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Jon Francois
Jay and I picked up where we left off last week with commercial copywriting. I was assigned to write five commercials and make sure they were within the 30 second time constraint; I wrote commercials about White Castle, “The West Wing” television series, the Apple store, Levi’s, and Sprint. Jay seemed to like the imaginative ideas I put behind each commercial (i.e. 50% off “Go Away Levi!” special at Levi’s for anyone who mentions Bristol Palin’s ex-fiancee Levi Johnston) and had some very helpful suggestions about certain phrases that can be changed and wording that could be more simplified.
Jay also listened to another personality aircheck I produced over the weekend, keeping his notes from last week in mind about effective endings to each of my segments. I’m getting better at natural/thought provoking endings, but I could still work on avoiding punchlines that seem forced. That brought about an interesting conversation about what I want my identity in radio to be; for example, morning shows have the news guy, the funny guy, maybe someone who moderates the conversation, etc. It’s clear that my role isn’t that of a comedian. I’m realizing with these airchecks that my strength is natural, smooth, mostly thought provoking conversations with the listeners. I have to find some way to be ok with that. It’s very easy for me to think that successful radio host = someone who is funny as hell.
This week’s main assignment was producing a three minute newscast with three audio clips or “actualities” that would act as sound bite support to my “readers”. My newscast was about President Obama’s final State of the Union address and as I told Jay, producing a newscast is one of those projects that seem simple at first because of the task of stating objective facts as opposed to producing personality breaks that have to be conversational and attention-grabbing. As it turns out, a newscast is the greater challenge due the amount of research required to back up what I’m saying, structuring the narrative in a way where it makes sense to the audience, and finding sound bites that compliment my narration. Recording my dialogue was also more time consuming than I thought as I frequently tripped up on words in my attempt to sound like a “professional newscaster”.
I edited my vocals and the sound bites together on Adobe and allowed Jay to listen to a rough draft of the project. He made me aware of the higher pitch in my voice when I’m reading the news as opposed to being a personality and he noticed the sound bites were a tad too long (each of them should be 30 seconds). I’ll definitely keep those notes in mind as I produce a final project to turn in next week.
