Radio Jingle

A short introduction:
A radio jingle is a short catchy song varying between 5 seconds and 30 seconds, although others have gone over this. They're usually used to promote something such as a radio show, the radio station or a radio DJ, or can include all three in one jingle if they so wish. They can also advertise upcoming films or songs as well. They usually include speech, music and sound effects depending on what is being advertised in the jingle.

The Task:
So, to begin with we had to get ourselves acquainted with the Apple Mac software, and for this project we had to use Logic Pro, this programme allows you to record, edit and produce a new track. Logic Pro is known as a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), other examples of a DAW is GarageBand and Soundbooth. Logic Pro also lets you 'bounce' a track, so you can save it as an MP3 format, MP3 is a compressed file so it can be quickly uploaded and downloaded to and from the internet and sent to someone or something else with ease. However, MP3 has a low quality because of it being compressed and it sounds unclear when compared to for example an AIFF format or WAV format, so if anyone ever wanted to burn music onto a CD the best format to do that in would be AIFF as it is much clearer and better quality. As well as being able to create a new track on Logic Pro, you can add different types of effects to your track, better known as 'plug-ins'. These plug-ins can be used to make your track sound different for example you can make it sound distorted, or change around the equaliser to make your voice sound different, or even use autotune to make your voice sound 'better' shall we say. We also played around with the built in instruments to make our own tunes or beats, or we could get a song from the Internet and use that instead. When having a track we had to make sure we put it on different audio tracks so that each individual audio could be edited in it's own way.

After learning about Logic Pro, we were told to try and create our own radio jingle for the college student radio called SNC Live! This had to be between 5-20 seconds long. It also had to include the radio presenter, the radio station and to make sure we had vocals, music and sound effects. We had to look at other radio jingles to get an idea of what we were trying to create, the one I looked at was the Chris Moyles show on Radio 1, this was an interesting one to listen to as Chris Moyles is usually known for pushing the boundaries a little bit, for example he did it longer than the expected time and actually mentioned in the jingle that he was on a radio jingle, etc. However, it did give me a good insight of how to try and create my own jingle, so I went about figuring out what was going to be said on it and how I should sound on it. After figuring out what I wanted to do I had to get a MP3 recorder and record my sounds on that, I decided to get a group of people to say enthusiastically 'SNC Live!' as a starting point, I then went on to say 'You're listening to DJ Panda on SNC Live!'. After getting all of the recordings I desired, I went back to the Mac and plugged in my MP3 recorder and took my sounds off it and imported them into Logic Pro to begin my editing. I tried out different sounds and tried to edit them together with the recordings and edited my sound recordings by adding distortion effects and what not.

After making the jingle to promote a radio show, we then had to create a jingle promoting a product, so we had to invent our own products up and I came up with the idea of a pair of glasses that could take a picture by pressing a small button on the glasses arm. So again we had to go out and use the MP3 recorders, I aimed my products at teenagers as I thought they would be excited at the concept of being able to take pictures discreetly with just a pair of glasses on, I know I would be. So I decided to try and sound excited on my recordings and I got someone else to record something saying how amazing the glasses were, so it would sound like other people reviewing the product, I went on to explain how they worked and tried to sound happy and upbeat about the product. After happy with my recordings I went back to the Mac's and again began the process I mentioned in the above paragraph.

Finally, we had to make a jingle promoting either a new film or a new song, I decided to take up promoting a new song by N-Dubz, this time I used the Mac's built in microphone to record myself explaining a little bit about N-Dubz and then when the song was to be released. I tried to put parts of the song behind the speech and parts of one of their old songs on in the background as well, this was very hard to put together and this was also unfinished as I struggled using the programme. But after happy with my recordings I again imported them onto the Mac and yet again restarted the same process.

Evaluation:
In this evaluation I will be discussing what I've learnt from using Logic Pro and what I learnt from creating my own jingles, why I found it interesting in some parts but not in others and what problems I faced and what I did to solve them.

To being with, from using Logic Pro I learnt that creating and editing music is a lot more difficult than I first thought. It takes a lot of time and care if you really want to create the best track, at first I thought it was a bit complicated to use but I began to get used to it. I found it interesting to use once I got into it and enjoyed trying out the different plug-ins and using the built in instruments as I've always found the concept of making music quite interesting. I also learnt how to use the different recording devices because at first we had to use a MP3 recorder but for the other jingle we made we had to use the Macs built in microphones which I enjoyed, I then learnt how to import the recorded sounds into Logic Pro. From creating my own jingles I learnt that it's actually quite hard to make a good sounding jingle where everything flows together and I didn't actually manage to finish either of my jingles to the standard I would've liked.

I found this project interesting as I enjoyed trying out different sound effects and making the recordings on Logic Pro and I liked editing it all together to make a new track. I liked learning how to use the Mac's and how to use Logic Pro as it is now a new experience for when we come back to this programme and it is good experience if I ever wanted to use it for other things than just radio jingles. However, unfortunately for us the Mac's weren’t working until the end of the week so everything was a bit rushed and I still feel like I could've learnt much more, this is also why I didn't finish any of my jingles because I had an idea of what sounds I wanted but couldn't find them and I believe I might have been able to if we had more time. But that couldn't be helped so I just got in with it in the time I had and I believe I didn't get bad results considering I didn't finish or the fact we didn't have much time.

In conclusion, I found this project exciting and interesting to do, I would definitely do it again if I got the opportunity to as I would happily want to learn more about Logic Pro and how a finished track may actually sound like. If I were to do this project again I would've tried to get better recordings for all of the jingles I made as some of them weren’t very clear or were too loud and other parts were too quiet. I would take more time when trying to edit the sound effects and the music I added to it as I wasn't really sure how to do it. I would also try to experiment with other sound effects instead of trying to find specific sounds as this wasted time and I could've gone back to that at the end. All in all, I did enjoy this project despite the technical difficulties and would definitely return to it if the opportunity arises.

