Finished Radio Show

After two weeks of work, my group of James, Edem, Mike and I have finished our radio show!



We would like to thank the Bath Spa University Welfare department, the students we interviewed and everyone who worked with us.

Radio Show Progress...

Below Edem has written a script for our presenter Mikes introduction.

"Hi im Michael Kelly and your listening to Gatehouse Fm. Like many students who applied for university in 2009, and processed their student loans in time for the start of the academic term, I am yet to receive my loan payments from the student loans company. But why did these problems occur in the first place? And what does Bath Spa University do to help it's students who are going through financial problems? We asked the students of the university, if they had received their student loans and if they had what had they spent their money on:"

For the show I have put together an audio montage of clips from various news reports regarding student loans, this will go in just before Mike introduces himself.
Below is what i have created:

News Edits.mp3

Radio Program Progress: Team Meeting 2

Written by Mike:

Meeting was held - Tuesday 17th November, Gatehouse, Bath Spa University.

Attend - Mike, Edem, Ed and James

Action Points

* Interview with Welfare has been confirmed and to be held on the Thursday 26th November at Welfare office at Bath Spa University.
* Equipment has been booked for the above interview (Edirol R09 Kit).
* Vox Pops to be carried out on the morning/lunchtime of Thursday 26th November at Bath Spa Students Union Bar as this will be a prime time that students will be at the Student Union.

Next meeting is to be held on Friday 20th November at DYG01 (Dairy) at Bath Spa University. Below is the next step of what we discuss at the meeting.

* Organise making a jingle for the beginning of radio show in Garage Band.
* Speak to Harry who has been asked to attend Fridays meeting about presenter of our radio program to share his personal experience with Student Finance.
* If Harry is unable to be our presenter anymore then Mike (Me) from the group is happy to take his place using his own experience with some of Harry's put in.
* Talk about how much time we have to edit our radio show, we want to leave a minimum of a week to edit our show as problems will arise.

The Finished Soundscape

Here it is:
One mans trip to the riverside cafe

Soundscape Complete.mp3

Radio Show

For this assignment we have been put into groups and been asked to produce a 4-5 minute radio show based around a topic of our choice.
My group; Mike, James, Edem and I, have chosen the subject of Student Finance.
This is a topic which not only is hot on the press right now what with the changes taking effect next year and this years disastrous mistakes make by the student loans company, but it also effects us and some of our closest friends at the university. For this reason we have chosen to structure our show around our mate Harry and his mission to sort out his finance issues.
We will use techniques such as Vox Pops to help fill out our show. we will have a continuing theme tune which at the moment is 'Kanye West - Can't Tell Me Nothing' because the opening lyrics are: Wait till i get my money right'

Our first draft of the structure is as follows:

Intro - Music and clips from news about student trouble.

Interview - Harry talking about his experience
Vox Pop - students from uni, ask opinions 'How are you doing for money?'
Interview - Student talking about good experience
Comment - From student finance staff
Summery - Where to go for help and advice etc, Music out.

Here is our written Proposal written by group member James:

Every year, thousands of people embark on the journey to higher education. The concept is fairly simple, use tools such as UCAS to alert potential Universities of your course choices, attend interviews and hopefully enrol on your desired course. However, there are sometimes glitches in the system.

We propose to create a radio show that is primarily aimed at University students, staff and future University students.
The radio show will cover multiple angles on student life, but especially the main issue of Student Finance. The intention of the programme is to gather the correct evidence in order to create a story that affects most students during their first few months at University.

The main focus on Student Finance would be the late distribution of Student Loans and how this has affected the University and most importantly, the Students.

We will gather information regarding this matter from the Students themselves and how they are coping with the current economic climate and the shortage of disposable income they have.

We would also gather information from the Universities and Student Finance in order to give a different angle on the issue and what they are doing in order to help the Students and anyone else involved in the situation.

The radio station will be produced by Students, but will be aimed at a wide target audience. The target audience will be mainly fellow Students, but also the University staff, Student Finance and friends and families of anyone affected by the issues raised on the programme.

We intend to create a non biased production and to give as wide a view as possible on the issues raised in order to create a balanced and equal argument for both cases.

Sound Scape Proposal

For this assignment our task is to collect a series of sounds that plunge the listener into the exact environment to which they came from. Sounds simple?
After days of consideration i have settled on my idea. I didn't want just one simple location or experience to record, i wanted to bring together a collection of places and ideas to create a real complex sound scape.
I chose to do mine based upon a cafe. I felt the collection of people chatting, eating, drinking, the exchange of money and music would make for a wonderfully full and interesting sound scape. However while walking through Bath looking for a good location i stumbled on gold. On the other side of the river, hidden away in the corner of a small walk way was 'the River side Café':




The idea of mixing the sounds of a Café AND a river, in my opinion, will make for a far more exciting soundscape.

I have made a list of possible recordings i should make:

kettle boiling
sizzle of cooking
toast popping
spread of butter
clink of cutlery
cups and saucers
sound of steamer
sipping
eating
water running
lid going on pan of boiling water
river
general public chatting
music
footsteps down to cafe
running water
splashes
birds and wildlife

I remembered an commercial i has seen on TV a while back advertising Lurpak. It incorporates many of the sounds I plan to use in my sound scape and is extremely effective at making the viewer want to eat. In my opinion it would be just as effective without the imagery that is used. This is why i have chosen to reference it:



To record my sound scape I have hired an Edirol R-1 from the university...lets see how it goes!

