Work experience week 1

Hi bloggers - mike here. I've had a hectic week with my work experience placement. Colin McGuiness head of group production and my mentor for work experience was taken ill and unfortunately will be unavailable to take me on for work experience. Luckily my connections at star radio paid off and I managed to get a placement at star radio in north somerset as a freelance production assistant.
My first task today was to work on a project called "things you didn't know about North Somerset". Using Cool Edit, a multitrack audio editor I mixed each individual piece of audio down before recording it in RCS. RCS is the play-out system used at the station. All audio, songs and commercial adverts reside on a central RCS server. To catalogue the audio into the database RCS uses a database system known as carts. Check out their website rcsworks.com

My second task of the day was to freshen up some of the production, in particular the weekend promo. This was the brief-the promo was to last no longer than 50 seconds and needed to include music demonstrators, clips from weekend shows and a voice over from Bob, the voice of E4. I was very excited about being given such creative freedom with this project! I found the most difficult part was the music demonstrator, when Choosing the song clips I needed to find music spanning 4 decades that was similar in tempo and matched in key. Its not easy to get Yazz - the only way is up to mix with the Bee Gees -tragedy! I used cool edits proprietary time and pitch plugin to match tempos and also some special effects like flange and delay. I also found that creating small repeat edits of syllables in the lyrics worked well adding some interest to the clips. When I had finished I played the promo to the production manager who offered me some feedback on the piece. He felt it was to long and offered me some tips on how and where I might shorten it. I followed his direction, replaying the audio to him which, he was then happy with.
One thing I have learnt today is that in an environment where time is critical you may not have time to plan a project in the traditional sense of pitch, planning and rough. Deadlines are tight and you are expected to come up with the goods!!

Check out the website star1077.co.uk