On the 16th of November 2015 we received a guest lecture by Dan Shepherd – BBC radio programme producer and founder of Far Shoreline Productions. In his lecture he focused on the production of feature programmes for radio. He explained that the feature could be explained as a documentary but there is a difference – radio documentaries specifically tend to be more journalistic (i.e covering current events/news leads), a radio feature on the other hand allows you to explore an idea, a convention, a person and most importantly it provokes your imagination through sound (sound effects/adding music to the feature etc.). Shepherd also touched on the difference between a presenter lead feature and a montage – the presenter lead style is self explanatory: it includes a presenter who leads a panel of guests, dictates the pace of a debate/discussion and most importantly clarifies all the information to the listeners. The montage consists of many recordings put together to tell a story or to inform/grab the listener’s attention without the assistance of a presenter/narrator.
In the lecture we discussed some of his productions for the BBC. We were given the opportunity to ask him questions about his travels and about the ways/techniques he used to produce content for an organization of this variety. He also gave us some advice about project researching and pitching, and also pointed out that things go wrong quickly – quick adaptation is key (similarly to what Bryan Rudd talked about in a previous guest lecture) – (LO5).