In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Originally our radio drama did not use the basic concepts of a reasonably good radio drama, e.g. The archers. We originally had only one main storyline, being that Elisa was having doubts of which uni to chose to enroll in, the main reason being that she did not want to leave Ethan to go to her dream uni further away. We all agreed that this was too much like real life, and although we did want our radio drama to appeal to our target audience of students, we realised that if our radio drama did not have any "drama" in it, this would not be entertaining enough, comparing our radio drama to one of the archers, who would usually have 2-3 main points happening in one single episode.

Another problem that we have had with our originally shot radio drama was the amount of white noise, this was a problem caused while recording our radio drama, and because of how loud it is we decided that the best thing to do would be to re-record it. We also realised that our characters were not developed enough for the audience to relate to the characters which needs to happen in order for the audience to get the feeling that they would like to listen to episodes in the future. In order to develop our characters more thoroughly we created mind maps of how we thought that the characters would be, I will be including the images of these within my post, this character development helped us to relate to the characters and develop them more consistently.

Another way in which we have used other media products, is the linear storyline; Beginning, middle and end. I feel that in doing this, it is clear what is going on the in the drama, and that the audience would find it easier to follow. After researching other radio dramas we found that in particular The Archers implement this discourse in their own dramas. To further use conventions of a radio drama, we decided to research on how the actors talked in radio dramas, we in particular looked at The Twilight Zone, as we felt that their actors really used their voices to get the message across. I feel that the way that the actors talk plays a major part in relating to an audience, as it must be believable. We noticed that the characters used stress, intonation and pitch in order to do this.

Although I do feel that we did not fully use conventions of an average radio drama very well, I do feel that there are some aspects of the original recording that did reflect other radio dramas in our own, for example comparing our radio drama to "The Twilight Zone", they would normally use a variety of sound effects and music to increase the effect of their radio drama, for example listening to the first 5 minutes of one episode I found that they used music, narration, sound effects of a car door opening, a bell ringing etc. I think that our editing was originally used to an okay standard, we used sound effects during the scene where the characters Elisa and Ethan were finding out their results this included a group of people talking in the back ground, I feel that this helped to set the scene, and also helped to build an image of a busy environment. We also used sound effects for the car door opening, and also to make one of the speakers voices deeper, so differenciate between the actors voices I believe this helped to make our radio drama to build an image in someones mind of how the scene would look if you were able to see it.

Another major part of our radio drama that we had to look into was the language use used in the script. This would play a huge role in wether we were able to correctly relate to our audience, as our radio drama was aimed at 15-24 year olds we would have to write our script as though we were this age, as we are all in this age boundry this was quite easy to do, as we wrote it in a way that we ourselves would find appealing.

In order to improve on our originally recorded radio drama, we decided to revamp the characters personalities, we did this by creating character mind maps for both Elisa and Ethan, as they were the main characters of the radio drama. We also decided that we would rewrite the scenes, so that there was more entertainment going on, we decided to include a major issue among young people at the moment, and drew up teenage pregnancy, as well as the university decision. I feel that in doing this we can relate even more to our targeted audience, and at the same time make the audience remain interested in listening to our radio drama, whilst capturing their attention.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT DIAGRAMS


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