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.