Pinhole Camera

The Task
To begin with we had to bring in a box or something of the sort to act as our camera structure, I bought in a shoe box as I thought it was be easier to make into a pinhole camera. I then had to decide where to place my camera lens and I decided to place it on the back of the shoe box so the lid wouldn’t get in the way. After deciding where we wanted the lens to be we had to cut out a small square roughly about 1 inch by 1 inch, then we painted the inside of the box with black matt poster paint to ensure no light reflects inside the box, after letting the paint dry we taped a piece of foil over the the hole we had just cut out with gaffer tape, after taping that down to the box we made  a pinhole in the foil and that is now the full camera lens. Then we made a bigger square out of cardboard to create what would act as a shutter and taped it down over the lens but not too tightly so that we could take it off when ready to take a photo and put it back on when we had left it exposed for long enough.

So after all of the creating of the box which is now a camera and no longer a box, we had to figure out the f-stop so that we knew how long to leave it exposed, we used the distance between pinhole and back of box divided by diameter of pinhole as the formula to work out the f-stop. The pinhole was roughly 0.8mm and the width of my box was 197mm so that means I had to leave it exposed for 2 minutes when outside but 10 minutes when inside.

So finally after making the camera and figuring out the f-stop it was time to go into the dark room and attach the photographic paper into the box, we had to go into the dark room because photographic paper is light sensitive, we had to put two small pieces of doubled sided tape inside the box on the opposite side of the lens so that we could stick our paper to it, after everything being in place we had to close the box and completely tape it up so that absolutely no light would enter it and ruin the photographic paper, after ensuring every single hole was taped up we were ready to take our photos.

I then took my camera outside and took off the shutter being careful to tape it back so that it wouldn’t close halfway through exposure and left it pointing at something for 2 minutes. After that I securely put my shutter back on and returned to the dark room, untaped my box and put the piece of photographic paper into three trays which were filled with developing chemicals, then into the fourth one which was just water to wash all of the developing chemicals off. Then I had to decide if I was happy with the result or not, if I was then I dried it off in the drying machine and kept it, if I wasn’t happy with the result I could either decide to keep it as a practice photo or just put it straight into the bin. After all of this, it was time to take another picture, so we start with this whole process again, beginning at the point of placing a piece of photographic paper into the box.



Scanning:
Once all of my photos were developed we had to scan them into the computer and to do this we had to:



Photocopier:
Step 1: Log onto the photocopier by swiping my card
Step 2: Click on send
Step 3: Click send to myself
Step 4: Select file format of JPEG

Step 5: Click the green button on the dashboard
Step 6: Check my email

Step 7: Use Photoshop to invert my images.


Flatbed Scanner:
Step 1: Log on to computer

Step 2: Open Photoshop

Step 3: Click on import from the drop down bar
Step 4: Choose scanner
Step 5: A preview screen appears
Step 6: Select the image I want
Step 7: Click Scan

Step 8: Save picture onto my USB key, in JPEG format. 


Photoshop:
Once all of our photos were all uploaded onto the computer, we had to open them onto photoshop to try out different editing styles but to mainly crop and invert the photos, some of the photos were upside down so we had to rotate them, then we cropped them, then we inverted them because they were in negative. Once our photos were all edited we had to save them in JPEG format and save them to our USB key to that we can access our photos from any computer.

Evaluation
In this evaluation I will be discussing what I've learnt from making and using a pinhole camera, why I found it interesting in some parts but not in others and what problems I faced and what I did to solve them.

There are lots of different genres of photography including, commercial, fashion, nature, paparazzi, still life and wedding, but these are only a few. Pinhole photography has played a massive part in film and photography today as it was the first type of photography around dating back to 4th Century BC.

From making a pinhole camera I've learnt that it's the basics of photography and that without it we wouldn't have been able to create digital camera's we have today, even on our mobile phones, which are a lot more efficient and faster to use, and can be used almost instantly to send to friends or upload to the internet. I really enjoyed experiencing pinhole photography as I was really amazed at the fact that light going through a pinhole can make a picture. I loved the whole process of creating the camera, down to waiting around while we waited for the required exposure times, I liked using the dark room and all of the chemicals because it was interesting to see the photo develop infront of my eyes. The only part I didn't like was the fact that I had to keep taping up and untaping my box inside the dark room and it was very difficult and frustrating to keep doing because at one point I had just sat down to take a photo and realised I'd left a big hole untaped on the side of the box and completely overexposed the photographic paper and had to go back and redo it all over again. I took 5 photos, 2 became overexposed, 1 became underexposed and the other 2 were good but there was only 1 photo I was genuinly pleased with as it actually looked like it was taken with a digital camera. Two of them became overexposed because the first darkroom I used the light was too bright in there, the second one that became overexposed was the one I didn't tape up properly, the 1 that became underexposed I was a bit confused about because I still left it for 2 minutes when outside like I did with the other outside photo and that one came out fine. The two that did come out successfully I was very pleased about and can be seen on the right hand side of this blog post.

In conclusion I was very happy with this project and would happily do it again, I enjoyed practically every part of it and was fascinated by the whole concept of it. I don't believe I came over too many problems and the ones I did I come across I sorted out straight away without too much stress. I learnt from the mistakes I made and if I were to do this project again I would consider the exposure times more carefully to make sure I got the best photos. All in all I am happy with my final photos and would happily do this again.