Radio Drama Production Diary: Log 1 - Thursday 22nd October 2009

First start date of this project, we first started to think of what style of recording we were going for film noir and then started to think of a recording name to go with the work. We began thinking of names for our Recording today and ended up with the name “Transgression” We started to plan the characters and start writing the first scene for the piece in brief detail. 

Radio Drama Production Diary: Log 14 - Thursday 4th March 2010

This thirsday we had a radio listening party during our lesson where we all got together to listen to each others work and give feedback and opinions on what was good and what needed to be improved, another group of students also came into the lesson to give feedback.

We presented ours and got a good collection of good feedback however we needed to finish of the ending with a "Next time on..." style of ending, followed by our "Production details" for example who plays who and who wrote the script. We have taken these points into consideration and will work on them in our next session.

Below is our most up to date recording of our drama peice.



NOTE: If you are trying to listen to this recording behind a firewall or college network, you might encounter problems as the host may be blocked!

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.

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.

Double Page Radio Guide with Transgression Feature

Before I began working on my double page radio guide, I thought that it would be a good idea to build a template before I started adding the text so I knew what was going to go where and to ensure I was happy with the colors and layout of the page. This was a wise idea because if I had added all my listings and feature straight away and then decided I did not like the layout, I would have had to re-design the whole thing.

                                  

I also Decided it would be a better Idea to design my listings in two separate documents and then join them together at the end, this would give me more space and would allow me to easily change the green headers on each page, using the pre-made template. 

Below is my final double page radio listing, Including my feature on Transgression on Page 14, I used my Transgression poster as the image for the feature as I thought "If people had already seen the poster, seeing it again in a radio listings guide might draw there attention."

I have also sticked to the same color scheme between the two pages, I have used pink on the titles on both pages and a black and green table scheme. This makes my listing easier to understand and easier to read. I have also blocked each station into different tables as that is how it appears in real radio listing guides.