PRODUCTION WEEK ONE

This week was mainly based on my team sharing individual ideas that would be brilliant for our radio programme. Although there were many other options   of themes to choose from, we concluded on a cultural theme. Our idea was very wide as we were thinking of focusing on UK cultures however we felt that was too open and we had to narrow it down. We concluded on simplifying the project to cultures within London. Some of the cultural topics my team concluded on highlighting every week were entertainment, love, food and traditions. I am very happy about these weekly topics because there is so much important contents, we could create relating to the weekly subjects.

During this week I was able to choose a suitable job role for this project. My job role for the whole of this task is marketing and digital content creator. I chose both of these job roles because I believe it would be a smart idea to work on the branding/imagery and digital contents which is mainly about our online contents as I believe it works hand-in hand. It would also be easier to communicate changes, ideas if am aware of what is actually going on within the marketing and digital team as it contains similar responsibilities. Moreover, the marketing and digital are supposed to communicate and work together in some areas such as creating a name for the show and also the logos necessary. It is important that these two teams communicate in other for us to come up with outstanding results. This week my group included that the radio channel was based on different cultures in the U.K. However, we received feedback to narrow it down which is one thing that will be discussed for next week. I need to come up with lists of a names suitable for our channel, start thinking of the logos, start creating it, start thinking about the idents and create scripts.

PRODUCTION WEEK TWO

This week was quite challenging because I had to think out the box and be creative. Being creative is not usually my comfort zone but I had to challenge myself in other to come up with great ideas for my team. This week I had to come up with ideas suitable yet a creative name for our radio station. I was able to come up with many names however one of the names I picked was part of the final two names my group thought was interesting and suitable for the station. We concluded on Atlas London and collective radio which was derived from connective radio. I was also able to write script for the idents. The plan I and my team concluded for the radio show was to involve different accents worldwide. We wanted listeners to have a feel of different cultures through them hearing idents. The initial plan is to have people of different backgrounds and demographics. The script I made was fun, exciting and energetic, therefore I wanted participants to sound that way. How I got my idents was by sending messages to most of the people I knew had an accent.  I gave them instructions on what to say by sending the scripts. I also sent them audio recordings of the style in which I wanted them to sound. That made them comfortable and also helped them gain an insight of how the ident is supposed to sound like. I was also able to write the social media plan. The purpose of the social media plan is to guide the digital team on things they could possibly post each week for all the socials.

PILOT WEEK ONE
This week was very challenging as I was in charge of all social media pages. In preparation for the pilot week, I recorded some idents of people from different backgrounds such as Turkish, American, south London, Jamaican and Chinese. I made sure I instructed them on how to sound which was an exciting, cheerful and feeling free to speak in their accents. I even sent an example of recordings so that they got the idea.

I had to read throughout contents for the pilot week to gain an understanding of the topic.

I was able to create a table which consists of social media contents. I wanted it to be essay for me every week by listing ideas of contents that could be used for our social media. I did it for all the weeks so that I am ahead of time. Because I did not schedule any for the pilot week, I noticed it was quite difficult as I had to think out the box because there is no plan. The topic was about ceremonies and it was subtitled debut. Debut is a celebration into adulthood performed by Filipinos. I also noticed that to make things much more at ease with the social media, I would need to plan ahead of time and google images I believe is suitable for every week. This is because I have to find an image that is labelled for reuse due to copyright issues. This makes the search for pictures take longer than usual. Therefore, in order for me to be fast with tweeting and posting, I have an idea of pictures suitable for each week saved. Also, I could use Twitter deck to schedule posting for Twitter so that immediately it’s time to post, it would be done automatically.

I also communicated with my team members whom are also in charge of the website to make sure they were also up to date with what was going on with social media. Although they have access to the social media page, it was better for me to communicate with him as their main focus was on the web page. I feel like the pilot week was a successful one because it made me realise a lot of things and I also noticed there were a few things which i did not pay attention to before that might be necessary.

Our theme for next week is entertainment therefore I have to start scheduling tweets on Twitter and also get all images saved up for entertainment week by looking at the social media contents. For example, music.

PILOT WEEK TWO

In preparation for this week, I got a lot more people to participate in the idents, I tried getting people with different accents and from different backgrounds e.g. American, Turkish, south London, African and many more. Moreover, I had to search for images of which will be needed for posting on social media pages. This can be quite challenging as I have to find images which are labelled for reuse however not all the images available for reuse is relevant or suitable for the topics I might be researching. In this case most of the plans I have for the socials do not come to plan.  However, am able to make adjustments to some of the original social media plans in other to get the right images for posting. I also try using both Computers and phones as they sometimes provide different images. You might find a picture on a computer through google that you may not necessarily have on your mobile phone’s google search.

