Stephanie Cooney
Northampton College
A2 Media Coursework

How our radio drama represents particular social groups?

Within our radio drama there is many social groups that are represented but the main ones would be the difference between men and women. Also groups that are expressed are young adults of which are most likely students.

The way women and men are represented.

The representation of both women and men is the most obvious group expressed within our radio drama. Roxy being female is expressed to be extremely weak and frightened where as Max being male is displayed as confident and dominant of which is very stereotypical. allow we found this within the character Max, Joe the other male within our piece is expressed as some what shy and caring in comparison. Belle being the other female character seems to be quite forceful and portrays a stronger female attitude toward the audience. Another way of which expresses that females are less confident and capable then men is e.g.

Max: I’ll walk you home now as it’s getting really dark

Roxy: ok thank

you, but only if your sure

Max: Yeah of course. I wouldn’t let you walk back alone

This part of our script shows the way our radio drama represents males as more powerful and protective.

Also within our radio drama the females use words such as 'babe' this shows the females are

more caring and charming towards one another.

The way social group students are expressed

Social groups can be defined by ethnicity,age,class, gender,occupation and many many more.
Collective identity can be seen as a common aspect in social groups in our case we choose the collective identity of students.The way our radio drama expresses students is by focusing on their attitudes towards relationships and how they spiral to cause problems within friendships. This being a extremely familiar day to day routine in students life styles. Our drama also represents how students want to be social, we did this by setting our scenes in e.g. 'Bar' being a common place to find students these days as a form of socialising, we represented that our characters were young by the use of sociolect chosen e.g. use of " Babe" being a common used word within a group of younger people including students.

Audience Feedback

After completing our radio dramas we decided to have a listening party at college in order to gather some audience feedback to see what other individuals thought of our recordings. After gathering our audience feedback i have found that many people expressed different feelings towards our radio drama 'Listen'.

What individuals liked about our piece.

when receiving our feedback i found that the majority of individuals had said that they liked our use of sound effects. The way they like these was due to helping setting the scenes and also making the the drama sound more effective and dramatic e.g by the use of Police sirens. Also i found that many people had expressed that they liked the way in which we had used backing music behind the suicide scene as it helped add emotion to the part. One person also commented on the way in which our piece was good as it was a great way of gathering awareness as issues such as 'rape' are happening so often and the results of this issue need to be made aware to the public.

What Individuals disliked about our piece.

It was very important to find out what people disliked about our piece in order for us to know how we could improve our piece to make it as effective and convincing as possible. From our findings i found that many people said that there was slight shifts in sound volume in our piece which made our piece not run as smoothly as we had hoped. Also they had expressed that some of our sounds didn't quite fit in properly and made the audio vocals sound quiet. Also the other point i got from our audience feedback is that our emotions in the character voice could have been more convincing.

What could be improved technically.

Things i have found from our audience feedback that could be improved technically would be the levels of sounds e.g the walking within our drama sometimes sounded more like marching as the audio vocals were quieter than the sound effects. Also we had been informed that the whole drama seemed a bit rushed therefore needed slowing down to be able to understand.

What could be improved in relation to the story line/plot

In relation to the plot of our radio drama our audience feedback informed us that firstly the levels of emotion could be improved as it is such a deep subject the emotion levels should have been higher to have maximum effect. Also the audience would have liked it to hear more about certain characters e.g. Joe as we didn't express to much into the personality and life of him.

Overall the audience feedback we received was extremely helpful by allowing our group to understand where we could have improved our piece to make the best quality possible. From our findings i have realised that we could have recorded and rehearsed our script more times in order to have our radio drama not rushed and running smoothly. Also i have realised we should have taken into account that the sound levels would have a very large overall effect on the listeners. The emotion is our recording also could have been improved again by rehearsing more so and maybe researching into more depth of the issues of which we were expressing throughout our piece.

