Research
Where to find Radio Dramas
Radio Dramas and fiction podcasts can be found online on an array of different services. The main difference between the two is that radio dramas are played live in similar fashion to how tv shows are played. Fiction podcasts are uploaded to different services for on demand listening.
Radio Dramas can be found live on BBC Radio 4. The best example of this is the Archers which plays weekdays at 2pm. You can also listen to radio dramas and fiction podcasts on places like spotify and youtube
Foley Sound
Foley sounds are a way of amplifing sounds for films popularised by Jack Foley during the days of silent films with live real time music. By using an assortment of different tools, instruments and fabrics, sounds can be created that replicate actions on screen.
Foley sounds are still a huge part of creating films today as microphones are unable to pick up sounds like footsteps and environmental sounds. Foley artists have an incredibly large amount of tools and have to get creative when making weirder sounds.
When making audio dramas often times sounds will have to be played up intensly and made a lot more over the top in order to compensate for the lack of a visual aid. Sounds will need to paint a picture of what is happening and be able to tell listeners what's happening.
Sound Design
Along side foley sound for characters and objects there is another form of painting pictures in radio dramas and that's by creating a soundscape
When creating a soundscape there are 5 things that should be accounted for. These form the acronym DAMNS.
Dialogue - Words or sounds from the actors
Ambience - The background sounds of the environment
Music - Either Diagetic or Non-Diagetic
Narration - Story telling from someone outside of the scene
Sound Effect - Sounds that have been activated on command
Analysing DAMNS
In order to understand DAMNS I did some analysis of a few episode of the Archers and listed off all of the sounds I could hear.
Adapting Footage to Audio
For our radio drama we would be adapting an episode of the twilight zone to being an audio drama. This comes with a fair share of problems
A lot of subtlties shown in the acting doesn't translate easily to being just audio. Without visuals, storytelling can become incredibly hard esspecially with trying not to sign post everything to the listeners
In order to get some practice in adaptation and understand more of the difficulties I watched a scene from lethal weapon and took steps towards adapting it
On the right you can see the full clip that I began to adapt.
The first struggle would be being able to convey the environment. There are also times when the camera shifts perspective and people from very far away can be heard up close. This would be slightly hard to pull off with audio. The hardest part would definitely be the scene where the officer tricks the man about to jump and hand cuffs him. This is all done visually with very little dialogue about it.
I made a note of all the sounds in the clip so that if I were going to create any foley I can walk into the foley room and clearly know what i'd be making. I also made not of any sounds that i'd need to add in order to tell the story better.
In the adaptation I moved the police officer at the begging to downstairs. When at the bottom of the building he would explain to Briggs that the jumper is on the roof. This way we could also be introduced to the soundscape of the bottom of the building meaning any time we cut back down there the environment will sound different but still recognizable as a different location. The rest would play out very similarly up until the handcuff scene. At this point I'd make the chain not only make a lot more noise but the actors would be making more noise. The jumper would be saying things like "you said no tricks" and "get these handcuffs off me" and Briggs would be saying "gotcha" something cocky like that.
The Twilight Zone
For our actual radio drama we would be adapting an episode of the twilight zone into an auditory form
The twilight zone is an american tv show that aired from 1959-1964. It was a science fiction show that had a style of strange and unsettling content. Whilst looking back at it now the episodes feel incredibly silly and laughable. It's very easy to see why it was so popular at the time getting itself 5 seasons alongside multiple different attempts at revival.
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The twilight zone despite it's age has very clearly made an impact on media today with references to it's style being made incredibly often. Even if you haven't watched the original twilight zone it's very likely you would have heard of it in some way due to it's cultural impact. Whether it's by hearing the music or knowing the style, you likely know this show
Despite not physically watching any episodes I had a feeling that this would really suit being an audio drama.
Picking an Episode
I watched multiple different episodes of the twilight zone to try and figure out not only would be the best episode to translate into audio but would also be the most fun to do.
A World Of His Own - S1 Ep36
In this episode the main character Gregory is caught by his wife in the middle of an affair. Before she can catch him on he manages to hide all the evidence and his wife becomes incredibly skeptical and searches all across the house for where he's hidden this girl
Gregory is a playwright and he reveals to his wife that the girl she saw him with was one of his characters that he managed to create in real life. With the power of his voice recorder, anything he says will be written into existence.
I feel like this story would have worked perfectly well for an audio drama because of how much of it is dialogue. The script is incredibly descriptive when describing the characters to the voice recorder. Everything here is very simple and would require too much reworking at all.
The Fever - S1 Ep17
In this episode an old couple win a trip to las vegas, despite being completely against gambling, Mr. Franklin is forced into playing one spin of slots and immediately becomes hooked. The coins he won starts talking to him as if a spirit. They force him back to the slot machine where he cashes multiple checks in order to try and win the jackpot. Eventually Mr. franklin had spent the entire night at the casino and decides to go back to his hotel room. Before he can get to sleep he start seeing visions of the slot machine. Eventually these slot machine starts making his way towards him and he falls out the window and dies.
