These last few weeks have been very busy and stressful but we have finally finished our Radio Documentary, I shall write about the whole process of this on this post as I know there haven’t been any recent updates on my blog. This production has been particularly hard I have found because we had a lot of issues which really used up our time to edit and record. I took the role of producer for this production, Nathan took the role of Director and Ben the role of BA. The process of the radio doc was slow at first, we struggled to think of ideas and also to base these ideas in a ten minute piece, after a couple of group meetings we decided that it would be a good idea to target the SirenFm audience as we thought that these were a young and wide audience that would be able to interact and relate to what our doc is about which we decided was going to be about social media effects in businesses and how its effected individuals careers as well more specifically looking into websites such as Youtube, Facebook and Soundcloud.

We now had to think about who we were going to interview for the piece and this was the challenging part because we had a lot of problems,  after some research we got hold of interviews with an expert on social media Karen Locking based in Scunthorpe , and other figures that had started their own businesses with the help of social networking sites. All of the interviews were conducted through Skype or on the Zoom H4N, these interviews were conducted very formally which was good. Here is a little about the interviewees:

Karen Locking is a social media expert based in Scunthorpe that also has her own business which is called Evolve Business Developments. Karen loves to use her knowledge, experience and passion for all things strategy, Social Media, training and development and is thoroughly enjoying her self employed journey with the business Evolve Business Developments.

Lewis Canner is a singer/songwriter from Doncaster. Having decided to try to further his career through the use of social media, Lewis joined SoundCloud to get his music heard.

Daniel Munns is a post graduate from the University of Lincoln, having graduated last year after studying Media Production, he decided to start up his own independent production company named ‘Shot Sighted Productions’. The business is currently going from strength to strength and they have already secured important clients.

Dean Dobbs is a University of Lincoln student who is currently in his third and final year, studying ‘Film and Tv’. Dean began his Youtube career many years ago, when he teamed up with a friend to create their own YouTube channel ‘OMFGItsJackandDean’ which now has over 300,000 subscribers.

So that was a little about each person we interviewed and overall I was very happy on the interviews we managed to get and felt there was a good range of social media aspects, I was particularly happy to have a social media expert in the piece although I think the doc could have done with another expert in order to make it more interesting. The problems we faced when trying to book interviews was time, we had one interviewee that kept cancelling on interview sessions booked and we therefore had to keep changing the time and date until it was near the very end of our deadline. This also happened with another interview and because of this we did not have any audio to show for the work in progress presentations, I also thought that perhaps the questions asked could have perhaps been more thought out instead of being a bit vague and at times complex, leaving confusion for interviewee’s. The Karen Locking interview should have been recorded in the studio rather than through Skype as the audio is poor as some of the other interviews as well in order to make the piece captivating and not put listeners off the poor audio.

With regards to the editing process, this went very well and Ben our BA did a very good job, we talked about having a futuristic and modern feel to the piece so we therefore implemented music which would suit this.  We wanted the music there to separate each interview allowing listeners to focus on each one which I feel worked well to some extent. I think our Director Nathan did well on directing Ben with the edit as Nathan had a clear idea of where the piece is going to go and how it will sound.

The main problem I feel with the whole radio documentary is that it is perhaps too simple in terms of narrative and structure, I think it does well in informing audiences but we could have gone for something more unconventional and changed how each interview links with a narrative. Overall I think that the team worked well and communicated well and worked in a professional manner, although there are some improvements that could have been made the piece still turned out professional and intriguing.

Here is the final Radio Documentary to listen too.