Radio Drama Techniques - training as a radio drama director (+ acting, technical, scripting)
SOME OPENING IDEAS - sounds promising!
Step by step instruction from Alan Beck
See also FIRST QUESTIONS - 'HOW DO I'? (directing, acting, radio studio or not)
Of course, I can't teach HOW TO direct radio drama, or how to act, or write, or post-production.
I can only pass on advice, experience and short-cuts. If there were rules, I could type them here, and anyone could be a radio drama director etc.
I pass on advice, and after that, you have to use your judgement and a lot of work.
You have to do a lot of listening, and you have to discover styles and sounds for yourself.
Listen to all those marvellous plays available from BBC broadcasts and the BBC web site. Listen to all you can find on the Internet from around the world. Find what plays are being broadcast around you.
Listen to the sounds of the living world around you, and listen to talk - to how people talk - to all sorts of talk.
Listen to all sorts of fiction sounds, and also to the sound-track of films.
Sound is rapidly changing in our world. Sound design is speeding up. Digital sound technology means that you can do it - direct, act, script, post-production - everything.
So many radio drama skills are 'invisible' and that is why they are so successful. This web site will open your ears.
HOW TO: Read the following through, and then go over it again, clicking on the links.
| You are creating a series of sound pictures in scene after scene, and within scenes. You have to think about the possibilities of sound and of how people listen. |
| You have to arrange the sound events within each sound picture carefully. You have to follow the logic of the story and the picture. You have to think about perspective - as in a painting - but this is a series of moving pictures in a series of sound pictures. These pictures are usually arranged around a 'sound centre'. We call the elements 'sound events' - dialogue, background atmos, sound effects. |
| Radio is a miniature art. You are creative sometimes with much more precise means than on television or on stage. Radio drama dialogue is much more than the words on the page
But one word slurred by one of your actors might cause a listener to switch off! |
| Radio directors seem to divide into the word lobby or the sound brigade. Word lobby - radio plays that are packed with words - but you use silences and music too. Sound brigade - you use sound scenery and emphasise the world of sound.
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| Often you keep the words in the foreground and the location (usually the atmos) balanced well into the background. (What I call STANDARD PRODUCTION) |
| You may want to be more adventurous at times. You may want to express some of the mix of sound events in the Lifeworld - in the soundscapes in which we live. You may want to be influenced by the 'filmic' - the enormous amount of production that goes into the film sound track. You may want scenes which are 'filmic' radio drama production. |
| The way we listen is always changing - in the digital world. We listen with 'super-ears' now. We are 'super-listeners' now - in cinemas we sit within Dolby six or eight channels. Eminem has small radio drama scenes in his CDs. Radio drama productions are hard put to play 'catch up'. Expectations of sound fictions are always changing.
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| The radio drama director fills the role of ideal 'ears', selecting, focusing and designing. The audience actively play their part in the construction of the 'second radio play' in their heads. |
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See THREE PHASES OF PRODUCTION
Now have a look at a great site:
Stearns, Jerry, 1995, 'Radio Sound Effects: An assembly of elementary tips about the use of sound effects in the creation of radio theater', electronic publication,
http://www.greatnorthernaudio.com/audio_theater/Sound_Effects.html
STEP 1 - and on to STEP 2 - Here is how you start - at the beginning of each radio scene.
Back to FIRST QUESTIONS - 'HOW DO I'? (directing, acting, radio studio or not?, script)
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