In Project Brief 4, we were asked to create an audio piece in a group. My group with Tessa and Ben created a fake radio broadcast within an actual radio broadcast. Our goal was to deliver something the audience would believe is real and we tell them that it is fake. Just like how Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds impact it had on the public. We wanted to get the point of how believing in things the media said can be somewhat dangerous, and we wanted to get the message out that media has so much influence on us.

This project was a team effort, we really wanted to work as a team so we split up the work load evenly. When it came to editing, we edited our own segments each and we just put it all together for the final product. At the very start we were missing a teammate, what I think we did very successfully with the lack of a third teammate was to have preparations ready for him when he came back. Me and Tessa had already organised enough to the point, where it was easy and accessible for a new teammate to jump in and contribute work for us. I think as a group we were able to work as effectively as possible in a short amount of time, but I think we could’ve been a bit more organised in the mid and later parts of the project. We all really left things to almost last minute, it is understandable as we do have other things going on, but I think we could’ve just been slightly more organised, so we didn’t have to rush as much during the end.

I still think as group we had pretty good chemistry and cooperation, we were all still able to work together in a positive and cooperative environment despite cutting it close to the deadline. We all knew we had the same goal, and we all knew were going to help each other achieve it. If there is one little thing I can say, I think I felt a bit bad on myself, I think Tessa might’ve done a lot more majority of the work, and I wished I could’ve helped out a bit more. She was pretty much the leader, I had no problems with that, because I was like working as a right hand man, being told what to do. However with me having done secretary work before, I knew how to keep everyone in track and keep organised of everyone and was able to make sure we all completed our work for each other in time. We all met up a lot to discuss and work on the project, which is something we really emphasised on, we really all wanted to get this project done, and if we were going to go down, we were going to go down together.

For the audio piece itself, I personally think it sounds like a genuine radio broadcast. So we were successful in presenting it that way. Despite it sounding successful, we really had a hard time fitting every bit of information in, because we could only have 8 minutes. The scripts we all wrote had a lot of information and things we wanted to say, so in terms of research, we all did a lot of research, but we couldn’t use all of it. So we ended cutting a lot of our script and segments down to fit in everyone. I think even though we couldn’t fit everything in, we still made it flow through smoothly between segments and were able to make the transition properly.

In terms of audio editing, I think I learnt some very useful things I can apply to the future projects. Especially when it came to effects, even Tessa did the effects in her own time, I learnt from her how to make the piece sound like a radio broadcast, which I didn’t even realise there was a function to make it sound like that. I didn’t even realise there was a difference in how radio sound nowadays compared to a normal recording of yourself. I also learnt how to make an audio piece sound like a phone call, as that was one segment in our piece I really liked, because it sounded like a genuine phone call. I learnt making a audio piece is very much different than a video, because so much is put into the recording of sound, we really have to focus on how to get people engaged by just listening, and I think we were able to grab there attention.

When it comes to collaboration I think we did a really good job, and it is a very important skill to have in the media industry. It really takes a good amount of teamwork to get a project done, and because we were very cooperative, we managed to get it done.