charlie's online media blog

charlie-ann mathers. university of westminster. w1483742. advanced online media. research blog.

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CRITICAL REPORT

My project aim was to create a podcast in which I take people in positions of interest and interview them on current affairs, politics and other things that are in the news - The thought process behind this was influenced by a BBC article in which band The Lumineers spoke about Barack Obama. Interviews usually consist of the interviewee talking about their current work (For example an actor would talk about the latest movie he is doing, or a singer may chat about their latest album). Fans of celebrities like to know so much more than just what happened on set, because that’s spoke about a lot. It is also, however, interesting generally to hear the opinions of people in such positions because they can really help influence things - Such as movements in terms of political campaigns and others (An example may be the #HeForShe movement). For this reason the target audience of the podcast would be the fans of the person being interviewed and also people who are generally interest in current affairs and other such things. Another unique selling point about the podcast is that I, myself, have next to no knowledge of politics. Whilst most cultural debate shows and discussions are hosted by people with an in depth knowledge of the matter they’re discussing, this podcast is right at the other end of the scale.

To make sure that it is still easy listening for the younger audience who’re only listening for their favourite artist, the mood will be kept light and friendly throughout. The ideal would be that the podcast just sounds like two people having a conversation. What helped with keeping the mood relaxing during recording that I was already acquainted with the guest before hand. Obviously, this will be much different with all guests so it would be tough to maintain that cool atmosphere in all of them as I’m aware that sometimes you meet a celebrity for the first time and have to do the interview there and then with them (This would mean I would not have time to pre-interview and get them used to me, helping them relax a little bit).

In terms of guest, I managed to get someone in an influential position (Regional Officer for the SRA), however I would have ideally got someone in a position of higher interest. This fell down to my lack of preparation time however. I left it all much too late. With more planning on my behalf, I would have got a better guest. The length of the podcast also would have been changed. Ideally, I would want each podcast to be around 10-15 minutes however because of lack of time that the guest could be around, this would cut a lot shorter than I would have hoped. I also would have liked to have edited the podcast better, the jingle also. The low quality editing is what differentiates this from a professional podcast unfortunately however, as I have previous experience in editing, I would like to believe that with more time it would have sounded much better.

What went well however was the fun informality of my podcast whilst still being informative. It is the ideal format and sound that I would have wanted. My existing relationship with the guest will have helped with that. The fun jingle was also in the direction that I would have wanted.

My pitch went as well as I had hoped. My idea was for an app that allows young people to arrange to meet up at locations for drinks or host a party at someone’s house. The app also allows for someone to see the location of the party, state whether or not there will be a large amount of alcohol, whether or not there are smoke facilities and also the style of the party (Formal, House Party, Fancy Dress ect.).  A more fun aspect which the younger generation would enjoy is the rating aspect - Similar to that of uber. This would drive people to be both a better host and a better party guest, as the younger generations are quite egotistical and concerned with their image.

In contacts, this app allows you to state your relationship to someone (Partner, cousin, friend, aunt) which makes the Surprise Party aspect doable. With this app, you can look at who someone has listed as their family and friends and invite them to a party. The person in question would not receive a notification that you have looked at your friends, but the people you invite would receive a message saying the “Jane Doe’s Cousin has invited you to a Surprise Party”. This is not doable on Facebook as you have to be friends with someone to view who they also have as their friends most of the time, due to privacy settings. Gather Planner is much more open however, in the style of Twitter, where it’s easier to see who everyone else has.

In my presentation, a flaw that was brought up was that the app does not allow for someone to plan for catering however the younger generations do not generally tend to cater their parties. It’s all very much bring you own food, bring your own drink and whatever else you are required. It was also mentioned that why would someone use this app over looking at events on Facebook? However in this app, it can physically show you on a map the location of the party which Facebook does not allow. With this app you can also easily look back at parties or look at parties you have not already confirmed you are attending - With Facebook, there is a lot of looking around. Also, with this app it sends a text when you have been invited to a party and people are less likely to ignore a text (Because they’re curious as to what it is) than a Facebook notification (Which they would get all the time about things and do not really care about). Another falling point mentioned was that people may be offended when they get a low rating as a host/guest however this app is mainly for use between friends and so this would purely be seen as a joke. You know that Stacey is always a bit messy at a party, but you invite her anyway because she’s your friend.

If I had more time, I would have wanted to planned out a more interesting and aesthetically pleasing user interface as, although I am happy with the wireframes I have, I believe that more could be done to make them better looking. Also I would have liked to have planned out a few more pages.

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GATHER PLANNER - APP LOOK

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Updated: Guests & Idea

Guests: Whilst I’d hope for most guests to be highprofile/somewhat celebrity guests that would draw in an audience, it could be funny to have random people - Like my friend, or my nan. These would still be as funny as the others and it’s also nice to hear from different people

Idea: Because of allowing a more wide variety of people onto the podcast, the lead point of the podcast would be that I know nothing about current affairs and politics and yet I’m talking to people weekly about current affairs and politics. Also, it’d be done in one take.

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For the podcast introduction, I wanted something quite funny and lighthearted that explained the concept briefly. Where it fades out at the end, the podcast/speech content would begin.

The image used will be replicated across every podcast also (With the text changed to the guests name).

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PoliticalPunk

Listen to PoliticalPunk | SoundCloud is an audio platform that lets you listen to what you love and share the sounds you create.

Whilst I would normally use Audioboom for uploading audio to the web, Soundcloud has a function which allows people to attach comments to the audio. I want this as an option for people so that if I have the same person on twice, the second time we can look back at what people said on the last interview and delve into points further.

