Styles within our Radio Drama Recording

A Deffinition of Style
Style: The way in which you write will vary depending on genre.

Before we decided what style of radio drama we were going to produce we listned to a selection of radio drama recordings that were made the year before. After hearing them we decided that we wanted to create something different that hasn't really been worked on before, everyone in our group were huge fans of film noir style films.

We started by looking a selection of films that were film noir, we started by looking at "Sin City" a famous film noir film based around a detective solving crime in the Los Angeles underworld 'Sin City' whilst solving crime he comes across a number of strange and unusual characters and evil villains, The whole film is in black and white and points out important points in the scene with objects being red.


The film also contains an attractive woman who falls in love with the detective after he saves her life from the evil villain. Sin City also has the main character narrate his thoughts throughout the film; we thought this would be an important factor when creating our radio drama.

After looking at Sin City we decided that the main concepts we should use in our drama is the character narrating his thoughts, a female "Bunny Boiler/Femme Fatale" character who would involve herself with both the good characters and the criminals. We wanted to play our drama around the same story that is portrayed in Sin City so we had our own detective and villain as well.

We felt it was very important to have our characters to narrate there thoughts in our radio drama as there was no visuals available and everything would have to be described using vocals, music and sound effects.

As we were inspired by a film we knew we would have to use additional cues in order to help our listener understand our genre. We looked at a radio drama called twilight zone in order to understand how a similar radio drama communicated their genre to their listeners.

The twilight zone used several techniques to make their storyline and going’s on sound believable for their listeners; these include use of cues, sound effects, music and vocals.

The twilight zone used fades in-between scenes to allow the episode to flow smoothly until the end. They have also used a huge range of different sound effects from small things such as doors opening and closing to lasers and gunshots. Through-out the episode they used dark and eerie sci-fi music to create atmosphere and suspense whilst the story is in process. Vocals were also a huge part of making a twilight zone episode as the emotion and tone of voice varied between characters to show their status and placing within the story, I listened to an episode of The Twilight Zone which involved a family that had robot servants built by the father, it was clear who the robots are by the tone of their voices, all of them had monotone and emotionless voices and were very well spoken. The humans in the story could express anger and other emotions in their voices whilst talking.