Tuesday 19th October - Radio Studio

Tuesdays are the day of Radio Studio for me at University, and today meant taking a first-time look at a completely new play-out system. Ultimately, the point of the new system is to simplify the way that audio, in particular (but not exclusively) music, can be played.

Helpfully, the software allows the user to create a "story" before the show, which can then be entered and automatically played throughout the show - with audio pieces and script entered appearing on the presenter's screen to ensure the show can move quickly along. Both presenters can see which item is coming up, at what time, when to speak and when to finish before moving onto the next item. It's incredibly useful as a presenter because it means you can practically view exactly what's coming up, allowing you to plan what to say and make sure you have enough time to say it in.

Later on in our class, we also looked at creating ideas for our assessment and listening through to another year's assessment piece to give us inspiration and ideas. Our tutor encouraged us to throw out any possible ideas, no matter how silly, to the rest of the group. After lots of discussion (and suggestions such as 'Toes', 'A$AP ROCKY', and 'Unusual Animals) our group concluded that our two assessment pieces would be on UK Cities and Chickens. Our UK Cities piece would essentially look at the differences in culture, language, fashion and accents of some of the UK's biggest cities (Liverpool, London, Manchester). At the other end of the spectrum was our other suggestion - chickens. At first we thought this sounded like a ridiculous idea, but after more and more discussion we eventually came up with a few good ideas for sections in the show - speaking to people that work at Nandos; looking at how chickens evolved from dinosaurs; and looking at chicken within the fashion industry. Of course, these are all just preliminary ideas and need more developing before assessment time.

Next week in my radio studio classes, we'll be looking at training our voices!