Radio trailers are short and simple and millions of people hear them in their everyday of their lives. Whether that be on the radio in the car, in a shop or even on TV. They are the easiest way for a business to quickly get word out abut upcoming films, TV programs and events.
Before we even started looking into producing a script and recording our own radio trailer, it was important to listen to and analyse many different ones that were already out there.
This Doctor Who radio trailer was one of the first we listened too.
Features included:
- Channel
- Extracts from documentary- brief summary of story line
- Fast paced
- Sound effects
- 40 seconds- short and straight to the point
This other, slightly different, radio trailer for Doctor Who included:
- Background music
- Channel
- Extract from program- high points of the story line
- Sound effects
- 34 seconds- short and snappy
This radio AD for Coca-Cola included the following:
- Conversation style
- Sound effects
- Music
- Iconic 'bottle opening' sound
- Brand name at the end
- 30 seconds long
Along with watching ones we could find online, we also took time to listen to the radio more often, to hear different radio ads. Doing this allowed us to see how long it took for us to zone out of listening to an ad, what sounded good/realistic and perhaps, what didn't work so well.
Overall, from our primary and secondary research we concluded that our radio trailer for 'A Close
Call for Britain' needed to be no longer than 40 seconds; include the channel/time of viewing and include snippets of our documentary in order to generate interest. We also knew that adding some sort of music and sound effects in the backgrounds would be necessary if we wanted people to listen and not just hear our ad as simply background noise.
Planning:
Once we knew how long we roughly needed to make our radio trailer and what it should include, we got to writing a basic script for our documentary. The script we decided on is below.
We knew that the radio trailer couldn't be too long, as it would result in people becoming bored. We recorded it ourselves many times and got others to read it as well, in order for us to estimate the timings. On average between lots of different speakers, the radio trailer lasted for around 40 seconds. We understood that we needed a bit of leeway it was likely that adding music/sound effects would add some more time onto it.
Filming:
Once we had decided on the script, we had to choose how we were going to film it and who was going to speak.
The majority of radio trailers we had listened too for research has male speakers. This is a convention we chose to use and we got a middle aged male to record our trailer. WE both agreed that this made it sound the most professional and realistic, and we were able to manipulate the pitch of his voice.
We recorded the radio trailer on Audacity, as it allows you to add multiple layers of tracks and use many effects in order to get the end product you want. We used the same music in our radio trailer as we did in the main documentary, as we thought this added consistency to our work and we went on to use the beats in the music in certain places to emphasise certain things that were said. For example, when the title of the documentary was read out, we picked a part of the music that was more up tempo, in order to engage the listeners more.
Below is the link to our finished radio trailer:
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