Broadcast Media, The Story So Far..

During this semester, our focus has been solely on sound and audio. We have been mainly concentrating on the manipulation, recording and editing and we have done many activities and exercises to practice them. I had never had any experience with sound editing previous to this course, and to be honest, it was the video and film that first interested me to applying for this course. But during this first semester i have enjoyed learning how to edit and manipulate sound and specifically enjoyed doing my Soundscape, which i was able to record some sound for too.
One of the toughest tasks I've had to do so far was editing some sound to go with picture for a short movie entitled Bodil, in which we were given the audio, but scrambled versions, so we had to edit and rearrange according to the video.

I also enjoyed working on the radio project and i am quite interested in taking a more in depth look at radio, for the future. But so far, i feel that the soundscape was the most enjoyable. I believe this is because i was able to complete it completely from scratch and we had larger boundaries for what we were allowed to create.

I have enjoyed visits to both the BBC and Endemol, where we were able to see how two different types of television shows are run from behind the scenes and i found it a great revelation into the workplace and was able to see a huge multitude of different jobs that i might like to be researching or concentrating on.

Previous to the course, i had also never really followed news in the media, only that of films and computer gaming. But i think that this semester i have enjoyed looking deeper into the media stories of today, and enjoyed trying to create predictions for the future which are near impossible, because nobody yet, knows the limits of how advanced we can get.

My experiences from working with audio have gone from literally nothing to having created a short radio program, edited sound to a film and created my own atmospheric piece and i think that i have gained a good start on the technical side of sound, aswell as a much greater knowledge on the media today.

Roles During The Production Of My Radio Project

For our most recent project, we were paired upto to plan and create a short radio project. i was paired with my classmate, Rob, and after a production meeting or two we were able to come up with the idea of doing a short radio show about tribute artists. we arranged interviews and had samples of their music.

During this project, i think i was more associated with the less practical side of things. My partner, Rob, had his own microphone, knew our contacts very well and is able to drive so he was in a much better position to handle more of the recording and interview work. I focused a lot on the research side and was able to research a fairly accurate budget, working out what we would have paid if not working on it at a university with free microphones and editing suites .etc.

We tried to work on as much of it together as possible though, and from production meetings that we had held we were able to create clear recordings of our interviewees, a decent portfolio and a well edited piece of audio.

I think throughout this project i covered many different media roles:

Researcher - for portfolio work
Audio Mixer/Sound Editor - cutting and editing the interviews
Scriptwriter - scripting small parts of the show where we would host
Interviewer - interviewing our sources
Producer - watching over the project

I'd hope that if we did something like this again, i would get more involved in the interviewing part of the project

Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D

The Band Nine Inch Nails have recently released an album entitled "Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D" which is a remix of their previous album "Year Zero", released in early 2007. As well as an audio cd, this album comes with a second data disk, that contains every track in multi track format, giving the user the option of creating their own mixes. There is a trial version of Ableton Live added onto the CD, to get users started and the band have even gone as far as creating a website, remix.nin.com/, that allows the fans to upload their home made mixes of the tracks, for others to view and rate. I think this a novel idea and something that other bands would benefit from adapting.

Newsdesk - Chris - 10/01/08

BT's On Demand service to be hosted on Xbox 360

From as early as the middle of 2008, BT's Vision Service will become available via Microsoft's gaming machine, Xbox 360, but to receive the service, users will first have to sign up to BT Broadband. Unfortunately unlike set-top boxes, that this service would be looking to eradicate, this service will not feature the ability to record or receive live television.
Users will be able to gain access to hundreds of on demand movies, on demand television as well as near live sport included this years FA cup football.
Sales of BT vision have been slow so far with only 100,000 subscribers and BT has hopes that the partnership will boost popularity of the on demand service using the Xbox 360's wide audience.
Nick Thomas, a media analyst at research firm Jupiter, said: "It will definitely make its broadband service more attractive but there are challenges. People have to sign up to a 12 month broadband contract and not all Xbox owners may want to do that,".
The tie-up was announced by Microsoft at the CES show in Las Vegas.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7178661.stm