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Jon Francois
Jay and I kicked off this week’s session with a review of two man on the street assignments: a report on Winter Storm Jonas featuring a brief interview with my friend Laura and a visit to the Hartford Boat Show. For the former, Jay liked that I kept the “man on the street” quality intact by interviewing Laura outside because the difference between indoors and outdoors is noticeable in the world of audio. In terms of the boat show, he noticed a slight difference between my “news reporter” delivery and “interviewer” delivery, but he seemed to like the segment overall (specifically the background sound of people walking and talking so the listener can feel like they’re at the show with me).
The two assignments for this week were Public Service Announcements and Sports. I wrote and recorded five PSAs through research on several non profit organizations in Hartford CT. During the writing process, Jay gave some very helpful feedback. For example, when writing a PSA for the Ferret Association of Connecticut, he suggested I should write it from the perspective of someone interested in getting an unconventional pet because let’s face it, ferrets arent exactly as common as cats and dogs. Recording these PSAs was a bit of a challenge as I was trying to figure out the “perfect” delivery. Jay initially told me that PSAs usually have a conservative style, but then he told me I could play around with it/be loose. Due to my overthinking/perfectionist nature, I ended up recording way too many takes because I was desperately searching to find that natural, conversational style that I usually excel at when communicating without a script. I had an improvised conversation with the microphone before the first PSA and that gradually led into the recording, but I felt like I was getting worse or trying too hard with each recording. Surprisingly, Jay thought the outcome sounded good, but giving natural delivery to a script is a handicap i still need to improve on.
Towards the end of the day, I worked on the first of the two Sports assignments. As a non-sports fan, I had to listen to a local sports station (CBS Radio’s WFAN in NYC) and create show prep for a one hour sports program based on the topics discussed. I noticed that, unlike the traditional “news at the top of the hour” of other stations, WFAN had sports updates every 20 minutes in addition to the long form sports discussions. I used my lack of sports knowledge to my advantage by using stories as a basis for broader-themed discussions; Las Vegas betting on Panthers quarterback Cam Newton for Super Bowl 50 led to my opinion on the risk of gambling and the Cleveland Browns dumping Johnny Menziel led to questions about what causes a number of NFL players to be accused of domestic abuse. As a non-sports guy himself, Jay liked the intellectual spin I put on these topics.
