Radio listings

This is my radio listings page, my 2nd ancillary task. I think it went well and I included my radio drama as pick of the day in order for it to stand out.

Evaluation; Who would be the audience for your media product?

Our audience for our radio drama is 16- 30 year olds, so young people, mainly female. We would expect the audience to be a passive one that enjoys soap opera style dramas. The audience is fairly specific for our drama which would maybe make it difficult to maintain listeners because our audience are probably more inconsistent listeners. It would be likely that we would have to rely on the older people from our target audience because many teenagers don't listen to much radio. Many 25- 30 year olds listen to radio and I expect they would be interested in our drama.

However, with the right advertising campaigns it is likely that it would gain more younger listeners, if it was played through BBCi player on the internet and via other sites such as you tube in a video format with an image, aswell as in cars. Many young people drive and work late and it is possible that they would listen to the drama whilst driving home.

Despite the drama having an, obviously small audience I think there is room to expand it and dramas like these can change peoples opinions on radio.

Evaluation; What kind of institution would distribute your product and why?

I expect that BBC radio 4 would host our radio drama because they're well known for broadcasting dramas. My second choice would have been BBC Radio 2 but I think BBC Radio 4 is the safer bet. Our radio drama would appeal to a relatively specific audience which does limit the institutions that would distribute our drama. I think it would gain more interest from television institutions if it was made as a TV series because you could make it very visual that way and we would get a bigger audience because the audience we are aiming our radio drama at is a younger audience. People from this particular audience are more prone to watching television than listening to dramas therefore If it was successful as a radio drama I think it would make a very successful television drama on Channel 4 or ITV.

Evaluation; How does your media product represent particular social groups?

Our media product represents 'teenagers', it is aimed at a young audience and is acted by a young audience. We kind of follow the social group that 'Skins' go under apart from our drama is abit more serious than that. I realise that radio as a media format is listened to mainly by an older generation so our listeners would be slightly older than our target audience, realistically. I expect that our audience will be mid 20's but we may be able to gain a younger audience if it is played on the internet.

Evaluation; In what ways does your media product challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our radio drama follows the conventions of a radio drama; it had a theme tune, it has only a few characters and settings so that it doesn't confuse people, it tackles issues that you would expect to hear in everyday life, it uses sound effects to emphasize and dramatize the situation.

We also challenge the conventions of radio drama because we don't use narration, many radio dramas use narration to introduce the characters and setting but we felt that you could learn enough about the characters without narration and this also added to the mystery. We have a monologue which you wouldn't usually find in a radio drama but we felt it was neccessary to build tension.

Evaluation; How did you use Media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages

I used media technologies at every stage of my coursework, at times I have enjoyed it but at times I have found it challenging. After a year and a half of practice I think I have perfected my use of Photoshop and In Design which I now enjoy using as a pose to this time last year where I hated them both...alot. I found the radio suite easy to use, we had no major problems and it all ran rather smoothly. I used programmes I have never used before such as soundtrack pro and Audio Hijack Pro and I was lucky to have Jess in my group who seemed to pick this up very quickly and she got on with the editing of the recording whilst I looked around for sound effects that I thought would work well; we then discussed this and started applying them to the radio drama until we had our finished product.

Later on for the ancillary texts, we used digital photgraphy because we needed to have our own photo for the front of our poster. We took a lot of photos and I eventually came out with one I liked. I did well in photoshop this year when in other years I have struggled with it. It didn't take me much longer than 2 hours to complete my radio poster using photoshop and In design. The radio listing double page spread went well aswell but was very time consuming.

Evaluation; How important is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

For this task we were aked to create a poster advertising our radio drama, I enjoyed this and thought it was a nice addition to our work to really make it our own.

The combination between the ancillary texts and the drama is vital; without advertisement it would fail like many radio shows in the past. Publicity is important for people to even want to listen to it so the poster has to draw listeners in straight away, then they see 'Listen' as the Pick of the day in the Radio listings and it becomes almost inevitable that people would give it a go.

Then we had to make a radio listings double page spread where we had to fit our own drama into it. This, metaphorically speaking, if this was the proper industry would be a very important advertisement. To be on pick of the day it would be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people and 'pick of the day' almost acts as a review and effectively says 'Listen to this!'