Making The invisible Visible

Making The Invisible Visible

Sections>

Making the invisible visible 010

By Alexander Towellwww.alexandertowell.gdnm.org

1 Client Synopsis2 Show Description / Presenter3 Audience4 Mood Boards5 Script For Audio 6 Font Analysis7 Story Boards9 Final Footage Captions

BBC Radio 4 is a domestic radio sta-tion in the UNited Kingdom that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programs, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. Radio 4 broadcasts throughout the United Kingdom, it can also be received in the north of France and Northern Europe as well. It is also available through Sky and Virgin Media, and on the internet. A sister station, now BBC Radio 4 Extra, broadcasts archive Radio 4 programs and some extend-ed content. Radio 4 is the second most popular British domestic Radio Station according to The Wikipedia source, just after radio 2, and was named ‘Uk’s Radio Station of the Year” at the 2003, 2004, and 2008 Sony Radio Academy Awards. The station Cost a whop-ping 71.4 million pound in 2005/2006, it is the BBOCs most expensive nation radio network. Its situation and place in the listen-ers mind is unlikely to change as channel 4’s plans to launch a similar speech based program failed in 2008 in an event caused by the recession. The head honcho of Radio 4 is Gwyneth Williams a long time employee of the chan-nel having joined in 1976. Music and sports are the only subjects that the station does not cover as the BBC have other stations that hold those subjects more closely. The occasional concert/ documentaries cover-ing popular music are featured, although these are fairly recent developments. It is said that in the event of a war or attack and stations such as radio 1 and radio2 would have to close out of fear or lack of funding or equipment. That the radio 4 broadcast would be the last line of communication

between the public and the government.

/History The BBC home service was the pre-decessor of radio 4 that was used during the second world war to give England’s public war updates. BBC Home Service began broadcasting in 1939 and ran all the way up until september 30,1967 when it changed over to the brand of Radio 4. This transfer was a response to the challenge of offshore radio. It moved to long wave in 1978, taking over a 200 kHz frequency previously held by the now more current Radio 2, and later moved to 198 kHz as a result of internation-al agreements aimed at avoiding interfer-

ence. As you can see by that last sentence radio four has spanned a long period of time a lot the same way modern telephone providers have been keeping up with the success of services such as broadband radio 4 were forced to keep up with the advance-ments of radio technology. Between the 17th of january 1991 and the second of March 1991, the FM broadcasts were replaced by a continuous new service devoted to the Gulf War, nicknamed “Scud FM”. Radio 4 is part of a navy command prompt called the system of Last Resort Letters. Which states in the events of sus-pected catastrophic attacks on the United Kingdom, submarine commanders are to check the radio signals of the Radio 4 chan-

/BBC RADIO 4

Above: Radio 4 Six O’clockNews Program. A daily doseof the news of the day, presented by a large cast ofpresenters, covering all mannerof news depending on the current climate.

Top: A photograph of a session of Gardeners’ Question Time, a panel basedshow where members of thepublic are invited to ask question about theregardens.

Money Box is a weekly personal finance radio program on BBC Radio 4. Money Box began in October 1977 with Louise Botting as a presenter. It was the first personal Finance radio program, and even today in the Uk, it is one of the very few. The program You and Yours also on Radio 4, also includes much about per-sonal finance, fraud and scams. The new Money box Live where presenters take to a live radio began in 1990 and is still running today. The Show is Run Every Saturday Morning at midday answering listeners calls and emails on issues concerning listeners finance issues and queries about the state of modern economics. It gets repeated on Sunday evenings just after 2100 local time.

/Money Box

/Presenter Paul Lewis has been a freelance finan-cial journalist since 1987. He writes extensively on money and is a regular guest on BBC Break-fast and News 24. He was a reporter on Money Box in the 1990s and, after a three year stint on Radio 5 Live, returned to as presenter in September 2000.He won the Headline Money Broadcast Jour-nalist of the Year award in 2004 and 2005 and the global business consultancy, Aon named him Consumer Pension and Investment Jour-nalist of the Year in 2006.Paul says “Money Box is there to make a dif-ference to the finances of its listeners. It is rightly regarded as a trusted source of financial information and news. It is a marvellous show to work on. And a wonderful team of people to work with.”He writes five pages of money news and advice every month in Saga Magazine and a weekly column on its website and has con-tributed frequently to The Daily Telegraph and Reader’s Digest. His books include Money Magic, Live Long and Prosper, Pay Less Tax, Beat the Banks, and Making Your Money Work.He is an authority on the Victorian writer Wilkie Collins and one of the editors of the first com-plete edition of his letters, published in 2005. He runs his own website, which has almost nothing about money on it at all.

