This week, one of our main concerns related to the logistics of preparing the team, given various difficulties that we are experiencing with ensuring their presence at workshops. We had planned to split this week’s workshop into two parts; one two hour session on Friday and another on Saturday. On Friday we learnt, however, that Aviwe and Ncubecko can only make the Saturday sessions, which is problematic as they need to catch up on everything they missed the previous day. As the Friday is the best time for the majority of the group, we can’t really do anything about this. We were, nevertheless, able to come up with strategies for working around this problem. At the beginning of Saturday’s session, for instance, Refilwe worked with Aviwe and Ncubecko, taking them through what they missed. In the meantime, I started working with Aphiwe, Aviwe, Reggie and Xabiso on the next stage of their learning. This worked well, since Refilwe was able to get through the Friday material a lot more quickly working with just two participants. We will most likely take turns doing this. By the end of the session on Saturday all the participants were on par. Because Aphiwe and Nckubecko will again not be present this next Friday, we have asked them to prepare some material and send this along to the session. This concerns questions that they need to answer with regards to editorial guideline for the show.
A key focus of this week’s workshop was the talk show scripts that the Upstart team had to prepare for Friday’s session. To our relief, they arrived with all of this homework completed. We were, therefore, able to work with these drafts, showing the team how they could be turned into good audio. As part of this process, we played examples of good radio talks, and explained the techniques of how to read out the scripts for radio. We then all went into the studio, and each Upstarter took a turn at presenting their script. We played these recordings back, and gave the participants a chance to critique each other. This gave them a chance to think creatively and constructively about their approach to the next recording cycle. I also showed them how to work the volume levels, with Xabiso appearing to be the keenest on this, as he made sure the levels were right for every recording. For their homework, we asked them to read over their scripts again and again until they were happy with how they sounded.
A second focus was the technical skills development of the team. I was able to show my four Upstarters for the day, how to edit their talks on Adobe Audition, where Reggie did an extremely good job. The others struggled, but there will be time in our other workshops to get to grips with these matters. We were also able to show the whole group how to use the recorders, as their next assignment is to go and interview a family member with questions that we set for them (although we also said to them that using these questions was optional). We showed the group basic interviewing techniques and played a couple of good examples from the work that our own second year students had recently completed.
Having the sessions on Friday as well as Saturday allows plenty of time to go over all of the necessary skills in preparation for next term. Hopefully by the this Friday and Saturday’s workshops, the group will each have recorded these interview, and we can take it from there for the next step.
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