From the findings of this i have now gone on to adjust the aspects of which have become highlighted from our audience feedback. For example i have gone onto our radio drama on sound track pro and adjusted all the sound levels, when doing this i did find they were set to extremely high levels which definatley DID need adjusting. Also when adjusting the sounds i took into account the feedback indicating the vocals were at a lower level of sound then the sound effects so i therefore adjusted this so the vocals could be heard easier and the sound effects were at a appropriate level.

In what ways does my media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of a real media product

The way in which our radio drama use and challenges forms and conventions of real media products is for example in the radio drama ‘The Archers’ they expose many storylines, although our radio drama in the episode is just one story based on the fallout, rape and suicide we have previous recap episodes of which again is common in real media products. I feel that ‘Listen’ used many similar conventions to other radio drama’s for example use of music, sounds effects, silence and audio of which is found in many of radio dramas I order to make the pieces effective. When researching into our genre teenage drama I didn’t find that there was many other of our genre out there, which made it hard to compare our drama to others of the same genre where the forms and conventions are portrayed therefore challenging the genre category present at the moment.

The way our radio drama uses the forms and conventions of other media products mostly would be the wide range of sound effects we used as all dramas seem to use these in order to gain effect. Also the way in which we used the forms of real media products is our radio drama having a dramatic ending and also a somewhat questioning feel to it. What is Roxy going to do? Will Belle forgive her? Will Max get What he deserves?

In relation to the radio drama ‘The Archers’ I found that all the characters were well expressed to the audience where as in our radio drama some characters e.g. Joe were not displayed much leaving people in our audience fed back asking why this is.

Who would be the audience for our radio drama and what media institutions would likely distribute our product?

The audience of our radio drama:

Looking at our radio drama the audience we aimed to target was students and younger teenagers age ranging from 13-23. We did this as the issues we expressed being a very important issue within society to be made aware of. Doing a radio drama with such deep expressed problems would therefore inform students and younger teenagers of t

he exact things that could take place around them. Also another reason that i believe i drama would attract this particular audience is after the listening party all the feedback we gathered contained ages of the individuals these ranging

from 17-21. We got some positive feedback most saying they enjoyed the story line and issues raised.

What institutions would distribute our radio drama:

Before deciding what institution we wanted our radio drama to be distributed from we firstly had to decided whether we want our radio drama to be commercial or public. We decided to opted for a public radio drama. We decided this as we wanted to express our drama to a large audience. Before deciding we look into the possible stations we could distribute our radio drama. We ruled out Radio 1 and 1xtra and other predominately music stations as i believe radio dramas wouldn't really fit the topics. This left us with stations such as Radio 2, 3, and 4. i found radio 4 the most popular radio station for radio drama's distributing drama's such as the archers of which has been around since 1951. Although this was the most popular station our group decided to opt for distributing our radio drama on the Radio 2. The reason for this is although radio 2 is very music based the audience of which is attracts is much of a younger age. Therefore i thought the opportunity of publishing our drama on this station would be very successful in relation to the target audience we aimed to achieve.

The effect of the combination of my main product and the ancillary texts

<-- Here you will see the final version of my Double page radio times listings. Within this it shows our radio drama as today's choice, here i have applied a explanation of the drama and what it will be featuring that week. Also i have followed the conventions of other radio listings i have seen so it looked like a real media product.

Here you will see the copy of my radio drama Newspaper advertisement. Within this i have placed the Radio 2 logo in the corner due to that being my chosen institution. Also present on my piece is the essential aspects such as time, where, date and name. Finally i decided to add a verdict from

two other media newspapers and a star rating.

Overall by creating the ancillary texts of the double page radio time listings and the newspaper advertisement poster in combination with our final radio drama recording it made the overall product extremely more effective.

