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Jon Francois
Jay and I worked on Lesson 12 and 13 in the textbook this week. I selected three commercials in Lesson 13 and they were all products I had no personal interest in (dance company, classic car giveaway, restaurant wine). This was intentional because being a commercial broadcaster is often objective; the broadcaster is hired to generate interest in a product no matter how he or she personally feels about it. As an extended challenge, Jay had me do two different takes for these commercials: one where I delivered original rewrites and another where I read the scripts word for word in the textbook. The rewrite session had good moments here and there, but it mostly came off as formal in Jay’s opinion. To capture a conversational tone, I recording improvisational takes on these commercials before recording the scripted dialogue. There were still formal moments in the scripted takes and I could’ve used more inflection for certain words, but Jay did see some improvement. He gave me some memorable advice on gradually moving away from formal to conversational: imagine I was talking to the mic as if it was a human being, saying something to the likes of “Wow, it’s so odd that I’m talking to you, you weirdly shaped inanimate object. It is what it is, I guess. Look, I’d like to tell you about this product I think you’ll like…..”.
Lesson 12 revolved around on the street reporting. I created a brief news report about the recent winter storm and it consisted of an intro, a man on the street interview that acted as an actuality, and an outro. Jay was my interviewee and he certainly kept me on my toes both as mentor and regular Joe impersonator; He deliberately gave me one or two word answers to some of my questions to see how I would keep the conversation going and gave me reminders whenever some of my questions had nothing to do with the storm. Despite having man on the street experience from public access television, I was a bit nervous during this activity. I had only a couple of questions to work with versus the several questions I usually prepare for television and the visual characteristic of the medium inspired a lot more follow up questions (if I was at a boat show, I could ask something like “What’s that blue thing on the boat?”). Not only that, but I forgot to treat my audio recorder as if it were a handheld microphone. The audio mostly picked up my voice because I forgot to put the recorder under Jay’s mouth when he was talking. It was a rocky experience to say the least, but nonetheless, it was educational and only motivated me to try this again with hopefully better results.