020 Making the invisible visible Making the invisible visible 030

Elisabeth MahoneyThe Guardian, Thursday 1 April 2010

Money Box Live (Radio 4), like Any Questions, brings out a certain sort of Radio 4 listener. Otherworldly might be a kindly way of putting it. “I’m going to Chile on Sunday,” one woman’s query began on yesterday’s phone-in on fiscal matters relating to holidays. “Do they accept our credit cards in their restaurants?” It wasn’t the question as such, but the fact that she was leaving it until Wednesday afternoon, on the chance of getting through on a busy radio show, to find out.

The questions were the sort of thing most of us blithely Google. But host Vincent Duggleby is there for everyone else with his team of trusty experts. They said lots of common-sense things (“make sure you’ve invested in a good-quality money belt”); so many, in fact, that the programme – as always – ran out of time.

The moment where Duggleby realises that time is cruelly against him is as marked as the turn in a Shakespearean sonnet. His easy charm evaporates. “Can you give us your ques-tion rather than your life history?” he snaps at a man who has just begun a rant about insurance premiums for the over-65s. “Can we cut to the chase?” The chase is cut to, everyone is rushed, and Duggleby sounds suddenly exhausted by the end. It’s just how it always is.

Elisabeth MahoneyThe Guardian

nel and if the signal is dead it is a verifica-tion of an annihilation of the homeland.

Client Synopsis____________________ __________Show Description/ Presenter

/AUDIENCE Whilst beginning to understand the audience for radio 4 more specifically the show money box i began to try and find facts and figures, unfortunately i cant find that much solid facts and figures on the listening stats on radio 4 let alone Money Box. Within the article on the latest RA-JAR (RAJAR is a corporation that collects and distributes figures on listening figures across the UK.) the report states “The headlines are that 9.84 million of you listen to at least 15 minutes a week - and you listen on average to 12 hours 34 minutes - which is up from the previous lot of RAJARs - and more than any other station. Radio 4’s share of the total radio market is 12.5% - which is also up. And we have slightly more listeners than at this stage last year. So all in all we’re happy enough.”

As you can tell these don’t collect much data on the type of person or the age of the listener. What i can do for purposes of this brief is begin to describe what i envision the listener of this radio station to be and they’re values, i hope to do this by analyzing the shows that the radio station broadcasts as well as the times and the way their life’s might line up with the show in question. Hopefully making a convinc-ing enough approximation for you my viewer to be convinced by my conclusions, enough to be swayed to defining my solu-tion as legitimate.

We know for definite that the radio 4 programming has listeners, around about 9.84 million people that tune in for an average of 15 minutes per week. So money box is on for One hour every saturday, from the figure given one hour of the week the average listening figure to radio 4 is about 58571 listeners tune in for an average of 15 minutes per hour. This gives money box an average listening of around about that figure. Now i know that is a bit aver-age and not very consistent but what we can understand from this is clear it is being listened to. Radio 4 does a variety of shows from as a listed previously in my client syn-opsis. It strays away from young popular culture, we can there by define that people under the age of 18 generally do not listen to radio 4 as a obvious choice. I will begin to narrow down my logic and state a con-clusion of these figures in the following paragraph .

Radio 4, has fourteen categories of shows, Arts, Culture & the Media, Comedy, Discussion, Documentaries, Drama, His-tory, Money, Music, News, Politics, Read-ings, Religion & Ethics, Science and Nature and Weather. Radio 2 the most popular

