'Making It' with the Roundhouse

Here’s the project that took up most of April 2012 – a documentary for Roundhouse Radio on how to get a career in the radio industry.

We got advice from Mike Anthony (the owner of Bang FM and one part of BBC 1xtra’s ‘Rampage’), Amy Redmond (BBC Radio 1 Producer), Ruth Barnes (BBC 6music contributor, Amazing Radio presenter and creator of the Other Woman podcast -  http://theotherwomanpodcast.podbean.com/ ),  Julie Adenuga (Rinse FM drive-time presenter) and Sacha Brooks (Capital FM Birmingham). In the end I think we made a great show, which is genuinely informative (there was loads of great advice, plus there was loads of good stuff that didn't make the final cut).

We actually had a whole range of ideas for our radio show. In the end we had two show ideas, a documentary on cassettes (‘The last Cassette Generation”) and a show about breaking into creative industries with a primary focus on radio.

After much deliberation we decided to go for the Radio documentary, since our mentor, Ray Paul, said that it would be more straightforward to make, given the contacts we had through the Roundhouse, and suggested that it would be more suited to the young creative types that listen to Roundhouse Radio. Also, later on in the month I heard a FANTASTIC series on Resonance FM by Naomi Christie http://cassetteradio.wordpress.com/ (I intend to write a more detailed ‘Radio in Review’ in the coming weeks) - so a part of me is glad we didn't make something that was too similar to another project.

We quickly realised the sheer amount of work that goes into making a documentary! It was originally going to be recorded as live, with us trying to book guests to come into the studio, but we figured that it would be too difficult to get loads of people find the time to come in. The ten point structure idea was given to us by our mentor, since it would be more straightforward and easier for the audience to follow it the show was broken up into segments that were under 3 minutes.

The topics we chose to do were:

Be a Pain

Be Ambitious

Make Your Mark

Be Wise

Make Mistakes

If in Doubt… Blag

Go Viral

Get Stuck In

Do It Yourself

Take Action

Me with Emma

It was pretty difficult to get interviewees at first, though eventually we were able to get quite a few contributors on board by simply asking them to record their questions from home and email them to us. After a disastrous attempt to edit it together on Protools (more because we were completely incapable of using a Mac), I did a rough cut of the show on Audacity, which I emailed to Ally (our team’s tech person) to put all the music and effects under the interviews. The girl doing the topic idents is Emma, the producer.

We all got loads of experience, plus we realised that making radio was easy to do by ourselves. We hardly used any of the professional Roundhouse Radio software or equipment (however I did borrow an Olympus Dictaphone to do the Amy Redmond interview). We used Audacity on our laptops and I recorded the script at home with a Tascam dictaphone in my room. Plus, big tip for anyone working in a team making DIY shows, wetransfer.com is a godsend – since it lets you transfer massive files online, meaning that you can transfer Audacity project wholesale to others. Producing this proved that, technology wise, everyone has access to the tools they need. It certainly helped that the contributors we used were technology savvy, but anyone who has access to a smart phone could easily record answers to questions using a voice recorder app (as I suspect Julie from Rinse did) and send it to you via the web.