Group work
The planning stage of the hour long show started out well with a lot of plans for it. We decided we would have a group meeting every Wednesday and to keep each other updated. We have constantly had a conversation over Facebook messenger as a group but the last weeks of working together the communication failed. The group meetings did not happen as often as they should have because there wasn’t often that all of us were in on the same day. The group dynamic wasn’t the best.
Our chosen station is BBC Radio Scotland. They have a target audience from 19 and up with an interest in Scottish culture and music.
We tried to divide different roles to everyone but this didn’t work. Some people in the group finished their documentary earlier which led to that they had to do a lot of the work when it came to writing and timing the script. We kept setting dates for things to be done but we rarely kept to it. Everybody with different reasons for it.
Our guest was planned very easy and we had no problem changing the date with her as the date for the hour long show changed due to strikes. She was on time and seemed to be happy about being a part of the show.
If I could do it again I would make sure that everybody stick to the time plan as decided. That we all have clear roles of what to do and if someone falls behind, we try to help them to keep up. We should have supported each other more than we did.
The hour long show
The group met up at college at 9.00 in the morning to finish the script and have time to run through the full hour a couple of times. Finishing up the script took longer than we planned but I was satisfied with the result because we had time to finish up and go through it. During our run-throughs we could try different questions for each other and build up a confidence. I would have preferred if we finished the script the day before and had more run throughs but because of lack of communication and misunderstanding, we didn’t do everything as planned.
Almost everybody felt confident and sure about what roles they had in the show because of the script. Everybody mostly knew when to produce and when to talk. Andrew did a great job with keeping track of time, something that can be hard to do when you are presenting. We kept talking to each other throughout the broadcast to make sure everybody knew what to do.
The only thing that was unpredictable was how much our guest would be willing to talk. We set out 10 min to talk to her but we didn’t know if she would give us long answers or not.
We did a mistake in the beginning by not streaming the first few minutes and I have to say I feel guilty about that because I thought about it but then forgot about it when we started to broadcast. We should have made sure that someone was in charge of checking that everything was streaming, recording and on the right levels. Even if the first producer set the levels someone could have double checked everything. That was a mistake.
There’s also a couple of swear words in the broadcast towards the end. A mistake done because of lack of knowledge of what would be OK to say on BBC Scotland. At least this is what was said after. This could have been avoided by listening to and studying our picked radio station beforehand. We should have listened to BBC Radio Scotland together as a group to really get to know the target audience and style of the station since most of the people in the group don’t listen to it by choice.
I don’t think we used social media very well because we didn’t promote the show beforehand. We could have come up with a hashtag and promote the show at least a week ahead. I kinda feel that we all lost the inspiration towards the end because of the lack of communication and group dynamic.
We chose to not play any music in between the documentaries. Mostly because we had five documentaries plus interviews to fit in the hour and we also felt that it fit with our choice of radio Scotland.
We wrote the questions for our guest Ramona Muir in the morning and were planning on trying to get more of a discussion and conversation feeling than just having her answering yes or no questions. Sphephelo booked her on time and we had no problems with getting her on the show. We chose Ramona for our guest because she is a female dj/producer in the Scottish music scene. She gave us good answers and point of views. The only negative thing was the chair she was handed because it was making a lot of noise that you can hear in the recording.
The ending of the show is a bit messy. We try to talk to things that are related to Kelly’s documentary but it just ends up being small talk about horror movies we’ve seen. Kelly brings it back by mentioning horror movies they would show on one of the horror nights. We had decided that Kelly would do an outro but it felt like Daniele forgot about that and talks a little bit too long so the outro sounds stressed and a little unprepared because all of us were signaling that the time was running out.
There was a risk of both Kelly and Andrew falling out on the day of the broadcast because of private reason and possible jury duty and if that were to happen we had secured another package from another group to play if that would have happened. Luckily we didn’t have to. It was however very tight and uncomfortable to be seven people in the studio even though we had fun doing this. It’s hard when you have five people who want different things there were some irritations among the group, in the end I think we managed to do a good job with the broadcasting.
Health and safety
We made sure there were no liquids on the table or cables on the floor on the day of the broadcast and everybody could adjust the volume levels on their headphones.
Making of the Documentary
I was super excited about my idea from the beginning. I really wanted to do it and had a lot of inspiration and will from the beginning. I wanted to make a documentary that would make people think. The idea was to tell the same kind of story but with different voices. I really wanted this documentary to be from the women’s point of view. I wanted to hear the voices of the girls and women fighting for the same right to the spotlight as their male colleagues. I wanted more than just one voice to be heard. Something I believe I managed to do. Not to the extent that I was hoping for because I didn’t get all the voices I wanted to but it tells the story of how feminism and uniting women is a good thing and why it is a good thing. The idea was to first have women from more than just entertainment businesses, I wanted to speak to women in PR and other creative industries too but I was too naive with my time. I also realised that it would have been hard to fit all of it in a 6-8 min long documentary.
