Radio Drama Production Diary: Log 15 - Thursday 11th March 2010

Today in our radio media lesson I began work on designing my double page radio guide for our radio drama piece, I have started using Adobe InDesign and started using my skills in my AS Year.  My color schemes is black and green and I have began to put the names of my radio stations onto my work. 

Cues and Links within our Radio Drama Recording

A definition of cues and links:

Cues  Links - How you fill the bits between scenes, intro's and credits

When writing our script we had to think about how the scenes, intro and outro would all fit together nicely for example when we were creating our radio drama we decided to add a musical intro to the drama to explain the cut between our "Previously" scene and the current episode. Also at the end of scene one we used a fade and slight pause to explain to the audience that another scene is starting in a different location with a different selection of characters.

Here is an extract of our script to show how we used cue's:

"Scene One ends with fade"

"Cue few seconds of silence to show scene change"

"Fade in Scene 2# INT. LA BOOSH BAR - Night. Jazz music is playing quietly in the background, the sound of a busy bar with various sounds of drinks being poured, general conversation and the sound of Abbey's chair being pulled from it's table"

As you can see from the quote above, we have thought carefully about piecing our drama together to flow easily through to the end without breaks and confusion. This helps the listener understand that the scene, location and characters have changed.

Before our drama started we used a technique that explains briefly to the listener what happened in the episode before the one that is about to be played. We used cues to show the listeners the cut between the previous episode description and the current episode by adding a brief pause followed by some theme music. Here is a quote from our script to show you what it looked like:

"Previously on Transgression....."

"Cue a couple of seconds of brief pause."

"Begin theme music."

This helps to break our drama up slightly and to inform our listeners that our episode is starting.

Radio Drama Micro Elements

Voice: Due to our script being set in the style of Film Noir we decided that we would have to use American accents to ensure our radio drama sounded correct as if we had just used our typical English voices it would not all tie together as our story was set in Detroit. We did however acknowledge that this could have been a huge risk as it could take the seriousness away from the story line and turn it into a mockery... We still however went ahead with the decision and the outcome was relatively successful. We spent two sessions at the beginning of our assignment practicing our voices to ensure they were correct and level all the way through the recording, this was difficult as sometimes we let our voices slip as we went through our scripts whilst recording, eventually we achieved our goal and perfected our voices. Another problem we had whilst recording our voice was page turns whilst using our scripts and loud students outside of the recording room. The recording room was only sound proof on one side of the room and was next door to the bathrooms, so when somebody used the hand dryer in the bathroom we were forced to stop recording. We went through our script four times to ensure we had each scene complete for editing.

Silence: The main use of silence in our recording was to indicate the change between different scenes, Using a moment of silence between scenes was a good technique to indicate to listeners that the scene was changing, This was important for us as there was three different locations used in our episode that ranged from a back alley to a busy jazz bar. I played Chief Justice in the Radio Drama and during the second scene in the office where I was being grilled by my boss about spending to much time on the case I was told to go home and leave the case alone, to show that I wasn't happy about my boss's decision I used a pause between my dialect and said "Ok Chief...(Silence)... Cya Tomorrow" This was a good idea as it brought out my feelings and emotion on the subject. 

Music: The use of music in our recording was used in small amounts however still played an important role in perfecting our final piece, we used a short clip of music combined with sound effects as our theme tune to create a link between our "Previously" section of our recording and the current episode, this was important as it explained to the listener that the current episode was about to start if they were not interested in the brief catchup. we found our theme tune music in the royalty free music archive owned by our college. We also acquired a royalty free piece of jazz music from the college archive for our "La Boosh Bar" scene where the chief’s daughter and the Villain "Scooner" are making conversation. This was used to create a Jazz bar style atmosphere along with sound effects of people talking in a group over the top of the music.

Sound Effects: Collecting sound effects was one of the most time consuming tasks out of all the micro-elements of our drama recording, Thankfully the college radio editing rooms had a large library of sound effects and ambient sounds to browse through that were available to use. Some times we found it difficult to find a sound effect so we used a program for the mac called "Audio Hijack Pro" which aloud us to record streaming audio off of the Safari internet application, this meant we could record sound effects straight to .MP3 off of the web and import them into Soundtrack Pro for implementation into our recording. The last thing we had to do with sound effects was to record our own, we struggled to find a suitable matching "Door Open/Close" sound effect for our recording so we decided the only way to get the sound effect we wanted was to record it ourselves. Our college technicians provided the equipment and software we needed to record our sound effects. I believe we used our sound effects extremely effectively, they sounded realistic and were put in the right place at the right time, there were times in our recording where we thought our sound effects worked amazingly for instance in the first scene (Alley Way) we used a section of traffic with a siren driving by, we cut the effect up and turned the levels down so it sounded as if it was in the distance, we also used a doppler effect on the siren so it sounded as-if it was coming from one side of the street, past the characters and down the other side of the street. 

I felt we have mastered the techniques when using Micro Elements within audio, If we were to create another recording I think we should have focused more on recording our own sound effects to make a more unique sounding piece of work, overall I am happy with our outcome.