In groups produce a radio trailer for a real or made up radio station of your choice. The trailer should last for one minute exactly and demonstrate an understanding of audio production.
Proposal
For our groups audio production I, Danny Mitchell, Luke Hicks and Nat Griffiths-Scotdecided that we would create a radio trail for a fictional radio station called Control Alt Radio (abbreviated to CRTL+ALT Radio). The radio station is aimed at an audience that enjoys alternative styles of music such as chip tune, emo and metal. The trail would be a simple piece that sampled the type of music that the radio station would play together with various edits, transitions and voice over.
Pre-production
The first stage of preproduction was the development of a script for the radio trail. This script was designed to show both a visual timeline that showed when and where each sample would be placed and in what order the sampled music would played. The script also showed the dialogue that would need to be recorded. The initial work on the script was done by Nat and myself who developed the initial concept of Ctrl+Alt Radio. After this rough idea about the name and style of the station had been developed it was Danny who finalised the script and the timeline.
When developing the style of radio trail I used both you tube and the BBC music website to listen to various types of radio adverts. After hearing several from BBC Radio 1 that are used to highlight the hits that have been played over a week, I decided that a trail to showcase the type of music played by CTRL+Alt Radio would be a good idea. I also noticed that Radio 1 has its own distinct type of voice over and transitional edits and relayed to my group that a unique sound to the trails edits might be a good idea.
Production
When it came to the production of the radio trail, our script determined that we needed to record some voice over dialogue. To do this myself, Danny and Luke used the recording studio to record Luke speaking the needed lines.
We found afterward however that the recording software had only recorded the tracks in mono instead of stereo. Whilst we still had the tracks recorded we were unaware of the problems that this would later represent.
After recording this dialogue we then decided what music tracks we would use. We initially wanted to use royalty free music but found that it was difficult to find music of high enough quality with the right kind of musical pacing that we wanted. In the end we decided to use music from cds that we legally owned. The artists we used were Disturbed, Anamanaguchi, LinkinPark and Rise Against.
While these samples were not royalty free I did however manage to use a lot of free sound effects files from websites such as freesound.org. These sounds included a dial tone for a modem, the Windows start up tone and some samples from various video games.
Post-production
This stage of the process is where I had the most involvement as I was responsible for editing together all the various sound files in a variety of post production software. To begin with I used the script to map out a rough timeline so that I could get an idea for the various track lengths.
After doing this I began to import all of the various sound and music files into Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. My decision to use this piece of software was that I was familiar with using it and felt more comfortable editing in it. I also decided to use this as Adobe Audition CS3 proved to be an extremely unstable platform and would repeatable crash when I attempted to use it.
Working with our chosen tracks I then proceeded to find parts of the track that had either a catchy instrumental or strong intro and would work well when edited together. After gathering these samples I then started to place the tracks on the Premiere Pro timeline. Starting with the first samples I used a sample from Anamanaguchi’s Party Stronger with the dial up sound from an old 56k modem layered underneath. The sound of the modem was edited down from its original length using the razor blade tool and areas were removed from it so that the sound was more compact. I also used the exponential fade transitions in Premieres audio transition library and applied them to the Party Stronger tracks so that they faded in smoothly.
At this point the problem that we had with our recording been done in mono became apparent when I attempted to add Luke’s dialogue to the timeline. This problem meant that the sound from Luke’s dialogue would only play out of a single speaker and there was no readily apparent way in Premiere to fix the problem. At this point I realised that I could duplicate the voice over track as a mono left version and a mono right version and play them at the same time on the time line. This method worked but was a bit clumsy so I decided to search the Adobe forums to find an answer. Eventually I found that there was a option to convert a track from mono to stereo by selecting the desired track and going to Clip>Audio Options>Source Channel Mappings. From here I found I could turn the track into a single stereo track.
After struggling with Adobe Premieres tendencies to crash when importing new tracks, I eventually managed to complete the full track. The final track consisted of 4 different songs with 3 or 4 sound effects or samples from video games and 2 different dialogue tracks with a separate one included that I had edited myself by taking samples from each of Luke’s tracks, cutting them to different lengths and changing speed and audio gains of the track.
Conclusion
Upon completion of the track Danny added a title graphic and we uploaded it to You Tube so that we could add it to our blogs. I am happy with the final product as I think it has a good initial concept that we then improved upon with some good editing techniques and interesting sounding music.
The areas I would improve upon would be the use of a more stable editing suite and the use of more royalty free music. I do not think that the use of our copyrighted tracks is a detriment to the final piece I do think that using royalty free music would be more in line with the initial brief.
