Evaluation NOTDONE

The Morning Glory Show - Brief Overview

After weeks of intense planning we broadcasted our children in need show. The planning we performed helped us to create an organised and smoothly ran radio show, the running order helped us greatly.

Strengths

I feel that our strengths lay in the organisation, the feature content and in the presenter himself. Our content stuck to our main goal, to create a light-hearted radio show that appealed to a 16-21 age range. We ensured that our content was linked closely to the research we performed before any main planning. For example, the music we played related closely to the results that we found out, that indie/pop were the best music genres for that age range. Also, we chose to create a show that had features/banter/music as the main content (as our research showed us), we stuck to this incredibly well; largely down to our running order and the meeting that we had before the show began, we dicussed topics that we could talk about, this ensured that there were no gaps in speech throughout the radio show; ensuring this would ensure that our audience would not lose interest.

The presenter, Mike O Connor, i felt performed extremely well throughout the hour. He was the main authority within the radio show, his voice was easily recognisable as the presenter to the audience. He achieved this through a louder projection, as he is within the personal zone to the audience. He also used upward and downward inflections, this is a useful technique as it helps an audience to easily recognise parts of a story; whether it be a question, or an emotion. He also kept the show structured, as he would introduce a new topic, a new feature or the next song; this helped keep the show flowing.

In terms or organisation our running order helped keep the show organised (refer to the running order). It contained detailed timings and the content to be discussed in each section, this helped me extremely well as designated producer as i had to help keep the show running on time, with topics not going over its designated time or going under. Without a running order the show would have been in disarray, this is something we discovered in the early rehearsal days of the morning glory show. We would usually go into a rehearsal with no sort of idea what topics we would be discussing, this did not go down too well but it helped us to improve ourselves as the weeks progressed. We went from having no running order, to having a running order and also script meetings to discuss the topics we would discuss.

In terms of music content we tried to follow the industry as best as possible. A week before our children in need show, our group met to choose pop/indie songs from the ABC list from Radio One that we liked, we then sat down and listened to each song and chose 7 songs that we all felt were the most radio-friendly and relevant to our audience. This way of choosing our playlist is used by Radio One, as we discovered in a Radio Documentary, and we felt it was relevant to the show we were doing as we were basing its style on the Chris Moyles' Morning Show. Our music was extremely relevant to the target audience we were aiming the show at.

Weaknesses

Our weaknesses lay in probably the most important part of a radio show, the sound levels. In several parts within the show, the sound levels were too high, overpowering the vocals. If i noticed this in the show i would have controlled them, it was only something i noticed when listening to the show after on Ustream. I believe this is all down to practice, we obviously did not have enough practice in the radio studio to get soundbed levels right. Unfortunatly the 'Time to Rhyme' soundbed is horrifically loud, if i was listening to the show for recreational purposes then i would have switched off straight away. To improve on this perhaps we should have had a designated sound engineer to stay on the decks at all times to listen to the sound levels, unfortunatly we kept our main presenter on the decks so he would have had to concentrate on several tasks.

Thankfully, in parts the sound levels were perfect, the presenters voices were at a high level and the soundbed was quiet enough to not overpower the presenter but also be heard. Soundbeds are vital in this genre of radio show as it helps keep you awake and alert in the morning, too many gaps in sound and you would lose interest.

We could have improved on the news much more, the content was good but the jingles could have been improved on. As radio is heavily reliant on sound, some more jingles would have helped improve the quality of the news feature. For example, after each story a jingle could have been played just so that the audience are positive we were moving on to the next news story. VoxPops would have also ensured that our news was as professional as Radio One. For example, Radio One's 'Newsbeat' has a good structure wherin they would reveal the top deadlines in a menu, followed by one news story, a voxpop, and then a jingle to tell the audience that they are moving on to another news story.

Feature Content

The feature content was something we wanted to largely focus on, basing much of our conversation around these features. I believe that our features were our main strength. The features we had were: Fact of the Day, Barryoke and Wood Chuck Chilli.

Wood Chuck Chilli was a pre-recorded feature, we chose to do this pre-recorded because of its sheer length. We believed that it would be easier and more efficient to pre-record it and then edit it together to avoid gaps in speech, and also to improve it with jingles. It also made it completely easier for us because we edited a song on to the end of the feature so that the feature was about 8 minutes long, this ensured that we could prepare for the next part of our show.

Fact of the day was a feature we thought up so that we could add a conversational element to the show. Matt Bragg and Matt Bird would reveal the facts of the day, after each fact a small discussion could be had in relation to that particular topic. We believed that this feature would appeal to our style of show, as we wanted the audience to feel like that were in a social situation with the presenters; almost as if they were our friends.

Barryoke was a concept i came up with when our show was in the planning stages. It involved a designated 'Barry' (usually me) mumbling a melody to a song in any fashion they deemed necessary, the people in the radio studio would then try and guess what song it was. I feel that this feature went very well as it was light-hearted and made everyone in the radio studio laugh. To improve on this feature we could have chosen to do the feature much earlier on in the running order so that we could perhaps get our audience involved aswell; especially as this was a children in need assignment we could have included a way of raising funds through this feature.

Audience Relevance

We set out to create a radio show aimed at an audience that could access internet radio, as that would be the format we would be broadcasting on. From the research we discovered that a large amount of the people we asked were in the 16-25 age range. Therefore we decided to aim our show at this audience. Also, we discovered that this target audience was particularly interested in the Chris Moyles' Radio One Morning Show; this show was a great influence for us.

The format of the Chris Moyles' show is mainly made up of banter and features with only four or five songs. We wanted to replicate their style of banter, as if you were with a group of mates at a pub. I believe we replicated this extremely well, primarily because Mike, Matt Bragg, Matt Bird and myself get on so well; we could replicate a good level of banter because its what we talk about from day to day college life.

We also gained some feedback from our target audience, here are some quotes:

"great feel to the show, felt like i was down the pub with my mates"

"sound levels too high in places"

"Barryoke had me in stitches"

I believe that we engaged our target audience fully within the content we produced, on the other hand we did not involve the audience within any other media formats; such as text or telephone. We did engage the audience in a visual way, as we had set up a youtube channel to advertise our show, but we could have done so much more.

I believe that if we had a better marketing strategy we would have gained a larger audience. The marketing strategy we used was to create a facebook page, a good idea, but we did not market it using this medium to the best of our abilities. To market it better we could have added far more people to the facebook page, and created more promotional videos to advertise the show so that our current audience would constantly be reminded that we were building up to our children in need show.