radio station equates to have 13 million two hundred and seventy one thousand people tuning in each week according to the BBC press office. Radio 2 boasts show listings of Music, Comedy, Documenta-ries, and Events. Notice radio 2 misses out politics, reading, arts culture and the me-dia, Discussion, Drama, History, Money, Religion and ethics. According to Wikipedia BBC radio 4 is the most expensive radio broadcast the BBC broadcasts. But its viewing figures are not. Notice i have noth-ing specific to show you to enforce these predictions just giving you a feel for the facts i have found. Each show description comes with a generalized stereotype that i will present to you. Arts and culture, typically women above the age of 28 and men above the age of 35 who enjoy light banter about the classical arts such as opera, classical music and film reviews of the london cinema col-lections. Comedy by a host of comedians most notably at the moment David Mitch-ell, the peep show actor who’s on stage character seems to draw an association with war loving, fact finders. These shows look like they appeal to a middle thirties type who’s angst about their pensions and tax bracket seems to find it way into every part of they’re conversation even the laughter they rarely find. The discussion section hosts a variety of shows “Garden-ers’ Question Time at the forefront, my prediction is that this resonates with a class of retirement based woman and men who spend their sunny days potting in the back garden. As well as a professor of chemistry playing the music he wants to get lost on a desert island with. It gives me the feel-ing again of a 40 odd audience hoping to find that glimpse of they’re youth without forgetting that they have jobs to wake up to in the morning. If i were to keep going i think you would find that the same result persists. Radio 4 is looking for people who want to engage in relevant and above all educated banter. Money box a show geared towards the economy, and personal finance in the show, this weeks show’s description is de-scribed with “Paul Lewis looks back to see why this type of final salary pension has become unpopular with employers. Blame is often laid at the feet of Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor introduced a tax affect-ing pension fund investments. But was that really a factor? The program explores less well-known rules and changes that were really to blame for killing the final salary pension.(bbc.com/radio4) Here you get an idea of the audience by the subject pension. From my knowledge a pension is worked towards once a person reaches his final destination for employer, and stays with them building one or two up slowly. Most people come to this point in there

lives in they’re early 30’s or late 20’s even as late as there early 40’s. Now i’m not an expert on pensions but it has been a subject of a gross negligence within the private sec-tor over the past few years with unemploy-ment and pensions coming under the spot-light. This show is obviously more widely received than lets say a long discussion of arab law. After all the subject of money can resonate with everyone. Thats why out of all the radio 4 listings i feel as though this is one of the most widely received. It’s timing also leeds one to think that it may be more widely listened to saturday morning at mid-day. With the majority of people at work during the week and saturdays mornings being a time for the kitchen or just chilling why get some input on your finance. After all this thought i have summed

it up to a simple stat, Money Box and Money Box the saturday morning broad-cast, is a show geared towards the career driven man, not woman because gen-erally in the relationship dynamic the male generally keeps informed about these situations. But its late 20’s all the way to late 50’s. And with most people in they’re 30’s who are geared this way looking to the papers and online con-tent as well as financial tv shows such as bloomberg. The primary audience is coming towards the end of they’re ca-reer late 40’s to late 50’s. That is my final synopsis on the age group of the show money box.


Audience_________________________ ________________________Audience

Script .Presenter

Now on Radio 4 its time for Money Box,heres paul lewis

.Paul Lewis Hello in todays program the banks refuse to process claims for mis selling

payment protection insurance. Despite loosing a crucial case in the high

court this week. A barrister tells us they’re wrong.


When approaching the new brief i be-gan by taking a really close look at Radio 4’s brand. More specifically their website and the mood it conveyed. The Radio 4 website is a subtle and pleasant composition that displays some content that lets say doesn’t exactly jump of the page. Radio 4 breaks up their large library of shows into a list of categories The Arts, Comedy, Discussion, Documenta-ries, Drama, History, Money, News, Politics, Readings, Religion and Science. As you can see its a rather extensive collection of media. The most popular BBC radio channel only has a fraction of this, most BBC radio coverage are of the musical genre with subtle subjects and conversation levels.This subject list really sets the level for the channel in my mind. The colors, there’s a simple a blue gradient in there with subtle hints of a rather assuming green

highlight and that iconic pink color that signifies the bbc iplayer. A list of the most commonly listened shows are placed strait onto the front page. I will list you these shows and give a short description just so you can get an idea of the kind of listening radio 4 caters to. The Archers is the world’s longest running radio soap drama. With more that 16,000 episodes, and since the axing of the American soap opera Guiding Light in September 2009, the world’s longest running soap opera in any format. In short it is a soap opera that takes place in the fictional village of Ambridge in the county of Boretshire, in a similar type setting to the West Middle lands. Front Row Is a show that is de-scribed as a “live magazine programme on the world of arts, literature, film, media and music.” The shows usually include a mix of interviews, reviews, previews, dis-cussions, reports and columns. The pro-gramme’s presenters include Mark Law-son, John Wilson and Kirsty Lang. Former presenters include Francine Stock. In Our Time is a discussion series exploring the history of ideas... Running since October 1998 by Melvyn Bragg. It is one of the BBC’s most successful discus-sion programs, it runs every summer for approximately 6 weeks between July and September. Each program covers a spe-cific historical, philosophical, religious, artistic or scientific topic. Today sometimes known as the today program is the bbc’s longest running early morning news/ current affairs shows. It is also one of the BBC’s most popular shows across all the networks. It con-sists of news bulletins, serious and often confrontational political interviews and in-depth reports, and an often attacked religious slots of three minutes it refuses to drop. Woman’s Hour, in it’s current format is presented as follow’s, the first 45 min-utes or so consist of news, current affairs,

