Task Evaluation Bearfaced Productions Natalie Palfreyman

I feel that Bearfaced’s news bulletin is set out like a traditional news production would be. Like a the traditional bulletin, we used the jingle at the beginning of the piece and the bed throughout the stories to affect the pace. We felt that using the conventions of a news production would be beneficial as it is what is expected by the audience. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

In a way, we did stereotype our audience, we assumed that only a minority of our target audience would be interested in things like politics, therefore we did not include such stories in our bulletin. This could imply that we have been biased towards our target audience’s tastes. We addressed young people aged with entertainment stories such as ‘Myleene Klass’ and a vox-pop with young peoples opinions about Crewe Bus Station. We also had a story about a ‘Lifesaver grandma’ which would suggest that we expected other age groups to listen to our production, as it gives the image of an older person. How does your media product represent particular social groups?

The media institution that I think Bearfaced would be distributed by, is the BBC. I think this would be a good idea as they are a big, well known company and there is currently no student radio productions. The BBC would appeal to our target audience as we expected many young people listen to radio such as ‘BBC Radio 1’ and therefore may be more open to listening to a new radio production such as Bearfaced. Also, they are publicly funded meaning that we would not need to rely on other companies to fund us. What kind of media institution might distribute your media product and why?

Who would be the audience for your media product? We chose to aim our product at young people aged 16-25, this is because we are within that age bracket and feel that we can relate to what people of this age think. Also, it’s possible that we will have the same opinions and interests as the people we have decided to target. We created a questionnaire to ask people at our college what they would be interested in hearing in the news, this enabled us to decide what stories to report on.

How did you attract/address your audience? We created a questionnaire to see what people would want to listen to on the news. We found out what attracted people to their favourite news programmes and what kind of tone they preferred their newsreader of choice to have. We discovered that our target audience preferred their newsreader to have an informal register and chatty tone. We created a collage of what we wanted our target audience to be like, which enabled us to come up with the type of stories that we thought our target audience would have wanted.

What have you learnt about the technologies from the process of constructing this product? At the beginning of this project, I knew nothing about what radio production involved, especially the editing side of it. I also did not realise that so much had to be done before you can actually even start speaking into the microphone; setting levels and volume on the mini- disk players and on the studio board.

Continued... I now know how to: Use the studio board when someone is recording in the studio. Set the levels on a mini-disk player to do vox-pops. Upload the content of a mini-disk on to the computer so it can be edited. Edit the recorded stories on ‘Adobe Audition’. This involves cutting parts of the stories out, splitting stories in order to insert a sound bite or other sound effect, order the stories around idents/stings/beds etc. Editing is used to create continuity.

Looking back at your preliminary task, what do you feel you have learnt in the progression from it to the full product? Whilst doing the preliminary task, I was nervous about recording my own voice and having to listen back to it, but for the final task, I wasn’t as I knew what to expect. For the final task, the scripting process was easier, as remembering back to script writing for the preliminary task enabled me to understand how much would be needed in order to fill all of the time required for the production. I also did not do vox-pops, or use mini-disks for the preliminary task, so using them for this was a challenge to begin with, but I soon learned and I am happy with how everything turned out.

What do you think of the final product? I am really happy with the way our news bulletin turned out in the end. Even though i was not in it much, it was difficult at times and it was too long before we decided to axe some stories, I am proud of the end result.

Have you achieved what you set out to do? In a word, yes. We set out to achieve: a 5 minute news bulletin, consisting of stories that our target audience would want to hear, the way they would want to hear it. We actually achieved: a bulletin, just over 5 minutes long, consisting of stories that we decided would appeal to our target audience based on the results of our questionnaire.

If I had the chance to do this again... I would probably be more involved within the main news more, i.e do more than just the outside report on the Haiti story. I would get all of the written pieces in earlier, rather than rushing towards the end. But other things I would not change, like the script that I wrote for my story and the script that I helped Amelia write for the sport, weather, traffic and travel.