Let the games begin

                                          Preaching interviewing techniques

I almost want to jump up and down with excitement.  I’ve been doing radio now for the past two and a half years and things can start getting familiar. There’s nothing like the opportunity to share something you’re passionate about with people who are eager to learn, to rekindle the joy of doing something you love. Am excited to relay everything I know about radio to the young Upstarters. Am equally keen to hear what ideas have been brewing in their minds since they heard they’d be part of this project because their input, in terms of content, is the most important element in producing three hours of infotainment for Yung Amplified.
This past weekend we held a workshop to induct the Upstarters into radio production. The workshop served as an introduction to the very basics of radio. We met the group of six Upstarters, two boys and 4 girls, who’ll be working with us in the weeks to come. They come from various high schools around Grahamstown and are mainly in grade nine or ten. Before the workshop started we got into pairs for an icebreaker. My partner was Ziphozihle Goje a grade nine learner from Marry Waters High School. For the icebreaker we had to interview our partner and do a role-play in front of everyone as either a bored, loud, extremely excited or sad radio presenter. I unfortunately had to play a bored radio Dj after finding out the most interesting thing about Ziphozihle. She told me that when she grows up, she wants to be a forensic scientist. I thought to myself, wow, I didn’t even know what that was when I was her age. I have a liking for people who are almost unreserved in their dreaming that fearlessness is all you need to make you dreams a reality. I certainly hope she will be as bold in her contributions to the show.

After the rounds of role playing we wanted to find out what is it about radio that interests the learners. They took turns telling us why they loved radio, majority of the response were music orientated, a couple mentioned their favourite radio DJs and one learner, Roche from PJ Olivier High School said he is really interested in the technical side of radio production. This is an interest we can exploit later on as we produce Yung Amplified, every team needs to have that one person who will take care of the technical intricacies of radio production.

The workshop got underway, we focused firstly on scripting for radio, impressing on the group that writing for the eye is different to writing for the ear. After that session I took the group through interviewing techniques. I’ve conducted several interviews over my short career, as part of my presentation I shared some lessons from my experience. My colleague Mike Moodie taught the group how to use the recorders. The learners were paired and shared a recorder, looking, touching, inserting and pressing at Mike’s instruction. At this point I thought I would make myself useful and walk around helping out where I could. As anything technical goes, practice makes perfect, in the weeks to follow we’ll be re-visiting the recorder session. We then proceeded to take the group to the studio,  and each of them got a chance to be interviewed and recorded so that they could hear if their radio voices lived up to their expectations.

                                         Learning how to use a recorder

 The group responded well to the presentations and activities of the workshop. No one was forthcoming with questions, I don’t know if this is a reflection of a well put together workshop or maybe that they haven’t warmed up to us yet. We’ll be meeting again during the week on Wednesday afternoon and the Upstarters promised that they’d all be joining us. The only glitch with this arrangement is that two girls from Marry Waters finish school at 3pm and we plan on meeting at 2pm. It’s vital that we have all the learners at these workshops as we are still in the early stages of our project. The team will now have to find a way around this anomaly before things start getting serious, for now the girls have agreed to come in for the last hour of the mid-week workshops.

We have been quite ambitious as the group of fourth year students working with this group, regarding how we would see this partnership working in terms of facilitation and production. From our side a quick jump into things was a method we were going to use to facilitate this project. The plan was to give the learners the skills necessary for them to be independent radio show contributors at a fast pace.

 One of the reasons why we chose this route is a concern raised by the Upstart representative about last year’s partnership. According to Shireen Badat, last year’s team took quite a while to get the learners to produce something that would be broadcast for a three hour show.

 After a presentation to our lecturer about our plans for this partnership and where we see the show going in the next few weeks, we need to go back to the drawing board.  We need to come up with ideas where we will sort of hold the learners hands through this process and slowly allow them to be independent. A kind of strategy that will see the learners get comfortable with being story tellers be it live on air in the studio or using the recorder.

 The one thing that leaves me uneasy about this way of doing things is time, what a precious entity. This strategy calls for more investment of time to this project, more than what we are already putting in. For Yung Amplified this means, things will be moving at a slower pace with regards to show casing the cool ideas we’d conceptualised for the programme.

I have a million and thousand things to do within 24hours as it is. Am panicking almost hyper ventilating at the thought of what this means for time I have on my other projects. I have a documentary in the pipeline and there’s plenty of leg work to be done with that. The thing about journalism is that people aren’t just waiting for you to interview them, you need find a way to squeeze yourself into their life without being a nuisance.  I foresee the next few weeks being about juggling, balancing and meeting my commitments.  My life as a micro manager of all the fine details of this degree starts now. I am a big girl, I need to take a time out, do a short woosah and then put on my superwoman vest and make things happen before the deadline.