Evaluation

EVALUATION

Overall I am not immensely pleased with how my Radio Drama has gone, I feel as if I could have planned better and used better research in order to produce a better final piece. 

Initially, I had three ideas that I could have possibly produced. One being the one I actually did – the murder mystery, one would have been a mock of a real radio show and another had a sci-fi theme. I feel as if the choice that I made was the most achievable and realistic. I personally love watching thrillers and murder mysteries in my spare time therefore doing a radio drama on a similar topic to something I enjoy it gave me more knowledge. 

However, I may have known a lot about TV dramas and thrillers but not so much about radio drama ones, meaning I should have done more research. By not doing as much research as I should have it made me massively behind as I had to do some more in my spare time – when I should have been recording the drama. This made me panic and switch off about the drama as I didn’t believe I was going to get it done in time. This leads me on to another aspect of some things that went wrong – my time management. I have never been great at planning very far in advance and do tend to leave thing until the last moment – exactly what I ended up doing with this project. Although a negative part of this project I see it as a blessing in disguise as it has made me realise how much more efficient I need to be with this aspect of things. I will take this on board to my final major project and make sure that I manage my time better – I will plan a lot in advance and get stuff done in order instead of cramming and leaving it all until the last moment.

Aside from all of the negative points in this project I want to mention some of the positives. Considering I have never used Audition before I am really pleased with how it went – due to the editing side of it being similar to premier pro I did not struggle with it as much as I initially thought I would. However due to there being a problem with my audio once all edited I unfortunately could not add any sound effects. This problem was out of my control and am unhappy I didn’t get the chance to play around with the effects and really make the drama come to life. If I could re-do this project again from the start I would most definitely plan for things to be disrupted. This is so if anything bad did happen ( like it did ) then I would have had time to sort it out and time to play around with it to fix it – as realistically its inevitable that something whether its minor or major is going to go wrong with a project.

Another thing I was happy with was my script. By doing some research into styles of radio drama scripts I could confidently write my own with little help, I also wrote the script a month or so before I needed to begin recording which was a massive help when it came to planning. I enjoyed the topic of my script and the style in which I wrote it, I and everyone who took part in the drama agreed that it was easy to follow and they new exactly what they were doing. However, If I could re-do this project I would possibly add a bit more detail in the script as after doing some secondary research by interviewing a student I found that she struggled to realise who the killer was. To me it was obvious but that was because I wrote the script myself. Consequently meaning I would have given the boiler man a bigger part and making there more of a cliff-hanger. 

In conclusion, there are many things I would change with this project if I could re-do it again. The research being the largest part – I would have liked to delve deeper into crime radio dramas as I feel this would have helped with my overall production. The other two major things being the actual production and the planning, I needed to plan my time better and get all of my sound production sheets done quicker, and also get all of the sound effects into the radio drama and bring it to life. Nevertheless, I am proud that I managed to produce something and was able to use software I have never used before. From this project I will take all of the new things I have learnt on board but also all of the negatives and hope to improve on these on my next project.