My name is Aoife Walsh and I’m a TY student at Coláiste an Átha. Our TYs have had many activities this year but our most recent one was that of Thursday the 12th and Friday the 13th of October, when we took part in the Tinpot radio production workshop. This included making an ad in groups of three or four and presenting them in the Sing Factory Vocal Coach.

The workshop was a great opportunity to find out if we have any interest in radio production, it gave us an insight on what a career in it would be like and the stresses of planning the radios schedule and keeping on track. Our day was broken into three parts, in the morning we got to know our mentor Ian Doyle and spent the rest of the day learning with him. We first started off watching a slideshow about Tinpot radio production and how to be a good radio broadcaster.

The second part of the day we were split into our groups and given two tasks, task one was making a promotional advert. My group and I did our advert on The Arc cinema Wexford. Other groups did their adverts on Skittles, Three mobile, Burger King and much more. We had to write our own script of how we wanted our advert to play out. Next, we had to produce a personal link. This is a short piece of conversational talk usually lasting for up to 60 seconds.

Once the written part was completed, we rehearsed both our ad and our personal link that would later be recorded in the Sing Factory Vocal Coach. This was by far the most hysterical part of our day. After lunch, we made our way out to the Sing Factory Vocal Coach to present and record our pieces of script. This was the most enjoyable part of the day as we got an insight of the technology used and atmosphere of a real-life radio studio. We all had a practice run through as no one had any experience of the pressure of recording live. We all made mistakes but that was just part of the learning experience and it helped to boost even the shiest of people’s confidence.

When we all finished recording we returned to the classroom and watched out recordings in the projector.
We all thoroughly enjoyed thus workshop and it gave students a great chance to see what this careerwould be like. Thanks to Alanna Hammel for the lovely photo.