It’s less than three weeks until Christmas and I will be home in less than two. It seems daft to be returning home again so soon after being back for Radio Orkneys children in need show. This was as usual, a really enjoyable community event for which I was lucky to be involved. The fast approaching deadlines are proving a bit stressful as I still have a lot of work to do between now and home time. Nevertheless, I’m still really enjoying life here and although I’m really looking forward to coming home, I will miss the lads in flat 30 over the festive period.
As well as the essays and various other academic studies, I have been busy working on some other projects which are more fun but still beneficial to my career. The student radio station, Utopia FM, has been recruiting new management for the next three weeks of broadcasting and I have won the ‘head of training and development’ position. I am responsible for helping people with a little or no radio experience to improve their skills in anything from editing to driving the desk. Nearer the time of the broadcast in May I will listen to the demo tapes and, along with the Programme Controller and Station Manager, give feedback and ultimately help decide on the final schedule.
I have also been getting involved in the new Sunderland student T.V. station that’s being set up by one of my friends. He aims to broadcast a weekly show over one of the spare network channels recently installed into the university halls. This will be a great opportunity for a lot of people, including myself, to get some extra hands-on experience of live TV. This will build on what I have learned in my TV studio modules both last year and this. At the moment we are working on a ten minute children’s show called ‘Fun Time’. This is proving to be great fun and very interesting as we are all getting a chance to try our hand on the cameras as the vision mixer, floor manager, director etc. The whole thing is also a great team building exercise. My only real problem with TV is that unlike most radio shows, it takes a lot of people and a heck of a lot of time to produce a programme. At times I find it a little frustrating because it always takes so long to set up the studio just to record two minutes of TV, where a lot more radio could be made in a fraction of the time. Having said that, I do really enjoy the module, and as my tutor said the other day; now that I know how TV works, I can watch bad TV and still get some enjoyment from it when I see them make mistakes.
Perhaps the most exciting thing which I’m embarking on at the moment is podcasting. I remember one of my computing teachers, Russell Manson, telling me when I was at school that I should have a go at it. I always thought it was going to be too difficult, and I suspect there was an element of laziness as well. Anyway, he told me that it was an exciting new thing and in light of my interest in radio, I should give it a go.
He was right and I have now begun to produce a fortnightly podcast called ‘The Rory Auskerry Show’. The podcasting process is actually quite simple once you have been shown what to do. Basically you need somewhere to host the mp3 file online, (I use a site called switchpod.com which is free and easy to use), you also need an iTunes account which is also free and very straightforward to set up. Once you have got this organised it’s just a case of recording your podcast, either at home on a portable mic or better still in a studio, uploading it to your host site and ‘pinging’ it to iTunes.
I have decided I’d like to experiment with lots of styles of radio show, and because a podcast isn’t broadcast it doesn’t need to conform to the usual broadcasting standards for quality and content set by OFCOM. Because I have access to broadcast quality studios and editing facilities I am able to make the technical quality sound pretty professional. As for the content I’m aiming to cover quite a lot over the course of the next few months.
Last week I produced a half hour show with Ian, one of the lads who came to Orkney last summer. In the show we chat about the trip to Orkney, (including the boat journey half way to Auskerry), some news stories which amused me and the ‘Kirby’ game that resulted in a broken front window, as well as various other things. He didn’t hold back and as a result I think the show is honest and funny, if at times a little explicit.
I hope that this does not put anybody off the shows as a whole because the next podcast will be totally different. I’m going to be joined by two of the most vocal students in my power, politics and the media seminar. Like my self, Caroline and Chris get quite heated during class debates and are both quite willing to play devil’s advocate over topics like Iraq, terrorism, religion and climate change. This show will be a properly organised, professional radio debate and therefore very different from the show with Ian.
Overall I’m aiming to produce a portfolio of work demonstrating that I can take the lead role in a variety of radio shows. It will also help me to discover exactly what I am best at, and what types of shows I enjoy doing the most.
Well it looks like that’s it from me until January. All that remains to be said is happy Christmas and I wish everyone a very good new year. I hope you will have a listen to the podcast, and I will now get back to my essays. Cheers.
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