I should have started interviewing the women I contacted right away instead of waiting a couple of weeks. That would have given me more time to get vox pops from events and probably more interviews. I stressed with writing my script way too much. I should have started that earlier than I did, I believe you can hear that every part of the script doesn’t fit every insert perfectly because of that. I think I might have felt I had more time than I did and that’s why I didn’t start my interviews sooner. Late interviewing led to stressed editing and scripting.
The recording of my presenter also became stressed because of this and it also led to a last minute change of presenter as I recorded the script only days before broadcasting, I always planned to do it way earlier.
I really wanted to get some vox pops from Girls rock school and comedy events with female comics but because of work I could never really attend any of them. This of course, is also bad planning from my side. It would have been great to get that kind of audio in there.
I did, however, contact a lot of people and got in touch with some great interviewees early on. I am happy with the people I got involved in this, even if it could have been more of them.
If I would do this again I would plan it much better and keep to the time management I set up from the beginning. Something I had a hard time doing, I just didn’t realise how much time it would actually take.
I could definitely have listened more to radio Scotland to get a better picture of what kind of packages they would play on the station. I based my documentary on what my tutor and classmates told me about Radio Scotland. I believe I managed to fit the description they gave me of the station. The subject of my documentary is bringing up gender inequality and giving a voice to females which suits the audience of BBC. I kept it Scotland-based and included women from 19 to 50 years old to fit the target audience and give a fair and wide picture of the situation for women of all ages in the Scottish music scene.
I tried to make sure not to edit the interview so any opinions were changed. I believe I managed to keep the opinions as they were without any slander or defamation. This was all about personal experiences and opinions from my interviewees.
The background music I’m using for the intro is Rebel Girl with Bikini Kill. Bikini Kill is a band that is often mentioned when you talk about the whole riot girl movement and feminist band in the rock scene. A band that are looked up to by a lot of females in the scene. I started the whole documentary with a clip from Sarah Silverman’s stand-up special “We are miracles”. A clip in which she makes a joke about how we shouldn’t tell girls they can be whatever they want to be when they grow up because they never thought that wasn’t an option. She’s saying that if we say that, we’re planting a seed of insecurity. Something a lot of the women I spoke to talked about. How women often think they can’t do something they want to do. Or that they wouldn’t be as good as everybody else. This is something a lot of women grow up with while men often get a chance to claim their space. Most women I know doesn’t claim their space until they are way up in their 20’s. Using a stand-up clip suited well because I was interviewing comic actresses. I also use a clip of a song by The Twistettes called Lampost Lights. An all female Scottish rock/punk band so I believe it fits the theme very well.
Interviews
I wasn’t as prepared as I wish I would have been for all my interviews but because of how much these interviewees cared about the subject I got really good material from them from just having a conversation. It’s hard to look on something in a criticising way when you agree with the people you interview. This is something I would have to learn if I want to do more journalism. I believe I made enough research for the majority of my interviews to come up with good questions.
I have learned from this and from the formative unit not to be afraid to contact people and that most people are willing to participate if you present a good idea. People want to talk to you about things they care about. And you don’t need to have 20 questions prepared because if you talk to someone who wants to talk the conversation will flow naturally.
I had an interview that fell through three times because of the person I was gonna interview. She was gonna give me her opinion about being a woman trying to break in the Scottish stand-up scene without a collective of women backing her up. I really thought the interview would happen so I kinda put the other stand up comedians on a hold when I had the interview planned with her as it was a little bit of the last minute. If I could do it again I would try to get another one in there even if the interview was booked. She simply didn’t answer her phone the times we decided on.Which was frustrating but I could have been more prepared with backup interviews.
I need to be better at setting the levels on the zoom. I tend to set them for the one I’m interviewing and then not think about speaking into the mic myself when I ask the questions. If I do remember to talk into the mic it doesn’t sound good with the levels.
I had about 7-10 questions for every interview I prepared for (I’m including the ones that never happened). I tried to ask the questions in a way that would make them talk a lot about the subject so I wouldn’t just get a yes or no for an answer.
Every interview was done with a Zoom recorder in an office, a flat or at a pub. I admit that I didn’t think about the health and safety part very much during these interviews but I do know that the office space had such things as emergency exits and fire extinguisher, same thing at the bar. Because I was using a zoom recorder there were no cables to trip over and I made sure there was no risk of spilling over the recorder. I kept my headphones on a level that weren’t too high for my ears. I made sure everything was set up safe and as it should be when I was recording Julie as my presenter. No risk for tripping or loud noises in her or my ears and no liquids near the equipment.
I managed to bring the audio release forms when I was doing the Witsherface interview in Glasgow but I forgot to sign them and I’ve asked them to sign them afterwards but I haven’t heard back about it yet. The only one I managed to get was Lou Mclean. I’m really frustrated with myself about this because it’s such a simple thing to remember, especially when I had them printed and with me.
I made sure that the people involved knew what I was gonna use the audio for from the first email I sent them. I didn’t want it to be any confusions. I’ll also make sure to send them the documentary as they all asked to hear it when it was done.
Here’s the Audio release form from Lou Mclean
LouMcleanform
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