and debates on anything from health to education to anything related. The show’s topics and discourse is geared towards woman but most of the topics are univer-sal or unisex. Research recently conducted according to wikipedia says that approxi-mately one third of the program’s listeners are male. You and Your’s is a British radio con-sumer affairs program, it began broadcast-ing in Nineteen Seventy. Its general orienta-tion is that of a consumer affairs program. It centers its topic debates around the ideol-ogy of capitalized affairs and consumer society. All debates like the recent hikes in VAT and changing of the Starbucks logo are covered here in this show. Desert Island Disks, is a long-running BBC Four Radio program first broadcast during the days of the second world war in 1942. Guests of the show are invited to imagine them selves cast away on a desert island, and to choose eight pieces of music, originally vinyl records, to take with them and explain how they relate to all the music they list. It is one of the very few shows on radio 4 that play any sort of music from the past 50 years that is not classical or opera related. As you can see a large amount of these shows are intellectual they lean on education and fact, they are less con-cerned with the modern psyche and stay in the realm of intellect and are of the mind broadening nature. It doesn’t lean on popu-lar culture for rating’s. Which i think shows strong character and determination. One important thing to note about radio 4 is that if the nation were to come under at-tack during a time of war our nuclear sub’s would check in to the airwaves to radio 4 and if no signal was found they would see that as reason enough to deploy their of-fensive strategy. Over all radio 4 is a brand that leans on the full knowledge and un-derstanding of what a lucky era we find our selves in, it bathed it’s listeners from the war as television took over in the education

and intelligent conversation that they may not find themselves in during their day to day lives. My reasons for choosing the show money box is partly due to a missed op-portunity as well as a highlight of a sub-ject area that is only covered from time to time on the channel, economics. In the past three or so years the world has been plunged into recession, with unemploy-ment rising and banks falling over the general public were left with a great deal of questions. Now Money Box a show that regularly deals with these issues is a place were people would be able to find their fix on these issues. I am certain that the subject on their agenda were orientated about the recession but i did not find out about this show until this project was set. Unable to find solid viewing figures for any shows or radio 4 in general i am unable to say what the effect of the recession was on the show Money Box only in my opinion it should of become a centre piece of radio 4’s roster advertised as well as possible. In the script i have chosen you can see that the subject on display is the banks loosing a crucial case in the high court. Now it leaves the viewer with a lot of ques-tions this is the intention. By leaving the viewer of my kinetic type brief with all these questions hopefully it will bring the viewer into the listening booth for the next show. The level of language used may also leave some people a bit bemused. Now “payment protection insurance” is quite a mouth full and personally i cant make out exactly what they are talking about but this is all part of radio 4’s intended ploy i feel. To bring their viewers to an intelli-gent discourse and leaving listeners more educated than they started. The speech i picked also makes it clear what radio 4 supplies it is not being dressed up to be more interesting that it seems only stating truth and fact and a discussion surround-ing these facts and figures.

Oftentimes, when you want to use a web font on your website or application, you know in advance which letters you’ll need. This often occurs when you’re using a web font in a logo or heading.

That’s why we’re introducing a new beta feature to the Google Web Fonts API. The feature is called “text=”, and allows you to specify which characters you’ll need. To use it, simply add “text=” to your Google Web Fonts API requests. Here’s an example:

<link href=’http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Special+Elite&text=MyText’ rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’>

Google will optimize the web font served based on the contents of this param-eter. For example, if you only require a few letters for a logo, such as “MyText”, Google will

return a font file that is optimized to those letters. Typically, that means Google will return a font file that contains only the letters you requested. Other times, Google might return a more complete font file, especially when that will lead to better caching perfor-mance.

