EVALUATION RADIO

EVALUATION:

For my radio solo assessment I chose three pieces that I thought contrasted each other but also had some of the same sub themes. For my first piece I chose ‘Poem on Drugs’ I chose this piece because I thought it put across a strong and vital message in an entertaining and catching way. This is a poem, which I found online which I adapted to work with radio. The genre of this piece would probably fall under audio poetry, all though it has quite an entertaining theme, i think this is more about getting the attention of the listener. I think it has a more serious theme. I think the performance style is factual and naturalistic, because it bases itself on the journey that drugs can do to you. I separate the text up and include different moods into the text as if the voice that you hear is the drug. The drug starts off as your friend and then suddenly becomes more manipulative and patronising as the journey goes on. I change the tone and the volume of my voice to show this change. I use quite a childish tone to begin with and then suddenly become this warped voice that isn't very pleasant to listen to which I think is quite a big contrast to the giggly child like voice at the beginning. I wanted to do this to highlight particular points in the journey of the poem. The context is audio dramatisation of poetry, and I have also done some character work focusing on the way I use my voice. The piece has come a long way since the begging, since then I have researched into the piece, got feedback from the piece and rehearsed with this. I think my diction and character has improved the most since I don't stumble as much as I did on the words as when i first started working on this solo. I think this is because I've separated the text more evenly and this created more natural pauses allowing me to breathe and catch my breathe. It didn't effect the pace however, I did slow some bits down due to feedback. The performance techniques I have taken in to consideration include, Script annotation techniques, character profiling, script reading and spontaneity, working with SFXs, Content, and vocal techniques.

The second piece I chose for my solo, was a children’s story ‘Whatever Next’ by Jill Murphy. I adapted this to radio in order to create an interesting and fun story for a younger audience. It didn’t need too much adaptation to it but because it’s a story where it would use pictures to fill in the missing pieces, I had to add a couple of words in in order to make sense. For example instead of ‘Baby Bear found a rocket in the cupboard under the stairs’ I changed it too ‘Baby Bear found a cardboard box for his rocket, in the cupboard under the stairs’. This is because the listener can’t see the picture of the cardboard box. The feedback I got when I performed this to a teacher was to really over play the owl, to make sure they could absolutely hear the difference between the owl and baby bear. I play the Owl over the top and therefore every line the owl says I keep to the same over the top owl stereo type. I decided to play Baby Bear as more of a young boy type character changing my voice to be childish but more in the boy gender. I did this by doing less giggles which I would associate with a little girl more. I wanted to make Baby Bear a boy because I wanted to have clear characters, and seeing as I had already two female character (The Narrator and Mrs Bear) I found it was a good idea to use another male character other than the owl. 

The final solo piece I chose was a short ‘Anti Smoking Advert’. I chose this because it was short; contrasting to my other pieces and delivered a crucial message. I think the theme that starts to become of all three pieces is about help and guidance. In my first piece it was about getting a message across, giving them an opportunity to listen and take the advice hidden in the story. The second is a children’s story, which naturally help children to grow and help how they see the world. Although this is the shortest piece of the selection, I thought it would be good to use to help link myother two pieces together. There seems to be a theme of harmful substances along with a childish outlook or theme running with it. 


More harsh and blunt adverts were launched at the end of 2012. They seemed to be proved more effective as they were more graphic images and were actually showing users realistic consequences of smoking/ second hand smoking. Users seem to respond to this a lot more as it's no longer just coming from what we hear we are able to be shown directly what we used to fill in with our imaginations which was probably a lot less than the truth. The last piece is also about helping people, educating them on something they also may not have known.

For Our group piece we chose ‘Seeing Beyond- With Maya Fantasma’. This is a play script that we adapted to radio. This piece is about a ghost called felicity who is trying to contact her brother who is living to warn him about his wife Becky. This all takes place on Maya’s stage and with Tom and Becky in the audience. This meant we had to find a way of making mine and Connors characters sound like we were in the audience. We also had to find a way to make it sound like Maya was on stage and Felicity to sound ghost like as if she were in another world somewhere. We decided to place ourselves in order from Alicia on the left, then Abbi, myself and then Connor. This gave the most believable effect. We adapted the piece to fit the radio genre by adding in specific SFX’s, which helped the audience visualise what was going on without sight.

