Radio Trailer

What is a radio trailer?

A radio trailer contains facts, information  and statistics which makes it informative and provides knowledge to the listeners. It should be used to convince people and interest them to want to watch / listen to what you are promoting/ informing people of.

The conventions of a radio trailer are:

• Slogan of the documentary.
• The purpose of persuading the audience to watch your documentary.
• Voice over.
• Information of what your advertising throughout.
• Sound effects ( when and if appropriate ).

Voice over:

The voice over is the most important thing in a radio trailer as it guides the listener to what is being portrayed.

• It explains to the listener what the documentary will be about.
• Used to entertain and inform which may set the mood of what they may be watching.
• It may have a professional touch - this may interest the listeners to watch the documentary.

How long should it be?

A radio trailer should be around 30-40 seconds as this provides enough time to provide key information also the right amount of time to engage the listener and not waffle on.

For examples here is a radio trailer from Doctor Who:

This contains vital information of what viewers should expect if they choose to watch Doctor Who. It also contains special sound effects which make it more suitable and attractable to the target audience. This Radio trailer was highly successful as Doctor who managed to receive millions of views.


Here is another example of a radio trailer from " Hair Documentary"

As we can tell from this radio trailer it is around the average time of 40 seconds, a suitable soundtrack and all the vital information which informs those of all the information which may attract those who have an interest in it. 

Music:

• Even though music may be played throughout the radio trailer it is vital that the voice over can still be heard as it is the most vital part when persuading and informing viewers. 
• It should be set a steady pace in order to create the right atmosphere for the listeners.
• Depending on the documentary you should decide whether you should have upbeat music or slow pace in order to give the right hints to what you are informing them of.

Audience: 

• The audience for radio trailers are limited as they are not that popular. Those whom listen to radio trailers tend to be of the older generation, meaning that we may need to make it more formal in order to engage the listener.

Extra - information :

• The trailer should contain more than one person speaking in it.
• It should be formal.
• At the end of the documentary it should state when and where they are able to watch the documentary.
• It might contain different opinions and beliefs.
• It may include information from the documentary itself - as this gives the listeners and incite into what they can be expecting from the documentary.

Our Radio Trailer!

After doing in-depth research into Radio trailers, we made a plan of what would be said in ours. It was important to keep it to the average time limit but also have included all of the important information so our audience would know the key details.

Here are the things which we needed to include in our radio trailer:

• What it is we are promoting/ informing the audience of.
• Where the audience can watch it.
• The timing which it will be aired.
• Key facts which may give away valuable information of the documentary.
• Use short and snappy sentences which will attract our target audience.
• Ending with if they can watch it any other time then the time it will be aired on television.

After thinking of what we need to include we then came up with a script which you can see below which will be heard on our radio trailer.

Recording for the radio trailer:

After we had made a script for our documentary we needed to decide on the voice that would be used for our radio trailer. In previous documentaries that we have listened to, which are of a similar genre to the one which i am producing, they have used a male voice. Therefor we recorded two middle age men which we thought would be good to use in the radio trailer. Here is the recorded trailer of the male which we did not use :

The other male which we recorded we used in the real one, if you would like to listen to our final piece please continue to scroll. After we had decided on the voice over we would use, we took it to audacity as this is where we would edit it. Here we were able to change the volume of the voice over, also slow or speed it up.

Music for the radio trailer:

As we have listened to other radio trailers, we gathered that they use music as a backing track. To begin thinking of soundtracks which we would use in our radio trailer we listened to a verity of different soundtracks to see which one fitted best:

This soundtrack which we listened to, was good but we thought that it did not create the right emotion, that it might be to slow and to emotional which may bore the listener. Also when we edited this with the voice over they did not suit each other so we carried on listening to others.

This is the second piece of music which listened to, it is very uplifting and inviting. Although we liked this soundtrack we did not think that it would be suitable for our target audience. Therefor we went to think of other music which we had used in the documentary to see if this would be useful.

We thought that it would be a good idea to use the music that we have used in our documentary. This because it will make it recognisable to our target audience. We also thought that this would be a good soundtrack as it is up beat. However, even though are documentary talks about quite a serious topic we wanted to use this soundtrack as it makes it more up-lifting and inviting to watch.
Here is the soundtrack which we used:

Here is our finished radio trailer

  

We were very pleased with the end result of our documentary. It was important to us that we made it attractable as possible.

This is a radio trailer with a voice which we thought would be most attractable. This being a middle class/ middle age man.