If there is one thing I’ve learned from creating my radio advert, it’s that an idea will never look the same at the start as it will at the end. My group’s original idea was to produce a radio advert for a charity called “Imaan’s charity”. The charity was created by one of our group members and was based on helping orphans in Africa. However, due to said group member leaving, we decided to keep with the charity theme, however tweaking it to use the Harry Moseley charity instead. However, due to a difference of opinion and another reshuffle of our group, we decided to scrap the charity idea and go with something a little more closer to home. After careful deliberating, we decided to go with something, that presented a challenge, however, if successful, could make a change in our day-to-day lives, eliminating our Futures lessons.
Through our research, we deduced that a large majority of our college disliked the futures lessons, for various reasons (Not getting graded, not relevant on a personal level, better things to be doing) with very few reasons to like and go to the lessons (For the social advantages). So now that our idea and our primary research was complete, we decided to move onto secondary research and look deeper into why have Futures lessons. We discovered through our secondary research (The internet and various teachers) that Futures lessons were mandatory as from 2002, so the only option was to change the content of them, rather than get rid of them.
With this knowledge Jade and I came up with the idea of having a mock “I ❤ futures” campaign, with Jestina and I revising and refining this idea. At this stage Jestina and I assigned roles, with Jestina doing the remainder of the script, leaving me to do the remainder of the treatment and the pitch. We finished our separate assignments and teamed up to then record the radio advert with Phil Upton. The editing was mostly done by Jestina and Jade. There are three edits of our final radio advert and we tested the edits on different people to see which one worked our best. The first edit of the advert is the advert clean, with only one sound effect and no soundtrack. The second edit of the advert included elevator music and the third edit included the elevator music and a version of “Eye Of The Tiger”
Peer Evaluation:
To get my peers to evaluate my work, I decided to sit them down in front of a camera and interview them about the advert, asking them questions to prompt them.
The response we received for the first edit was generally good, with some suggestions on how to improve it. Our interviewees stated that our content was at a high standard, with them enjoying the concept of the advert, the dialogue and the way ti was edited. One of the more prominent pieces of criticism that we had from this edit is that it felt a little empty. Although, this was mentioned as a small side note from a small portion of our interviewees, it was mentioned that there could have been some sort of music or soundtrack. There was also a mention of there being a noticeable gap after the bell rings to when our first piece of dialogue starts. This is an issue because, wasted time is essentially wasted money if we were being commissioned.
The response we received for the second edit of the advert was slightly more mixed, with more critical feedback, which was very useful. One of the responses mentioned that we didn’t explain what exactly futures is. Although this is a fair and reasonable point, our audience isn’t anyone outside of our college, it doesn’t need to be. In order to achieve our goal (changing the content of our futures lessons) we need to appeal to the people that actually take and teach futures lessons.
Another complaint we had with the radio advert is that there is a small gap at the start of the advert from after the bell, till when the first person starts talking. After reflection we understand that this is a flaw in our radio advert, to prevent this happening again, we would time the radio advert whilst recording instead of getting someone else to do it.
We received praise for our radio advert’s general content, in particular interviewees commented on the elevator music, saying it was “good” and added a certain comedic value.
The response we received for the third edit of the advert was a general good response. Both interviewees said that they enjoyed the advert and didn’t have a problem with the soundtrack and that it generally went quite smoothly with the advert. One stated “You got your message across, what you thought of futures” which indicates to me that the advert content was generally to a high standard. One complaint for this batch of interviews was that the American accent put them off a little, although they understood that it was to show the amount of diversity that we have within BOA.
The problem that we would have with airing this advert is getting permission to use Eye Of The Tiger. Realistically, it would be extremely difficult to gain permission to use it, even if we did, it would cost a large amount of money.
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