Evaluation - Representation

As part of my research and planning I thought carefully about representation when listening to existing radio shows. Having listened to presenters on contrasting radio stations (BBC Radio 2 and Magic Radio) I analysed the ways in which presenters spoke, the language they used and their tone of voice and how this related to the target audience and radio genre.

Analysis of Representation on Magic FM and BBC Radio 2

When I scripted my preliminary task I didn't think about the ways that the characters in my script might sound and I especially didn't think about representation when choosing my actors. After completing a number of listening tasks where I listened to news presenters, show presenters, voxpops and adverts, I realised that I had to carefully choose my actors for each role, and that I may have to explicitly tell them exactly what tone to use so that the representation was accurate.

After I had completed my script, I went about about choosing the actors for each role. I had over 10 different characters in my script ranging from the news presenter to voxpops accompanying my news stories and I made sure that I gave careful consideration to who I chose for each character. Below are the links to my posts on choosing actors.

Choosing Voices for my Show 1
For my news presenter I wanted a female as after listening to radio stations such as Kiss FM and Capital FM I found that they used mainly females for news presenting however I wanted her to sound slightly more serious than my show presenters. I chose Louise the drama teacher at school as I felt she had an authoritative yet calming voice so when listening to her it didnt get boring nor was her voice annoying.



When researching, I noticed that the show presenters on stations such as Magic and Capital sounded young in comparison to those on BBC Radio 2 and spoke in an excited manner when discussing what they had coming up on the show or introduced a song. I decided on two show presenters, one male and one female as this is what was most common on the stations that I felt mine was most similar to. I also that that a male and female presenter would help my show appeal to a wider audience. I asked Jess, a friend of mine, to play the role of female presenter Amy Morgan and I asked another friend Michael to play Marvin Kemp.




I chose Jon, one of the Media teachers, as the voice for my jingles. I wanted to use the same voice for all of my jingles so that my station had a consistent identity. I felt that Jon had the right tone of voice for a jingle - informative with a degree of authority. The clip below contains Jons jingles without any music







For my voxpops I wanted people to sound less formal and more natural, as they were supposed to represent members of the public rather than professional  broadcasters. I still chose my actors carefully and didn't edit out any pauses or mistakes in the same way that I did my presenters and other characters.