This episode is not great but i love it. It's an incredibly silly episode and it made me laugh a lot whilst not the intention it was still fun. Originally I thought it would be fun to make the soundscape of the casino and make the sound of the coins talking to him but i realised that this episode is for the most part is just a really long montage and if i had to make that a radio drama it would be incredibly boring. The episode would also end up being incredibly short so despite finding the episode funny, it wouldn't have made a good radio drama at all in my opinion.
The Purple Testament - S1 Ep19
In this episode we follow William Fitzgerald a luitenant in the war. The day before going into battle William looks at the face of 4 people in the infantry and sees a glow on their face. He keeps a note of their names and they die the next day in battle. William talks to his friend and Captain Riker. He tells him about the note and how he can predict peoples death before it happens.
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The next day William goes into the infirmary and talks to a soldier that was injured in battle. During their conversation William once again sees a glow on the mans face, and the boy dies almost instantaneously. He talks to Riker about the next mission and once again sees the light this time on his closest friend. He tries to convince him not to go to battle tomorrow but to no avail. William is dispatched from the war early due to this condition and as he's collecting his equipment and looks in a mirror. He one last time sees the light.
I enjoyed this episode a lot and whilst adapting it would have been hard I twould have been a lot of fun to figure out a fun way to change the key visual component to an audio based one. This was originally the one I was going to adapt however when we moved into groups this changed
The Purple Testament - S1 Ep19
A Passage For Trumpet - S1 Ep32
I wrote a treatment for this and you can find it here
I was shown this episode by someone in my group and i was intregued by the fact that it's based around music. This made it feel like it would be perfect for a radio drama. I also quite liked the characters in this episode.
Pre-Production
Script
After we chose our episode it was up to us to adapt it into a script for us to perform.
Instead of typing up every word we used the much quicker way of transcribing all of the footage. We did this by importing the footage into word and using the transcribe feature. There are other websites online where this can be done but I personally feel like not only was word the easiest to use, it also had better features. For example each line was given a time stamp and assigned a character. Although it was all done by the AI it was by no means perfect and needed a lot of touching up. Thankfully the timestamps made fixing lines a lot easier. The AI doesn't know the characters names however it's fairly good at telling them apart so it lists each line as character 1 and 2. By using ctrl+f we were able to find and replace all instances of character 1/2 and replace them with our character names. This wasn't always accurate but once again we were able to correct it afterwards
We split up the footage into three parts. This way it would be a lot quicker when transcribing it
We made some adaptions to the script where it wouldn't make sense in audio only. We also did a a lot of this when recording as we only realised it then
Treatment
Production
Table Read
The first thing we did when we started production was a table readthrough of the script. This allowed us to talk more about the characters, any changes we needed to make, and the story as a whole
We went into the podcast room and used the multiple mics in that room for our read. This also gave us our first chance to get used to recording in the multitrack and the audio mixer
When using audition the multiple mics in audition the first step was to go into the audio hardware and make sure that it was recording the zoom deck. After this we go in to the multi track and make sure that all the tracks are assigned to each of the mics correctly.
Where it says default stereo input we would change that to Zoom t8 channel and the respective channel
The first four channels on the audio mixer where for four mics we have connected in both the podcast room and in the tv studio.
Foley Sounds
After researching foley sounds we went into our foley room in the college and used the materials we had to make sounds for our episode.
The first sounds we wanted to make was footsteps which we would likely end up using the most. This was surprisingly harder than we thought it would be. We tried multiple different ways of moving the shoe to make the footsteps and on mutiple different surfaces. When hitting the sounds on the desk there was too much reverb but when hitting it on the floor it was too padded due to the carpet. Eventually we found a hard material to use which made the sounds sound a lot better. This however lead us to our next problem
I greatly underetimated how sensitive the mic was when recording so the footstep sounds we recorded where practically unusable. Our running noises where fine as although they where faster, they where lighter taps.
Another sound we needed was a bell for the shop that joey enters. I wanted the bell sound to play with a door. This was one of the easier sounds to make as there was a small bell in the room. The only dificulty behind this was getting just enough strength on the bell for it to make a noise but not so much that it wouldn't sound like a small bell.
There where so many different peices of equipment in the room that I was able to get really creative with some of my sounds. In order to get the sound of gravel I used a drum, a patch of fake grass and a hard mat. I grabbed the grass side and rubbed the harder rubber side against both the drum and the mat. By applying enogh pressure it would scrape and manage to sound elmost perfectly to sound like rubbing against gravel. In order to make the sound of getting up from the gravel I capped the fake grass on the mat and lifted it as I was peeling it.
There where a good selection of sounds that we made and ended up using, There's actually a fair amount of sounds that I didn't end up using for the original intention but I did use for other sounds because it fit well. For example, when joey throws his trumpet case we used an empty plastic box in the room and hit it against the floor. However in the edit I didn't feel a need to keep in joey throwing the box but I still used the box noise for the impact of Joey hitting the car.
Recording
After our table read It was time to go into the tv studio and record. We filmed sort of out of order based on who we had access to at the time.