Below you will see the Final Version of our radio drama:

The ways in which having the combination of the all three of these products that i have produced make the overall radio drama more effective are, the way i have used a double page listings involving my drama as the 'Today's choice' helped me attract my audience as it therefore stood out on the double page as a some what must see. The way i used a description of my product would have also attracted an audience as unlike any of the other programmes the 'Today's choice' gives more detailed so therefore the audience would have more insight into this particular radio drama therefore maybe more likely to want to watch it. Before completing my double page radio listings i looked at many present listings pages in order to make my own as realistic and effective as possible. Secondly the use of my Newspaper advertisement poster in combination with the other two products would make it again more effective as having the advertisement in the newspaper or several newspapers allows the radio drama to be advertised to those individuals who aren't a viewer of the radio listings. Also creating a poster allowed me to imply a visual image to my radio drama letting the audience/listeners visualise the characters therefore gaining a greater connection with the radio drama itself. Also by creating a poster i included positive comments from other institutes e.g "Easily the best i've heard in a long time" this could therefore influence the audience to want to listen to the radio drama more so. The poster also includes a star rating of four stars which could again attract the audience due to this being a high rating. By having this combination my media product is spread across many media institutes making it more likely to be viewed visually and then listened to.

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages.

In the construction of our Radio drama during the process of constructing, research, planning and evaluation stages we used a number of media technologies to help make sure our radio drama was as effective and convincing as possible.

Radio recording studio

When recording our script we used the college Radio studio of which consisted on many technologies where we recorded our piece onto the soundtrack pro programme. In the radio studio we used microphones and headphones allowing us to sit on serparate sides of the studio and be able to here eachother through the connections of the microphones and headphones. The studio also involves a mix desk which allowed us to slightly adjust the sounds again making our drama run smoothly.

Sound Track Pro

Sound Track Pro was very inportant technologie used within the process of constructing our radio drama. We used this programme to record our drama firstly directly onto from the radio studio. We then used sound track pro to edit our Radio drama , the ways in which we did this is by cutting our recording and placing pieces of our orginal recording together in order for the piece to run smoothly. We used many sound effects e.g. We used the sound effect 'swimming pool' although we dont have a swimming pool scene we decided this particular sound sounded very effective to have as the background sound in the bar scene. Within our piece and we gathered most of these from the sound track pro sound effect gallery we did this by taking the sounds from the gallery and copying them onto our radio drama recording already on a document on sound track pro. we then used the tools available within the program to adjust each sound to the correct side and place them in the correct posistions to create a overall more dramatic and convincing effect.

Digital Camera

We used a digital camera prior to the creation of our Newpaper poster articles and our double page radio listing spread. We used the camera to take a number of images. The images we took were of four indiviuals being two females and two males. We decided to do as they were the main characters expressed in our Drama.

Here are a couple of the original photo's taken. We took pictures of the two couples serperate before finally deciding to create an image of all four together. In the final photo you can see that there is a space between each set of two characters this was to indicate the seperation present within our radio drama. You can also see that the girl on the left is Roxy and she has a inferior facial expression to show she is scared, the male then is comfting her. On the opposite side we have the female with a more confident expression and the touch of her hand is showing that she still cares of the male Max no matter what she has heard. Max then has is arms crossed to some what show a arrogant expression.

Photoshop
After taking our photo's with the digital camera i decided to use the program photoshop to edit my choosen photograph for my newspaper article, The editing i did in this program was changing the photo from the original format to black and white. I did this as i thought it made the poster look for effective and eye catching when placed with the fonts i created in another program In desgin

In design

I used the In design to both create my newspaper poster and the double page radio times listings, the way i used In design is to firstly with my Poster where i used In design to create the fonts i wanted to used on my editing image in photoshop. I found Indesign the best programme to use for this due to offering a large variety of fonts with the use of swatches to create individual colours and gradients. Secondly i used In design to design and create my double page radio listing spread, again In design programme was the best one to use and you can mark out our page and set up your bleeds to the correct size to make my pages look neat and some what follow the conventions of a original radio listings.

Internet

Finally i used the internet throughout the whole entire process of the construction , planning , research and evaluation. I used the internet firstly to research into our decided topic choice being 'rape'. We needed to research this so when we came to acting out the scenes of our piece we could try to relate to the character as much as possible in order to make the drama effective. i also used the internet to search for various sounds that could possibly be used in our radio drama and finally i used the internet to research things e.g. previous radio dramas and also listening to them, the history of radio drama to help me understand it into more detail.