Thursday 13th November - Kraftwerk

Today we started the day with our short presentations on our chosen musical pioneers. I worked together with James to introduce the early German electronic group, Kraftwerk..

Kraftwerk emerged from the same German experimental music community of the late '60s which also spawned Can and Tangerine Dream, members Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter first met as classical music students at the Dusseldorf Conservatory, originally teaming in the group Organisation and issuing a 1970 album, Tone Float. Schneider and Hütter soon re-christened themselves Kraftwerk (German for "power station").

Their song "Tour de France" proved popular with the group, Whch was made in 1981

We then finished the day off with a introduction to soundscapes. Through some information from our hand-outs. Giving us time to think about our individual projects for the 4th December.

Thursday 6th November - Pitch

Tody we began our pitch proposals for our radio projects. After discusssing our suggestions in the group, we broke into pairs to continue on on idea. paired up with Hannah to create a Hip-hop package. We knew this would be a challenging idea as it was an introduction to dance, through radio. However, we decided to use the oppurtunity to interview members of the Hip-hop society, including the group members and their future plans. We also decided to include a bit of the history of hip-hop and how it progressed. The ending was the more to do with vox pops from group members from recent and upcoming performances. Icluing the UDO dance show in Newport.

The pitch went well after we got over the nerves of proposing a difficult package, shown by me saying "Hip-hop steps back" - not the best start. The questions were as expected and challenged our thoughts on the proposal. However it gave us a chance to improve on the idea ourselves.

Snow Patrol

One of my favourite influential songs is "Run" by Snow Patrol. I thought i would add some of the best lyrics from their song.

"Light up, light upAs if you have a choiceEven if you cannot hear my voiceI'll be right beside you dear.."

Thursday 23rd October- Poetry

We used our free time most of this week to record our poetry vox pops. We asked the question "Do you like poetry and why?" to as many people as we could. Considering it wasnt a gripping question, this task proved to be quite hard. Especially when we realised we didnt even record the first group of people we spoke to.. to make it worse they were the best answers we had all day. However we managed to put together a good couple minutes of recordings, so we were all prepared for thursdays assessment. :)
Thursday soon came around and i was suprisingly confident about making the radio package. Through minerva we were given a 15 minute interview with Annie McGann, a 20 minute Poem of ‘Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, and finally a short selection of our vox pops. We had 3 hours to make a 3 minute radio package about poetry. I also used this oppurtunity to use what i knew about soundtrak pro in my package. I wanted it to sound interesting but informative, because we didnt have a say in what was included i decided to use the poem against the interview so it didnt sound to quiet.

Thursday October 16th Vox pop introduction and media consumption

When i first read the intro to vox pops i can honestly say i didnt have a clue what i was reading about, however a couple of hours on, i soon realised it wasnt as complicated as i tought.
Vox pops are simply interviews with members of the public on one particular topic or subject.
And it wasnt long before we tried a few out ourselves. So again in my small group of Hannah and Chris we decided to ask university students on their opinion of social networking sites.

We managed to gain a good range of answers as we knew this would be something the majority, if not all the students could relate too. We then edited them on soundtrack pro. Which wasa good oppurtunity for me to experiment with Mac's as i havent used them before.

Friday October 10th Group interview with Andy Netly.

Having discussed more interview techniques with Susan, we were pretty prepared to ask Andy more about his career and current editing job for the BBC Amazon series. Considering it was a group of 12 people ready to ask a whole range of in-depth questions, in the space of an hour he was a pretty brave guy, Nevertheless, he handled it well and we managed to find out more about this side of the industry.
He mentioned how you have to be open minded and creative to keep up with the hectic life of an editor, and as friday ended we gained a good understanding of what he does..

Thursday October 9th First interview practise with local band, Cojack.

At first i was rather suprised we started interviewing so early as i had never done anything like this before, but discussing the interview questions in our small grous made me realise it was nothing to worry about, and the two band members were pretty relaxed and were open to answer anything we wanted to ask.

I was working with Chris and Hannah and we interviewed Matt, the bands guitar and bass player, we asked questions to do with Cojack, the band members and most importantly how he ate his creme egg! The interview was longer than expected but when it came to editing it wasnt as hard as i thought to compact 10 minutes into 3..

WELL i thought i would finally sort this blog out as i am starting to feel a bit ashamed.. So ive decided to briefly explain each day so far so i dont fall too behind, unfortunatly this will come out as one long post, but its better than nothing :)

provided material manipulation

radio package for thursday

S'up all

Hi welcome to my ghetto site, this is my first blog so bare with me.. watch this space :)