The “text=” parameter has the poten-tial to dramatically cut down web font file size. In some preliminary studies, web fonts can be cut from 35k down to just 5k (or even smaller), if only short strings of text are re-quired. If you have a longer string, you can shorten the request by removing duplicate characters, as the order of characters in the string doesn’t matter.

The effect of this feature is even more pronounced on mobile devices, where con-nection speeds are limited. Using the text=

parameter, you can ensure your users will have a great, quick loading experience.

We’re happy to say that the feature also works for international fonts. There’s no need to also specify the subset= parameter, as text= has access to all the characters in the original font. To access Unicode characters, use standard technique of url-encoding the UTF-8 representation of the string. Therefore, ¡Hola! is represented as: text=%c2%a1Hola! .

Go ahead and give this feature a try, and let us know what you think by emailing [email protected]. Enjoy!

As i began to narrow down exactly what message i was conveying with the ki-netic type brief one area i felt was paramount was type. Now i am no typography expert but a cool new online beta development called google web fonts caught my eye. With the advent of HTML5 people are really beginning to delve into creating a cleaner more designed web, font and the new css3 are playing a lead role in this development. Now the web is a crazy place with lots of different styles and applications being found all over the place. I believe that a service like this could supply a small constraint on designers a constraint that we/ they need. By giving the general web designer these limitations with font it creates a universal legibility factor that is needed to cre-ate cross Atlantic projects and compatibility. These fonts have been certified and signed of by the web power house google.

Above you see a small selection of fonts i picked from the google font api as a library for my project. Cabin regular, Cabin Bold, Damion, and Raleway. They’re a dysfunctional group wait no they are not, cabin is becoming very popular i have begun to see it all over the place its clean its refined and perfect for occasional bold high-lights. Daminon, its rare that you find a cursive font that actually works but here you have it, its small but it actually flows as if it floated of a pirates hand. Raleway its so slender it hurts, your eye drools over its curves that look like a jazz note on a cold new york night. Now thats just my description. I believe that for my project Raleway can give the voice of Paul Lewis the edge that ra-dio is missing. And that Cabin can give the strait forward cut that radio 4 needs to take its brand in to the future.


Story Board Final Revision www.alexandertowell.gdnm.org

Whilst planning for my kinetic type piece it was important to convey the right visual aesthetic. I began by planning out the script on a series of slides. My initial ideas was to have the text popping up in time with the audio. At this point my vision is showing a pretty normal Kinetic type composition. I have toyed around with the placement and hinted at a few possible camera angles and movements within the planned story board as well pictured above. The font’s were also planned i settled on Cabin and Raleway as the final fonts for the comp. Now as you can see the final and the plan look very different this is due to a few factors i will explain here. The colors when rendered looked a bit drab and dull so i livened it up with a strong royal blue to make the white text pop. The original planning had camera movements the final doesn’t, it has a fixed camera angle in the centre. I found that while in after effects the

camera movements and background move-ments detracted from the meaning on the piece, mainly due to the speed of the speech the viewer would not have time to digest all the type. When i kept the movement simple and legible i felt the image was conveyed with much more sophistication and prestige. The final animation is the way i believe encom-passes radio 4 as a brand as well as an infor-mation broadcaster. The logo pictured above in the original plan-ning is pictured three times, once in the initial mention of radio4 a second during the time sequence and a third at the end of the passage. No win the final i use the icon as a different design vice completely. It is used as a emblem of the footage in the final. If you watch the final animation found on my blog you can see the logo in the bottom right hand corner growing to a size and then fixating in its final location during the speech then at

the end swelling up and then disappearing. It takes on an almost animated character in this way, featuring as an interactive button during the footage. I had an idea that this button could feature within the bbc iplayer as an interactive button for triggering sub titles or scripts to assist in disabled viewing of the iplayer. You can find an example of this at the website www.thinkvitamin.com all their vid-eos feature subtitles and have a button on the top right that triggers such features.Over all i believe my final animation is much better suited to the content i am trying to convey, in the original planning i got a lot of the basic concepts of the footage out the way but did not equate for the complexity and timing one would have to navigate the cam-era angles and type movement i thought pos-sible. The final shows a delicate and under-stood style to a short passage that conveys a large amount of information.

Making The invisible Visible

Documents

Transcript of Making The invisible Visible