Radio Evaluation

During the production of our Remembrance Sunday radio production I worked with a team to create a vox pop based on residents of Farnham’s thoughts.

Personally I interviewed four participants of the vox pop, which I found quite challenging as it was one of the first times I have interviewed people using the equipment we needed, and it was difficult to find the right questions to ask. This was difficult because I was aiming to get a response that could be used in conjunction with other people, so there opinions had to be either completely different or very interesting.

Working with the new equipment was exciting as none of us had the knowledge of how to maximize its use, yet we were able to work around this issue through co-operation. Improvements could have been made to the quality of audio through editing yet we did make good use of the sound buffer technology available, we tried to correctly position the wind buffer to weaken the impact of noise interruption.

Furthermore, I had to edit the sound clip into a 30 second file. I found this not too difficult even though it was new to me, as converting the file and using software like Adobe Premiere Pro and the website “sound cloud” was quite straightforward. Combining the audio into a vox pop was a challenge though, I had to remove any answers from the public that contained stutters, lengthy pauses and some of most of their responses had to be cut down to only a sentence or two. Yet I feel with more practice and experimentation with the software I could of improved my editing of the sound file.

A major problem and assumption we initially had was that due to Farnham’s more elderly population we expected less interesting responses. Which proved to be an error of misjudgment on our behalf as we actually got quite controversial and interesting remarks.

Even though we struggled initially we broke into our stride after the first interview, we began to ask more controversial questions that manipulated the person we spoke to into giving us more interesting answers. We also asked direct open questions which lead to the person speaking at more length so we could obtain more information and cut it down to the pieces we desired using the editing software available. I do feel that I have learn t a lot during the production of the vox pop, especially about Remembrance Sunday itself, how to use the equipment and how I can improve my interview techniques.