The difference between broadcast and narrowcast lies in two keywords: broad and specific. But they are both aimed at groups of people. Broadcast is good at delivering information to a wider audience so that its message is known for some promotional or commercial purposes, so broadcast is aimed at a wider and more diverse group of people. In contrast to radio, narrowcasting is about sharing information to individual groups and is more targeted as they try to attract a more passionate and interested target group. Some narrowcasting is even tailored on a one-to-one basis, serving only one person.

I think broadcast can be better communicated than narrowcasting because there is no specific audience to serve, so it is more accessible. However, compared to narrowcasting, the broadcast has less targeted publicity so it is not easy to achieve the desired goal in the short term. However, I believe that narrowcasting is based on broadcasting because it requires broadcasting or some form of access to information about a specific group of people for the purpose of classification or research. After discussing the concept of these two terms with my friend, we had some questions such as, is narrowcasting limited in terms of the group of audience? And is broadcast completely unrestricted? Ultimately I think that the starting point of radio is not limited but the audience group itself may be limited. For example, some Chinese broadcasts have no specific audience, yet some people are unable to listen to them because of language issues. Narrowcasting, on the other hand, is not completely restrictive or limited, and sometimes even receives a very good response to its targeted messages. According to some surveys, ninety-eight per cent of people will open narrowcast emails, while broadcast emails are often ignored.

When I was thinking about these two concepts, I noticed that some of today’s social media genres have examples of these. For example, at Tiktok, at the beginning they push different types of videos to users to determine their preferences, this is broadcasting, and then they push the appropriate type of videos to users based on these judgments, thus arousing their interest and spending time on these videos. This is narrowcasting. This combination of broadcast and narrowcasting is a perfect example of filtering and research to increase customer satisfaction and achieve the desired outcome.

In today’s class, we worked on mimicry and sound effects and I was involved in the part where we created the sounds of the sea and screaming. I held the tape in my hand and gently rubbed it to create the sound of the sea breeze blowing on the beach. The other students created the sound of the wind blowing the sand away by moving it around. In the scream session, the three of us screamed together, a sound that I think could be put into our radio, as we have a violent part in our drama. The most interesting part for me was the killing of the watermelon, although I wasn’t in the studio doing it, I could already imagine how I would create the sound of a knife stabbing a person as the students stabbed the watermelon with various tools to make the sound.

I also tried to create my own sound effects at home, I wanted a blood spatter sound so I recorded a wringing wet towel sound. When I listened back to the sound and did some eq processing, I still found the sound very unrealistic and I didn’t find a solution in the end, but of course I will continue to work on the sound.

I also used a synth to create a whoosh sound that I wanted to put in the flashback segue of our script. I used five tracks of different synth sounds, changed their xy and stacked them on top of each other. Unfortunately when I used the whoosh sound I found that it was too cyberpunk and did not fit in with the theme of our script.

In my last blog, I talked about how I was inspired by the movie and in this blog, I will talk about the creation of my script and the problems I encountered.

After discussing my ideas about the theme of school violence with my group, I started trying to write a script for a radio play. The most important thing in writing a suspense drama script is logic, so I was very careful in the beginning, afraid that I would write something wrong and the context would not make sense. So I drew a relationship diagram of the characters and wrote a synopsis of the story in Chinese.

I also used flashbacks in the script because they added more richness to our broadcasts and gave us more opportunities to create sound effects.

I found some interesting things in the process of writing the script. I would imagine the script as it would be recorded, the sound effects it would add or the music. So I would also mark the effects that I wanted to express in the script so that our group could understand it better.

I also encountered some translation difficulties in the process of writing the script. As English is not my first language, the English version I translated after writing the script was not very authentic British English. We also discussed whether to record the radio drama in a combination of Chinese and English, and both Juice and I agreed to use all English. My group member, Fraser, took on the role of revising the English script, which he made more authentic and natural.