This week was so hectic for me. We were supposed to submit our demo on Monday but the studio was reserved on our preferred demo day which was Friday last week. Since it was the day we had in common so we had to do it at 8:30 am on Monday. This means I had to woke up at 6:30am. in order to be at the 3RRR at exactly 8:30. Waking up at such early time was a extraordinary challenge for me as I’m still having a jet lag from Vietnam which makes me fall asleep at 4am everyday!! I think I didn’t do well during the demo. Georgia asked me some questions and I couldn’t think of a single answer to response back to her, which consequently created dead air. We left the studio at 9:30, and then ran to the tram to RMIT for our RWAV tute. We had another presentation to introduce our documentary’s topic. I think Bruce likes the idea that we have for the documentary (yayyy!!). After that we went to the editing suite to meet Josie. She showed us how to use the recording studio, which I reckon it would be very interesting if I wasn’t too dozy because of the 2 hour sleep (Josie, if you’re reading this, I just want you to know that i’m terribly sorry for not concentrating on your class, I tried but my sleepiness brought me down. And the sleepiness doesn’t come from you, it is because of my lack of sleep, i’m being honest ’cause  i’ve always enjoyed your class when I’m sober 🙁 )

On Monday we also got the email from Elizabeth to confirm the approval of our topics. Unfortunately, my favourite topic beer and philosophy wasn’t approved. Well, she didn’t really deny it, but Elizabeth requires more information about the topic but since we were running out of time so we couldn’t manage to further research the topic. I thought I couldn’t be any worst than that but sadly non of our individual interview got her approval but instead a straight, cold no-no. So we had to go with Spamalot, Laneway Learning and YGAP organization. I was a little bit worried by these 3 topics since most of them are profit-driven enterprises and maybe if we do not carefully choose the story angles, the interview will be similar to an advertisement. Nevertheless, Elizabeth gave each of the three topic a definitely YES and since our radio show is only a week away so we had no choice but to go with it.

We worked on the runsheet as soon as we received the email from Elizabeth. It was quite easy sorting it out except for the calculation of time elapsed since I’m allergic to math. Seriously, I got 3 different results for 3 times I calculated the elapsing time (yuk!!). On Tuesday our group met for 3 hours to sort out the interview questions and prepare for the script. But the struggle hadn’t vanished yet. Wednesday morning I received a message from Jane (the panelist) saying one of our interviewee-Ian Nisbet from Spamalot couldn’t come to the studio on Monday so I had to do a prerecorded interview with him. I wasn’t very comfortable taking this duty but since Georgia (my group mate and presenter for RWAV show) was busy on both Ian’s free days and I was free on both days, so it must be me who would construct the interview. I chose Thursday, which was the day after to do the interview so that I could show it to the girls on Friday during our 2nd demo. So on Thursday night at 7:30, I caught the train to Parkdale where the Spamalot team rehearsed for the theatre show. Before the interview I read the questions and the intro/outro all over again, as I was afraid that I would be nervous during the interview and mumbled and twisted my tongue so I reckoned a little practice would make things go perfectly well. Yet, it was not until I found out that I left my interview questions sheet at home and I didn’t prepare any digital back-up, I started to freak out. I had to call my roommate to took a photo of it and send it to me asap. Thanks god she was at home. I arrived at the Parkdale Church of Christ 10 minutes earlier than the appointment time so Ian invited me to attend the rehearsal. It was really hillarious. I was even called up to stage to join the play. Although I was really nervous when I arrived at the church, with a little fun from the rehearsal I felt much better. But the god of unfortunate hadn’t left me yet. Ian told me that Sam Marzden was gonna join the interview as well. I was stunned when I heard it but I still had to say yes ’cause I wasn’t the one who talked to Ian, Jane did and I thought she asked for Sam to join the interview without telling me. So I had to quickly brainstorm some questions for Sam and plus I didn’t know what to do when I only had two mics with me. Being so unprepared, I was freak out and consequently forgot to quote the traditional RVAW’s intro: “welcome to 3RRR at 102.7fm you’re listening to RWAV, this is Linh, i’m here with…”. I ran straight to the interview. And one mistake leads to another, and another and another… I mumbled, I twisted my tongue, my voice tone was unstable, I responded to their answer with an unrelated questions, I couldn’t produce a conversational interview but instead a dry, rough Q-A interview. On the train back home, I was so blue. I tortured myself further with the thought that Elizabeth would deny the interview because we had two interviewees, a case which I have ever seen in any previous room with a view show. I wrote an email to Josie reporting about the problems, then I tried to call my group members but none of them picked up the phone as they were at work. Arrived home at 10 past, I was so drained but I still needed to edit the interview as no matter Elizabeth denied it or not, I still had to present it to my group on the following day as I promised. It took me 3 hours to edit the piece as I had to cut out a lot of my mumble while I still had to ensure the interview ran naturally.

On the following day we went to the 3RRR studio for another demo. We wasn’t happy with our previous demo on Monday so we thought another practice would be great for us to confidently be on air. During the demo we played my interview with Spamalot and I realized that It had a lot more problems to be fixed. But it was a such relieve that Josie approved the interview and she said there was nothing wrong to have two interviewees, yet she agreed that my interview had to be further edited. Tired of working on radio for the whole week, I decided to leave it until tomorrow and indulged myself a bit with some weekend charms. Yup, I dedicated the friday night and the whole Saturday for game of thrones-my favorite series at the moment.

Today is Sunday, the back to work day for me. I ran through the script once again and notice that we had some huge problems: some segments did not have the appropriate intro and we haven’t decided who’s gonna say what. So I listened to the radio show of Callista and her gang to see how they moved from one segment to another. I wrote the script for myself as I found it easier to read everything out from a paper, compared to remember the whole things, it’s too challenging for my absent-mindedness. I also edited the Spamalot interview again, but it only took me a hour to do so since there weren’t many problems. At this point, I feel quite organized and super excited for the show tomorrow. Finger crossed!!