The past two weeks have been rather disappointing considering that two or three of the Upstarters showed up. This past Friday Xabiso and Reggie were the only two to arrive, while the weekend before the two of them showed along with Aphiwe. Our first show should ideally be this coming weekend, and if that’s going to happen, we as a team have a great deal to do if we’re going to make it come together. Let me walk you through what we did manage to do and my current thoughts.
Reggie and Xabiso searching through old Upstart editions for content.
It all began with the breakdown in communication that I spoke about in my last blog post. Since then we have tried to rectify this and make earlier arrangements to have the team arrive for our meeting on this past Friday especially, but alas, our efforts have failed. I do think we are at the stage where we desperately need to meet with our partners, the Upstart management team, and talk about the way forward.
With only two or three team members to work with, we’ve been doing what we can and trying not to give them more than they can do. It would be far too easy to make then pick up the slack for the rest of the team but we can’t forget that they are school children and have other commitments such as Upstart, and extra mural activities. And we would not want to reward their dedication with more work than is their fair share.
We have taken them in studio and recording their work. This term is all about creating the content so we created content with the guys that showed up. For some of the things that their recording, we’re finding that vox pops of their friends experiences of the Upstart event being reported about, would add colour to the piece so we’re asking them to go home with recorders and speak to their peers. We will only be hearing this content next weekend.
More excitingly, we helped Xabiso and Rggie put together brief auditions for RMR to be anchors for the YUNG Amplified show. It turns out that Aviwe and Reggie never got around to doing the audition last term and so Gugs, RMR’s station manager agreed for us to have them do something sort to send to her. Only Reggie and Xabiso came this weekend so we decided to audition both of them. We had then individually in studio read from a script where they introduced a show and the topic and then announced into a song, and finally back announced out of the song. Gugs essentially wants to see if they can be vibrant as hosts of a youth show. I think that Reggies strength is that you can tell that he enjoys listening to radio and can talk about the music he enjoys. He is also able to speak off the cuff. His weakness is that he doesn’t always get his words out fluently. My collegue Tom favours Reggie for this part but, my hesitation with him is that on radio, people usually have one chance to hear what you’re saying, and if he’s not speaking fluently then this could be a problem. Xabiso’s strength is that he does speak fluently. I personally think he has potential, he just needs some training and practice. He is very willing to learn, it’s just taking him a while to get used to the anchoring thing. His weakness is that he doesn’t necessarily speak well and vibrantly when he is impromptu. Once he was comfortable with the script he delivered it well, but the portions where he was meant to speak off the cuff and introduce his favourite song, he was quiet hesitant. This is a potential problem if he is going to be on live radio.
Gugs has said that she will let us know by the end of the weekend if either of them will be chosen. Since today is a public holiday in our Lovely South Africa, I count this day as part of the weekend. I actually cannot wait to hear what she decides. As it stands, two of the RMR dj’s are hosting this show. With the content that we have produced so far, it makes sense to me that the content would be dispersed throughout the show.
With only the work of three people that is ready to be broadcast, my concern is that we won’t have enough content for more than a week. Our only hope is to sort out the arrangements with the Upstart management team so we can have the rest of the Upstart team arrive next week so that we can start intensively producing content.
Refilwe
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