Based on the feedback I got today, I would need to involve some tweets and posts for the OB. I spoke to the OB team to send me pictures so I can post either prior to or after the show. Also, because I am not only tweeting about the questions on the presenters running order, I have to work on my time in terms of when I choose to post questions I have planned for the socials and the ones which are from presenters. This is because sometimes it clashes, and it can be confusing. Next week I will be getting pictures needed for the theme which is entertainment. There is already a social media plan so all I need to do is follow it and also check with the content team if there have been any changes. I also had to schedule tweets related to this topic.

WEEK ONE: ENTERTAINMENT 

This week was entertainment week however our angle was Latin music and international television series mainly telenovela. Before our group meetings, I was thinking of a completely different approach. I was planning of posting things about most listened to songs for the week within London, popular television series in London such as Coronation Street and EastEnders. After the group meeting, I discovered that we will be focusing on a whole different topic. I did not know much about slavish culture and Spanish music and so I did my research and discovered the Spanish music is very popular worldwide than before. This made me to start thinking of posting Spanish artist whom has had a lot of sales or breaking records and helped in taking Spanish music to the next level. Although I could not do this because there weren’t   images that were labelled for reuse, I had to forget about that. I used pictures of Netflix and telenovelas and asked people to post their favourite series on Netflix and their favourite telenovelas. I always try to work with what I have and do a lot of research to find more images and gain an insight into every weekly topic.

WEEK TWO: LOVE 

For the love week I started to think of places in London most couples go to hang out.  I believe most couples go on dates most of the time. It is just a norm in the society and it’s an easy guess which I don’t think my team would leave out.

I also thought of different tribal weddings as I believe different cultures celebrate their wedding differently. After we had a group meeting, I discovered that most of my ideas were matching our group discussions and so I therefore performed further research about my ideas so far. I made good use of images that symbolised togetherness, love and a lot of couple related pictures. It was quite obvious what the topic was about. Just by looking at the social media images, an audience would be able to guess what the show is about. It was bright and colourful.

WEEK THREE: FOOD

For this week I had to focus on creating suitable ideas for digital content. The topic for this week was love. Before the show, I had to do my research, look at the social media plan as usual which serve as a guide for the contents I will be posting.

Although the running order is never done or complete before the exact day of each show. I make sure to think outside the box using some key information discussed in our group meetings. Although it may not work all the time and I might have to switch some ideas for the digital, content, it prepares me for the show. This week was about food. Such a great topic as food is part of our everyday lives. When thinking about suitable for this week challenge, I did not have a main angle to focus on as it was not yet discussed. For this week I started thinking of everyday snack from different cultures within London. There are a few popular snacks people in London have based on their cultures or where they are from. I also had an idea of posting top five popular fast food places in London e.g. KFC and MacDonald’s.

However, after our group meetings we discussed that our angle is going to be vegan foods. This narrowed the theme food and gave me a specific subject under foods to focus on.

On the day of the show, I made sure I read the running order as it is important to know what to post and when to post it. Although there are guidelines on some things for posting such as questions, it is my sole responsibility to use suitable images and videos to make our social media pages inviting, exciting and engaging for our audiences. Therefore, I have to read the running order in so that I have an idea of the theme. After am aware of what the show is about, I have to be creative by posting interesting yet relatable contents on our social media page. I had to look for a website that enables you to reuse images as it was quite difficult to find reusable pictures in google.

After discovering unsplash it made it easier however I had to be more creative as you will not find everything on unsplash. It is a website that enables you to reuse different kind of images. I had to edit some of the images used, change the colour or crop it in other for it to be the suitable image I want. I made sure the two main socials used had similar contents, but I had to make Twitter contents engaging and wordy whiles I reduced words on Instagram and made it more picture focused. Next week is about tradition so I will be doing my research prior to that.

WEEK FOUR: TRADITION

This week was traditional week. Although we couldn’t make it for the show because of a worldwide illness known as Coronavirus, my group had to work on this week online. I posted all social media contents on our social media page as normal. This week being traditional week was a broad topic. We narrowed it down to different cultures, solely focusing on upbringings. In this case I had planned on posting different images that symbolises cultures in London. I also planned on posting different festivals celebrated in London or worldwide with a reflection on Londoners. As usual I have to go through the running order and as I did, I got more ideas such as posting different beliefs e.g. voodoo, Islamic, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism. As usual our main socials which are Instagram and Twitter have similar posts however, I made sure the Twitter is engaging whiles the Instagram page had a lot of pictures. My job role involves editing of pictures and videos. Doing this sometimes enables me to get rid of contents I may not need and also change things Which may not be useful. Every week requires a lot of research to be done. However, this week, I had to do extra research about different beliefs and cultural related information.

CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Working as a group to create four different shows was quite challenging. All though I may have had a bit of experience in the past, this time it was extended as my team had to put together four different music shows for four weeks. There were different topics my team could have chosen from however we chose all-inclusive topics which involves people worldwide. We eventually narrowed it down to different cultures within London. This is because there are people from all over the world within London and this shows that it is a diverse country. I was not really excited about this idea because I was leaning towards the topic of love. Love is something everyone has something to say about. We all experience it in our daily lives e.g. homes, schools, workplace, place of worship, families, friends and many more. However, my team came to an agreement that we wanted a topic that requires as to do more research. This was a great idea as I gained a lot of knowledge about different cultures from our four divided topics of entertainment, love, food and traditions. The four mentioned topics were discussed each week. Entertainment was week one, love week two, food week three and traditions week four. My job role within the digital and marketing team enabled me to use my creative and imaginative skills as I had to control all postings on the digital platforms mainly Instagram and Twitter. My strength was mainly researching about every weekly topic and thinking out the box to put suitable yet interesting pictures for the socials. My weak point was that there were certain things I did not have much idea about. For example, different cultures worldwide, that are usually celebrated by Londoners. I was also able to share a lot of knowledge or opinions with my group about certain things that I thought was helpful to my team.

For example, being part of the marketing team, I explained to the rest of my group to make the idents express diversity as our topic is culturally based. I believe the audiences hearing people of different cultures and backgrounds on Atlas London would make them feel welcome. Moreover, all of my hard work for the pilot week was deleted by the editor without speaking to anyone from the marketing team. I felt like the least the editor could have done was to have spoken to me about it. I had to find out from someone else that they deleted the contents on our Instagram page because they were starting everything for the main show. I panicked when I noticed that all the posts had disappeared. I started thinking of the worse and was wondering if our account had been hacked. The editor only deleted the Instagram posts which I thought did not make sense as the posts on Twitter was not deleted so I therefore made sure I restarted everything on twitter too. I made sure before I made changes to the socials, I spoke to the rest of the marketing and digital team because I respect all of my team members and I respect their opinions as well. Therefore, I discussed with them on deleting all twitter post and they felt it was a good idea and made much sense.

Although in the beginning of the show I was not feeling very well and did not want to speak much, I always made sure I discussed with my team online about my ideas and opinions. Working within the marketing and digital field together with my team was quite easier than i thought. We were all able to come to an understanding and agreement. Professionally we all worked together peacefully, respected each other’s ideas and opinions. This helped us to stay as a strong team and work at fast pace. Contributing was very necessary and important as that was the only way to get my voice heard. Although my advice was not taking all the time, it is always better to contribute as much as you can than nothing.

The whole team made sure we came together every week to share our ideas and opinions. Group meetings was very important as it have enabled me to contribute my ideas each week. Some of the general things I noticed was great teamwork abilities and how little support from each job roles helped build up and expand every little idea we had. Our shows were mainly three hours and was divided into two parts. The speech show which lasted for an hour and the music show which lasted for two hours. The only difference is that the speech show involved the presenters speaking a lot and involving things such as interviews to engage, educate and inform the audience. The music show was mainly music based and less speaking. We started of a bit unorganised however we got better each week. There were some points the music team added inappropriate songs to their playlists, presenters were not really engaging, adverts weren’t complete and many more.

Since I was in the marketing and digital team, I will say that idents were not selling what the station was about in the beginning which is “diversity”. Secondly the social media was having some issues such as wrong timing of posting or posting things quickly which may have confused the audience. The social media was looking dull as well. However, I tried my best to make sure there was a change. I recorded different idents of people from different cultures and backgrounds so that it is more culturally diverse. Furthermore, I made sure I tried using other techniques to improve the socials. I tried using polls on twitter instead of just asking questions. This somehow brought a change to the socials as some people may want to reply quickly and using polls was a good way to make audience engage in all twitter activities as they only had to select their answers from options giving to them. I also made good use of Instagram stories by allowing the audience to hear from presenters as they introduced the topic planned for every week. I also made sure I did not ask much questions on the socials so that the audience can focus on answering and giving their opinions.

This was a great experience that helped me learn a lot about my creative abilities and help me enhance some other skills such as communication and listening skills.