1. In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

I believe that our product, the radio drama Possession, uses a wide range of forms and conventions within its works. We tried our best through strict analysis of other radio dramas that are renowned as some of the best radio dramas ever made, to include as many conventions as possible, such as editing on the voices to give impressions of different situations, and adding sound effects in appropriate places to make the story and the radio drama more appealing to the average person’s ears. The one thing that we did find difficult however, is to consistently create a convincing level of acting, to give the listeners a true impression of our characters. Although we did all try our best, there were moments in the clip where the voices were lacking elements that would make it seem like an actual person talking rather than a newsreader speaking.

For example, the member of our group who played Teena, Catt Orsborn, was very quiet in comparison to the rest of the voices, whereas I was on the other end of the scale and was somewhat too loud when it came to recording my lines, as I have a rather powerful voice, and Catt’s voice is timid and quiet.

I don’t actually think that we challenged much with this work, as we adhered to the general consensus of forms and conventions of regular radio dramas so we made sure that we got it right to begin with. The only thing I think we challenged forms and conventions with, was the general plot of the whole radio drama, as we tried to make something original and from what we noticed during the analysing stages of radio drama, we found there weren’t many horror genre radio dramas, other than The Twilight Zone, and we used this as our main reference for ideas about conventions of horror dramas.

I think we did a valiant job of trying to create a believable radio drama that people could expect to find on legitimate public radio, aired for all the general public to hear on a night time basis. I think the quality of the recording suffered a little when it came to how we sorted out the levelling of the vocals and sound effects, and I don’t think we recorded the vocal lines as well as we could have, but on the whole, I think we had a good attempt at creating a convincing radio drama.