Work Experience Day 4 - GWR Bristol

18 March 2009

My second day at GWR, Bristol. The whole place is preparing for the big switch over from GWR to Heart FM this week as Heart is launched the following Monday.

I met Ben Marks, Station Producer and he showed me a long email sent to him with lists of all the new production that needs to be added to the automated play out systems in preparation for next week, this needs to be all added today so that it is ready for the weekend. All GWR material is already gone.

They are currently running a 'Heart is coming' campaign - but this campaign changes over the weekend as they start to hype the launch of Heart. Bens job is made slightly longer than other station producers on the network because he is producer for Bristol Bath and Weston. So if there was any production that was area specific (ie breakfast show trailers) he would have to add it three times.

Each trailer/jingle/ident/promo/music demo was added and put into it's correct category into the play out database. Some slight editing was needed for Bristol's Breakfast show trailers because they only mentioned 'Bush and Troy' when it should have been 'Bush, Troy and Paulina'.

Imaging idents/trailors in Protools

Ben played me a Heart FM 'Music Demo', in radio, a music demo is a 30-45 second piece of production that showcases the stations typical music output often with listeners commenting on what they love about music, or what they like about Heart FM. These are played once an hour on air. I noticed that all the voxpops were from Woman, Ben explained that the target audience for the new radio station is Woman between the ages of 30-44.

Editing Kims interview.

My main interests in broadcast production, at the moment, is editing audio. My history in music and recording bands sparked this interest a few years ago.

Our most recent editing project was to interview Kim about her career in broadcasting, to choose parts of the interview we wanted and to edit the whole thing down to two minutes. The Interview took 33 minutes, so to cut that down to 2 minutes was a challenge!

For my edit I chose to focus on Kim's early career, her career path and how her career affects her family. Kim went into a lot of detail when we spoke to her so I found the moments where she made key statements and used those in the final piece. However, it was very difficult to squeeze it all down to 120 seconds so I found myself cutting out a lot of words and silence in the edit.

I edited the interview in Cubase VST32 at home on my own Pc. Cubase is a primarily a music sequencer but does have a useful wave editor in the package. I would have probably completed the task quicker if I had used Protools as I find it more user friendly and easier to use.

Click the link below to download the final edit of the interview as an mp3.

http://www.mediafire.com/?8mbdyzgt4xd

Other relevant links:

Protools:- http://www.digidesign.com/

Cubase:- http://www.steinberg.net/24_1.html