FMP

I am happy with my final product as it fit the stimulus of binary opposites as it was inspired by the binary opposite of freedom and oppression. I am also happy with my final product as I have successfully fulfilled every convention of a podcast. Before making my podcast, I researched the conventions of a successful podcast and popular podcast platforms. According to my research, a good podcast should: be free, digital, 10-60 minutes long, have diegetic and non-diegetic sounds, background music, speech and an intro, outro and a jingle.
To make my podcast free and digital, I researched how to upload my podcast to streaming services and made sure that my podcast was uploaded to as many platforms as possible for free to let the audience have a choice between a wide range of platforms. I succeeded in this as all of my listeners had the podcast on a platform that they preferred to use.
My podcast also fits the conventions of being 10-60 minutes long and having background music, an intro and outro and transitions between segments. I fulfilled this convention by searching for royalty-free music that I could use that also fit the genre and feel of the podcast and by using free transition music that was available through the Anchor app, which I used to host my podcast and its RSS feed.
For this project, I successfully created a brand identity for myself and was consistent with it from creating the logo to creating the official website. I also feel that hit the goals that I had set for myself after my textual investigation; I wanted to continue to explore race in the media and how the media is changing which I successfully did in my podcast as I discussed how black women are portrayed in media as part of discussing our experiences in the UK.My product fits within the cultural, historical and political context of my area of study as it discusses the history of the treatment of black women, how it has changed over time and how it is continuing to change. The website I made to accompany my website also had extra information and further reading recommendations about intersectionality so audiences could do further research to help them understand the topics of the podcast. A lot of positive feedback I received from my podcast was about its societal relevance. Many found it educational and most if not all listeners felt that had learnt something new, useful and relevant to today’s society and felt that they better understand the experience that black women face in the UK.
The positive feedback I received from my audience about the relevance, relatability and educational value of my podcast shows that it was successful in including the uses and gratifications of information and personal identity. My podcast and website offered to teach listeners about intersectionality and how it affects black women in the UK specifically so they have a better understanding of their experiences. Most of my audience found the website easy to navigate and useful for finding further reading and platforms where they can listen. They also found it easy to share as it had all the links to the platform, they did not have to do much to make it accessible for their friends. My product was also successful in being relatable for some of my listeners which meant it helped them learn more about themselves and how they are similar to the guests in the podcast. This means that I was successful in my unique selling point as young black women felt seen and found the podcast interesting.

For this project, I think I vastly improved my presentation skills. In my ‘You, Me, Them and Us’ pitch, I wasn’t that prepared nor was I confident in my final product so my pitch wasn't the best it could be. I learnt from this and made sure I thoroughly researched before coming to a final idea. Because I was more confident in my product and had a clear understanding of my production plan, my pitch was very detailed and presented my pitch with more confidence. The research behind my product was thorough and I knew how I wanted to move forward with my product, how I was going to promote it and how I would distribute it. All these factors contributed to a good, convincing pitch and a successful product.
A lot of critiques I received for my product were concerning the sound quality. I tried to improve my sound quality as this has been a constant critique for my past products. Despite my best efforts to make it sound clearer in post-production, the speech was still muffled, which made it difficult for my audience to listen to. I tried to avoid this by using a higher quality microphone for recording, however, I ran into complications when it came to renting one so I had to settle on using a lower quality mic. To improve this in the future, I will invest in a better microphone for me and my guests so that the sound quality is better. Another critique I received was the length of the podcast. For some, it was too long, so next time I will take into consideration how much free time my target audience has and use a questionnaire in pre-production to research their preferences so that I do not run into this problem again.

This project helped me further develop my hard and soft skills. I improved my skills using premiere pro as I did not have a lot of experience using the product but used tutorials to quickly learn how to edit audio and use effects available in premiere pro to improve audio quality. I also developed skills in premiere rush, a program I had never used before. I used it to create a video for YouTube to make my podcast available on that platform. Rush was good for simple video editing and uploading directly to my desired platform as it is a program made specifically for editing and sharing online videos.
This project also helped me develop my planning, interpersonal and leadership skills. Producing this product meant I had to do a lot of thorough planning with dates and scheduled recording dates that fit my schedule and my guests' schedule so that it was done in time for the deadline. I also ran into many problems with scheduling during production that I had to quickly solve; such as needing to find a replacement for someone who became unavailable for recording and having to change an interview format for one of the guests because they fell ill and not being able to record for long. These obstacles that I faced helped me develop my problem solving, planning and leadership skills as I successfully found ways to fix them and still managed to be on schedule for every part of the production and post-production so that I was able to meet the deadline.
I also feel that my presentation and interviewing skills improved as I had presented a better pitch than I have for my previous projects and hosted a successful interview that my audience felt was good. However, some critiques I received were about some of the awkward air during the interview, which I will aim to improve for future projects.