One of the first voices you hear in our show is the narator. We had two different voice actors in mind for the narrator and recorded both in order for us to bea ble to choose our favorite in the edit. We thought we might be able to layer them both talking at the same time but they say words differently so it sounded bad in the edit. And when we tried it in person they didn't keep in tune with eachother at all and where falling apart with their lines
The mics we where using had no pop filters on them so we where subject to peaking the mic in certain situations. Luckily I made a work around for this. When I was recording I would talk past the microphone rather than into it. This way all of my breath from harsher letters was going past the mic not into it. When recording audio for somebody else I made them speak facing left of the mic and looking at me
Post-Production
Marketing
A big part of getting your name out there in the industry is marketing yourself. In order to learn more about marketing we decided to market our show
Thumbnail
As a part of the marketing for this project we had to create a thumbnail for our work to be found on radio apps.
1st version
When creating this first version I was given a basis of what it had to be designed after. This included the top text and the bottom title. All of the designs we where show where very basic images with focus. Due to this I made my image incredibly basic. I really didn't know what to possibly do for it as all of my ideas where way too advanced for the single focus images I was shown
2nd version
After getting feedback about the first version I went back and decided to completely redesign the poster and make it more complex. The fist step was to find and image of a bottle on google. Putting this image in Illustrator and then using the pen tool I was able to trace over the bottel and make it like a sketchy version of a bottle. I did the same with the man playing the trumpet
Thumbnail
I painted the the man different colours and then inverted them afterwards so i had two versions. This way I could show both Joey and Gabriel. I put the bottle inbetween them signifying what's needed for one to go tho the other. I made the label on the bottle "Sterlings" as a nod to Rod Sterling
Advertising
1st version
For my advert I wanted to make something that would build up hype for a potential big budget twilight zone audio drama. I took the original Twilight Zone intro script and changed it around a bit so that it would seem like the reason it's an audio drama is because "your sight is getting hazy"
I made another version of this that not only fixed the lowercase h at the end but also added a lot of different
Music
The episode we chose was about a failing musician and hate multiple moments where music will be played, both by a band and by an individual
I wanted the end of a song to be playing at the very begining as the band finish their set and walk off. I got this song from the youtube sound library which was all copyright free. It can be hard to find something from that library that doesn't sound pathetically non copyright but I think I managed to find a good fit with the song Smoke Jacket Blues byTrackTribe. When intergrating it into the begining I had it fade in quietly behind the narrator as non diagetic audio then after the narrator was done I made it louder and brought in sounds of people talking to signify the change to diagetic
Later on Joey and Gabriel starts to play music on their own. No-one else is playing with them so the only instrument would be a single trumpet. Due to this Instead of trying to find a video online that wouldn't be non copyrighted I decided to try and make the music my own. I have no prior experience in making music other than being able to play about three notes on the ukelele and the keys for a "Legend Of Zelda" song on piano so I had no faith in my ability here at all but i gave it a chance.
I used the website Soundtrap in order to produce my song.
NARRATOR
DIAGETIC
MUSIC
CROWD
When opening soundtrap I was met with the ability to pick an instrument to use inluding a trumpet. However the trumpet option was locked behind a paywall with the option of a month long trial. Using the trial I got on and started making my song. Iliked the idea of using a sort of ladder of downward notes so i started with that. When I got to my fourth note I made it go higher because that's what a lot of songs do. I don't know much about music theory so I can't really talk about the intrecascies of each note, I just went off of what didn't sound bad. I doubled the first set of notes and then made the last note higher. These where the notes that made up the shorter version of the song that would play throughout the begining and then the longer finished version would play at the end. It sounded slightly flat when I first made it so I turned the reverb up and it made it sound a lot better
INTRO MUSIC
CROWD
Below you can hear both the full song
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Personally I think the song works for what it is. I don't think it's too bad although i'm not to fond of the end. Maybe if the low note before the end was doubled like it's ealier one it would sound better but it sounds really forced
Editing
One of my favorite edits I did was when entering the shop. Using the bell I signified the door opening. When the door opened I made the outside world rise in volume so it was loud. After the door gets shut the outside world turns down and a duplicate sound takes it's place however this time with effects on it that make it sound like it's coming from outside the shop.
Another edit I liked was the transition I made between scenes. Once again using soundtrap I played the first few notes to the twilight zone theme on a piano. I then phaded this in to a heavily reverbed and phased version of the same notes. This would act as my transition between certain scenes. I got the inspiration for having a sort of wierd sounding transition sound from "Harley Quinn: Sound Mind" where they do a very similar thing
OUTSIDE
ENVIRONMENT
NO FILTER
FILTER
BELL
When designing the twilight zone (the limbo joey is kept in) I knew I wanted it to sound like a desolate ghost town which is the first thing I thought of when originally seeing it in the show. I did this by using drones, wind sound effects and crows in the distance. Whenever I made them go into a place wether it be a bar or the backstage from the begining I would take the background audio that would have been used for that environment put a phaser on it and kept the drone
