then another problem struck. For some reason, the option to convert mono to stereo was greyed out, meaning that we could fix it. We tried converting the original file into about 5 other different file formats, still this option was greyed out. We figured out a improvised technique to get what we wanted though, Through angrily shaking the mouse and clicking, we discovered we could flip the tracks, to that instead of getting stereo, we could decide what side the mono played at. My idea was to simply duplicate the audio, place it at the exact same place on the timeline, but flip the channel. So a left Mono sound and a Right mono sound plays together, lone and behold we succeeded!
The other problems we came across were minor in comparison, Little things such as :
- Audio files not displaying (Fixed with the audio scale adjustment)
- Audio files not importing (And not giving a reason for the error)
- Changing the document settings during editing.
- Exporting as a sound file. (Media Encoder kept throwing up errors)
- The program closing itself for no apparent reason
Eventually, after powering through on a full stomach, we managed to complete the masterpiece. What we ended up with is more or less what we planned to do, apart from the small ideas and thoughts the group felt like adding/changing during the final sweep of post production.
