Radio Advert Review

I began this project with a partner to assist in the planning, pre-production and production of this radio advert. We started off by planning out what our idea, my partner and I had decided to choose the brief that was to promote water efficiency.

We started to discuss ideas in which we could develop and discussed creative ways to portray our ideas, at first we had an idea to focus upon malnourished third world countries which didn’t have access to water and how people in the first world (our target audience) take water for granted and waste it. We soon came to the decision that the advert would be too slow and down-beat, it was hard to think of create ideas to get our idea across through audio, we also thought going for a advert which was too serious would make It dull and drag out too long therefore scrapped the idea. Our second idea which became our final idea which we used for a final product, what our idea was to indirectly inform the audience to waste less water thus becoming more water efficient, to create this idea we had to research some facts that could be included into the final cut of the radio advert. We went onto the United Utilities website to acquire the facts.

On the United Utilities website there is a section the website that tells you how people can be more water efficient at home with visual examples and facts on the subjects, such as above it says how taps can potentially waste hundreds of pounds if they are left dripping. After looking through the entire example we noted down multiple facts and ideas down for the advert and started to plan out a rough idea of the advert.

We then went to a website called ‘www.rab.co.uk’, this website hosts a multitude of different radio adverts for many types are brands/ products. My partner and I both looked at different radio adverts and focussed upon two; a O2 advert and a Microsoft Xbox advert, and then compared them. We used this time to look for similar conventions that were used which we could take and adapt to our requirements; we also looked at what made each advert unique and why it is unique to help us with our research.

To lay down our ideas we created a storyboard, the reasoning behind doing a storyboard was so that we would have a visual representation of what we wanted, so we would need to think of ways to create the sounds and use sounds which are recognisable without any visual representation.

We decided that our radio advert wouldn’t require any obscure sounds to achieve the sounds we wanted therefore we only needed to recreate our desired sounds as they are shown visually.

What we did to get the sound of running water was use multiple different ways to portray that sound, first of all we went to a local water stream and recorded a short clip of the water running down the stream, We then went into the colleges dark room and used one of the taps in there and recorded the water running from the tap and finally I personally recorded the sound of my home tap running. We evaluated each audio file and decided it would be best to use the home tap running due to the fact that was the sound we were going for and both the stream and tap in the dark room didn’t sound exactly like a home tap because for one the stream isn’t a home tap and the tap in the dark room has a plastic sink and created a different sound compared to water hitting the porcelain/ ceramic sink which most homes have.

Naturally we decided to use audio footage of water going down the drain from a home sink due to the ‘gurgle’ sound effect that happens when water goes down the drain. Finally we had to create the sound of coins dropping/ clashing together so we acquired a handful of small denomination coins so that we would get a better sound from them because coins such as a pound coin is thick and heavy and doesn’t make the ‘clink’ sound we were looking for. We tested 3 ways to achieve different sounds of coins dropping/ clashing together, Firstly we slowly dropped individual coins one after each other to get a continuous sound, dropping multiple coins drop and once and repeating so that you would hear the coins drop on the floor ‘rattle’, settle then repeat and finally letting the coins slowly drop off my hand so there was no pattern in how they were dropped giving it a random outcome each time. Again we came to evaluate and decided that dropping all the coins at once was too much of a sudden sound and didn’t last very long so removed that from our choice, after listening to our other two audio clips we decided on using the clip which had one coin dropping after each other, we chose this because firstly the recording came out nice, lasted a nice length of time and it can be connected to the slogan “Every little help” by ‘Tesco’ because all of the coins add up slowly whereas the other two clips have random outcomes which couldn’t have our desired connotation.

Now we had the sound effects recorded we needed to have a voiceover for our radio advert. We began looking through our information we had acquired from the United Utilities water efficiency website to use the facts we had to use within our script. Because we focussed our radio advert on running water in the sink we used a rhetorical question ‘Do you waste too much water in your home?’ and followed that up with the fact ‘If you turn off the tap whilst brushing your teeth, you can save up to 18 litres each time- that’s enough to run some washing machines!’, we changed the

wording and left out some of the fact to have this within our script ‘you waste 18 litres of water when brushing your teeth alone…when you leave the water running’. We did our own research and we figured out that an average glass of water holds about 260ml worth of water and calculated that it would mean that it is the equivalent to more than 70 glasses of water is wasted. We then worded it as ‘That’s the equivalent of over 70 glasses of water’ which we used straight after the previous fact. We used the 70 glasses of water fact so that 18 litres is put into perspective as to some 18 litres can just be easily under estimated. We then simply put ‘Think of how much money you can save’ so that it would link in with the sound effect and finally ended the script with ‘For more information visit the united utilities website at www.unitedutilities.com’ because it states within the brief that we needed to mention the United Utilities website.

At first both my partner and I had decided on using one of my friends because he has a deep authoritative voice which we thought would work well when trying to promote water efficiency in a serious manner, however once we had his voice recorded we soon found that his voice has too low and serious for us to create an informative yet interesting advert. We turned to our tutor to record our voiceover because he has an upbeat yet authoritative voice which is what we were looking for.

When we came to edit and produce the radio advert we discovered that the flow of the advert was slow and boring and decided to acquire more sound effects to add, we decided to get a recording of the sound of someone brushing their teeth and spitting and the sound of someone gargling then spitting which I went home and recorded myself doing both of the sounds. My partner and I decided once we had the extra sound effects to try and create two different versions of the same advert so we could use different ideas within the final cut of the radio advert. Once we had our versions of the advert we reviewed each other’s adverts and discuss what we liked and disliked and shared ideas to add to our final cut.

In Audacity I used 12 layers of sound so that I can edit each section of the advert whether it is the sound effects or the voiceover. What Audacity does is it shows the wave of the sound file so it helped with adjusting audio levels to work well with the rest of the advert because if the sound effects are louder than the voiceover than it may become inaudible and leads to a bad radio advert. I changed the amplification of each audio track to fit the levels that I thought worked well, the way I did this was by clicking on the audio track I wished to changed and highlight the track then click on ‘Effect’ then ‘Amplify’, that brought up a window to change the amplification positive or negative.

Overall I am pleased with the final cut of the radio advert because it has come out sounding near professional and flows nicely without any moment where it just stops, I found out that the flow of the advert is very important in the creation therefore focussed on making it flow as best as possible. I found that the voice recordings did sound a little tinny so If I were to redo the assignment I would use a better audio recorder to make it as professional as possible and collect as many sounds as possible so that I have many different sounds to choose from when developing the radio advert..