Montage Numéro Deux

Hierarchy from E Whicher on Vimeo.

Make a Marvelous Montage

For or this assignment we were asked to take a series of photos and use them, along with a soundtrack of our choice to create a video with meaning and/or a narrative.
My first idea was to go to the local library and make a relaxed, emotional video where the main focus was on solitude, self reflection and boredom.
This video uses a live recording of the song 'Better' by Jason Mraz:

Boredom from E Whicher on Vimeo.

Unfortunately with this video, when I uploaded it the computer seemes to have squashed the images from wide-screen to regular. I will try and fix this.


I was unhappy with the out come. I feel it did achieve what I had set out to do yet I wasn't convinced that it was interesting enough, seeming to induce boredom rather than portray it!
I moved on to make another video. When i was on my way to take the photos at the library i decided to get some shots of bath city, just as the sun was setting. The idea i had had was of making a montage about a dream. I took more photos of bath when the sun had completely set and used the lighting on the streets to get some blurred, distorted effects.
This video is accompanied by the tract 'Carol of the bells' by Barnenaked Ladies:

to Dream of Bath from E Whicher on Vimeo.

The Three Russians

Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, born 1898 in Soviet Russia, was a film director and theorist. Known particularly well for his silent films he has since influenced almost every film maker since.
It was Eisenstein's writings on Montage in film which really captivated others. In these he says how he believed that Montage was the soul of cinema and that it could not only be used to emphasize the physical intentions of a director, but also could, by using 'linkage' of totally separate shots, could effect emotion and understanding.



Born in 1896 Dziga Vertov was again a Russian film theorist and director. He specialised in newsreel and documetry style film, whilst still workin in cinema. His practises lead the way for many techniques, none quite so famous as 'Cinéma vérité'
In french, 'Cinéma vérité' translates as 'Cinema of truth'. This is because it is used to describe a style of documentary filming that is very hash, brutal towards the topic and combines naturalistic techniques with more stylizes cinematic ones.



Lev Kuleshov was born in Soviet Russia in 1899 and was best known for setting up the Moscow Film School, the worlds first institute dedicated to teaching its pupils about Film. He, like the others believed strongly that the 'essence' of film making lay within the editing, the art of using montage to add substance to a scene. To demonstrate the power of this he came up with an experiment known as the 'Kuleshov Effect'. This was where his audience was shown a piece of film in which an actor was to have one fixed emotion for a number of different instances (ie. being shown delicious looking food, of a coffin) while the edit would cut from him, to the object, then back to the actor. Simply because the montage was well placed, the audience believed that the actor had changed, when in reality he had stayed exactly the same throughout. The audience were truly fooled and even raved about just how good his acting was!

Soundscape...?

A 'soundscape' is a term used to describe a sound or collection of sounds that have come from a specific environment. Within the media it is often used as a reference to a recording that has been made to simulate the sounds of a certain place. A soundscape can marry the sounds from all sources that originate in within a chosen situation. That could be natural sounds ie; animals, weather etc, or human activity ie; music, technology etc. When creating a soundscape composers have often chosen to use a more abstract approach, often using unique ideas such as poetry or speech to help covey the correct feeling.

The first minute or so of this video on youtube, in my opinion are a great example of a soundscape, and the lack of imagery really allows our imagination to run away with it:

What on earth is a Vox Pop?

The term 'Vox Pop' comes from the latin 'Vox populi' which translates as 'Voice of the people'.
In media terms it is used to describe a way in which broadcasters can voice the views of the general public. Typically this is done by an interviewer stopping random members of the public and asking them the same fixed question. The answers are then edited together normally to show the different points of view.

Self Portrait

In the task we were asked to take a self portrait, this was one photograph which we felt summed us up as a person.
I spent a long time playing around with photos of me doing the things i love most, such as playing guitar etc but all these images cane across far to staged, and to me seemed boring.
I settled on taking one honest photo of my room...although this seems dull as an idea i felt the image seemed far more interesting and showed my life on a day to day basis...

An Atmosphere

Our Task was simple, capture the atmosphere of a regular location using just six images.
I settled on a classic family pub as my choice...















thoughts...

what seemed like a fairly straight forward task ended up proving to be incredibly difficult. I spent a fair while playing with the white balance on my camera to help capture that dark, warm, smokey feel that most pubs hold.
I am happy with my images, although in hindsight i do feel i could have made a better choice of subject.

Audio Editing

Today we were set the task of editing a voice clip. The recording is of someone walking through the basic controls of a Sony HVR Z1 Camera.
To do this is used Garageband, a simple program that is installed on all mac computers as standard.
Below is the track its self...have a listen!

Audio Edit Complete.mp3

Garageband in action:

Do I really need...

We were given the uncompleted title 'Do I really need...'. We must finish the title in the hope of coming up with ideas for a television show.

After a small brainstorm I settled on the subject 'the Media'.
I like this for many reasons. It can touch on many issues in today's society from how the media can influence people, ie anorexia from wanting to be like models in a magazine, to social networking and its lack of boundaries. What makes it even more interesting is that it is Media that i am studding...

Here is an amateur video that i feel touches on some important points relating to modern day gang culture and today's Media:

Photo Marathon...

For our first project we were given a printout with twelve different subjects on. It was our job to take a photo for each of these. Before i started this i was unaware of what a beautiful city Bath actually is, however after four hours of wandering around looking for unique and complex subject matter it really hit home!
This was a great task where not only did it throw us right into the creative side of the course but it also worked as a device thorough which we could get to know our class mates as well...