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SOUNDCLOUD BRANDING AND IMAGES.

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Media Training = Unwillingness to talk?

When originally discussing my idea with lecturers, I was faced with the problem that people may not want to talk about such serious topic. Artists are often on interview and press tours to promote something. After this thought provoking conversation, I began to think through how I might overcome such problems.

Would we only use people who’re on press tours? How are you going to get in the plug for their new project?

We wouldn’t only have to talk to people who’re on press tours. Celebrities are still celebrities even when they’re not about to release a new album or star in a new blockbuster. Obviously we may also get celebrities who are on press tours and then we’ll include information about their latest project in the information box.

Are celebrities going to want to talk about more political/controversial stuff?

After experiences of interviewing people myself, it tends to be more alternative artists that are happy to talk about more controversial topics - Although this is probably because it’s part of their image to be open, honest and to the point. Although still with a slight indie sound, The Lumineers have also spoken about more political subjects in the past during an interview with the BBC.

So will it just be alternative/rock celebrities that you interview?

Of course not! We’re open to anyone coming on to the podcast to open up and talk about more serious things however it may just be that more of the alternative kind of person stops in.

Will each episode just get the attention of the celebrities fans?

Obviously people who’re already fans of the artist will be interested in what their favourite person may have to say about the fiscal crisis. But also people who’re not already interested in the artist may listen and learn something new about them or find out that they agree with an opinion they have.

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Audio Podcast: Current Affairs Interviews Brief

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Pitch Idea Development

Wireframe of the main Soundboard page

This shows what the main page of the soundboard would look like. This is where people can play the sounds on their soundboard, or create their own soundboard.

Wireframe of the main home page

Here is the main home page where people can choose to create a new soundboard, open one that they’ve previously created or search for soundboards by other people.

( This list will be added to as the layouts are created )

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Summary Update!

STORY / INDIVIDUAL PROJECT

For my story piece, I’m going to pursue the idea of a weekly podcast where we talk to bands and instead of talking to them about their music - get them to talk about current affairs. For my actual creation, instead of curating the entire hour long podcast, I’d create a reel of the podcasts jingles/branding/ads that would last the required length of four minutes. As well as this, I’d create pictorial branding/imaging/logos and other physical things as well as banner ads that could be placed on other websites.

PRESENTATION / BUSINESS PLAN

To switch things around, for my presentation/pitch I’d look at making an app which is used to record a soundboard. There are a lot of soundboards out there however I rarely come across an app that allows you to create your own soundboard. It would typically look like a normal soundboard but then you can click on a pad, record into it and keep that audio. To create money, we’d allow people to pay and give other people access to their soundboards and also to add their images/branding to the soundboards.

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Audio. Theatre of the mind.

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After deciding that I’d definitely like to go ahead with the idea of a podcast where bands answer serious questions, I thought about a title. One that stuck in my head for a while was ‘Musical Interlude’. Here’s a play around with titles - The font used in this one is called PacFont.

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Audio Journalism Idea Planning

Whilst in interviews bands always answer the same questions over and over again - What we don’t get to ear from bands often however is how they feel about the more heavier topics, the topics that society care about rather than their obsessive fans.

My Audio Journalism idea would be a series of podcasts, with each episode being one interview with a band/artist. In that, we would talk to the client about everything and/or anything in todays current affairs. This would allow for great variety. One week we may talk to someone about the elections, and the next the refugee crisis. Whatever the big stories are (BRITS, Politics or Science), we’ll quiz and inform our guests on.

This would allow for fans to get to know their idols in a much different way to normal. With growing popularity, we could get bigger and bigger guests. The artists will enjoy this also because it’s a different interview to normal. They wouldn’t be expected to tell us about their latest album at all - In fact we’d make an aim/rule to not mention their new music at all really in the actual interview.

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Data Journalism

“Data Journalism is to acquire, research, extract and give sense and shape to the information which is too complicated for the reader and often full of numbers and statistics.”

Data Journalism is, in it’s simplest form, the info graphics you might see in a news article. It gets across large amounts of information that people need to know but don’t have the time to trawl through.

DATA JOURNALISM

Here is a good example of data journalism. To get across the amount of people on the planet and other related information, the BBC created this page where you can input details and find out about your place in the population.

Another part of Data Journalism is finding specific information. For exmaple if you wanted to find out tweets about the elections but not involving the police, you might search for “elections -police”. There are hundreds of other combinations of words that could be used. It goes even as detailed as being able to look at tweets about a certain topic in a specific area.

TRENDS MAP

Trends Map is another way to use twitter to the maximum. It allows the user to look at trends cross the globe and the further you zoom in, the more specific the trends are. At the time that I looked, one of the main trends in London were friday feeling, london and trump.

Graph Visualisations

There are sites to help with creating visualisations of information...

Tableau

CartoDV

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Family Tree App Ideas

Here’s quick idea of how the app may look. Obviously this is very minimalistic however it’s a starter. This was made using wireframe.cc .

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App Idea Planning

I’ve had one idea for an app that I’d be really interested in developing.

Family Tree-Contacts Style App (Name TBC) - In your contacts app and on Facebook, it always pushes for you to add on who is your father, who is your mother ect... Well what if there was an app that collated all of these together? It’d create a family tree style thing, showing you all of the contacts that you have for that person. Also, if ( for example ) your Mother has the number for your cousin but you don’t have that number, it’d connect that up! It’s useful in terms of getting in contact with family members who’s numbers you don’t have - For example when you’re trying to set up a family party/family event. A problem that might come with this is data protection however people sign up knowing that their number is going to be passed on to their family members - Also, it’d just be family members that get your details/numbers.