Work Experience Day 2 - GWR Bristol

11/03/09

Today was my first day at GWR in Bristol. I had anticipated this day for a while as I have not volunteered at a commercial radio station since I was 18, that's about 13 years ago! I was interested to see how radio broadcasting has gone forward, and was keen to get stuck in at the deep end at something I really feel I want as a career.

I was introduced to Ben Marks a couple of weeks ago when our year had a quick tour of the station. Ben is the head of production at GWR and in a nutshell is responsible for how the station 'sounds'.

I got to the station at about 10 this morning, Ben had to attend the daily meeting so I got chatting to another volunteer called Adam. He played me some of his and Ben's work, which included show promos, Trailors, Jingles, Music beds and Idents.

Ben came back from his meeting and he showed me around his studio. It basically consisted of Pro Tools running off a PC and another audio networking system called 'Glam'. Glam is GWR's way of distributing audio sessions from station to station and provided easy access to those sessions for producers at each radio station. For example, If Ben wanted a script for a trailor performed by a voice over artist, he would send the script to London. The artist would record the script and it would then be immediately be available for Ben to start editing and producing the trailor.

GWR is about to change it's format to a new brand called 'Heart FM'. What a great time to be involved in the production process as all the jingles, trailors, music beds etc are to be changed to suit the new format.

For the rest of the day I shadowed Ben as he continued to produce new content for 'Heart FM'.