The first couple of weeks we looked at different genres of radio plays and analyzed them with different questions which would help is when we came to perform.

We decided to adapt this stage play to radio after researching and looking at many different radio drama’s and stage scripts. We looked at different stage plays as we decided we could adapt these to radio if we found the right piece. We looked at radio scripts such as, Like A Virgin by Gordon Steel, Ouji Board, No time for Crime which is a segmant of a radio play we looked at from Crime Club. Crime Club stared Barry Thompson and Raymond E. Johnson. 

Vocal techniques we used were, diction, volume, pace, pitch and articulation. I in particular would stumble on my t's and d's in this because the pace had to be fast and I'd often be caught out. I think practising this and warming up before we start helped. 

Some directions on the script we had to cut as they would not have worked for radio for example. The moving of the chairs, we cut this because the listeners wouldn’t know we were moving chairs and so we worked around this by adding in footsteps or cutting the dialog before then. When Tom asks Becky to sit down and come on stage in the script initially Becky wouldn’t say anything she would just stand there but because the audience couldn’t see Becky “standing” we added in ‘tuts’ and a “fine”. One effective idea we incorporated into our rehearsals was to do a speed run, and a in the style of run. This was because after we got our first piece of feedback it was lacking energy and it wasn’t at the right pace and it was a little dull to listen to. After this we started to feel a bit complacent and didn’t really know how we could improve at first. I suggested trying a speed run, and although it sounded silly it actually really helped. We started doing one and already I could tell we were all getting much more into the piece. After that one we did another one and tried to go even faster, this really worked because we could finally find a level of pace that we needed for the piece, after bringing it out with the speed run. To bring the energy we did a in the style of run. This really helped with our characters because we did a ‘In the style of accents’ run. Even though none of us had a big accent it really helped us go more over the top with our characters because it was entertaining and fun to do, and so we also got a new energy from this exercise.

Listening to our radio piece back was interesting as the SFX’s for the group piece were put in and it sounded really professional and highlighted our performances. I think it helped to make the piece flow better, and helped the audience understand the story more, with out the vision of sight. You could listen and use your imagination and really get what was happening. I really enjoyed doing the group radio, as the piece we chose was actually quite entertaining for us to do, and I particularly enjoyed playing a more nasty and manipulated character. I think I’ve realised over the past weeks of

learning and studying radio there was a lot more to do/learn than I initially thought, and that there are many opportunity’s in this profession as well. I did a lot of character work and I can tell by the final performance how much I had improved from the first few weeks. I think our final recording of the piece was the best we had ever done it and we all worked well together. I liked the way the whispering worked at the beginning with Connor, and how Alicia and me talked over each other. It all seemed to fit into place. I think my plan throughout the script came out in the final recording as I could tell I was getting more and more aggravated.

I think my strengths were my diction and characterisation in my group piece. I think I did well to control my pace to which matched everything that was going on around me. I think I came off as the character I intended to be and during feedback everyone said how my character was nasty, and that’s exactly the impression I was trying to make. I didn’t stumble in the group piece and this is an improvement for me as I would always get caught up on my biggest line at the beginning and the end line “You can leave willingly or you can leave in a little white coat that ties in the back”.  This line I would always rush, I didn’t want to slow the last line down though as I thought it worked well faster paced and sceptical, so I just had to practise control on this line and it paid off.

I think I improved on my breathing. I think one of my weaknesses was that I was forgetting to breathe, or i wasn't breathing in the right place. I think I was so caught up in getting the pace right I forgot to breathe properly and it sounded out of breathe. I think marking when to breathe on my scripts helped direct me with this. I think I could have made Mrs Bear and the narrator a bit more contrasting because when I listened to it back I felt like they were a little bit similar. I think I need to put myself in the mind set of if I think I'm being over the top I need to go even more over the top. 

Time management in class wasn’t perfect, however I got better as I went along. I think I was quite prepared as I brought along other scripts for my other group members and always had something I could work with or work on. I contributed to the group well with ideas and even found the script we used. I believe an obstacle was finding a piece that would work with 3 girls and 1 boy.

My favourite piece I did was Poem On Drugs, because I got to play around with it and experiment and try different things. I also think it was quite original and different. Overall I think all of my performance including our group piece went really well. This is because we were well rehearsed, were familiar with what we were saying and had the right energy.