Getting PRESENCE into the scene
As a director, you have to convey to your listeners that all the characters in a scene are 'there'.
How do you keep a character 'in' when that character is listening to others, and not speaking at the time?
| By quality of acting - professional radio actors convey that being 'in' by their skills. |
| Good radio acting is NOT stop-start, NOT acting only when speaking the words, but all the scene in between. |
| By sound effects, both the actor's presence (shifting bodily and the character's clothes), inbreaths and outbreaths, and the umms |
| IN POST-PRODUCTION, you add further markers of 'presence' from pre-recorded sound effects - see TEACHER - INTRODUCTION - LESSON PLANS |
SEE Radio drama dialogue is much more than the words on the page.
Avoid the impression of 'stand-and-deliver' acting & dialogue
| As a radio drama director, you have to create the 'live-ness' of character dialogue. |
| DO NOT keep your actors in the same position in front of the microphones all through a dialogue scene. |
| REDRAFT THE SCRIPT if you need. Do not be afraid to do this! You must give opportunities to your actors to come alive. |
| Once or twice or more, direct your actors to move from position three (dialogue) to position two (intimate dialogue). This is a SHIFT from one position to another. It demands technical acting skill. It must fit with the dialogue situation - the intimate climax of a scene?, telling a secret?, wanting to move to an objective. |
| Get your actors to 'embody' the dialogue - to introduce physicality into the dialogue. This has to be organic - it has to realise what is in the script and it has to 'breathe', and open out the dialogue. |
| Don't be too fussy. All must serve the character-action-script. |
| ENTRANCES AND EXITS - I am overall against a scene beginning with an entrance and ending with an exit. (It's too slow.) But a character can arrive into the dialogue of two others (what I call the TWO PLUS ONE technique). |
| CHANGE a fixed-sound centre scene into a moving sound centre scene. (See SOUND CENTRE - FIXED SOUND CENTRE - the centre of the sound picture remains fixed in the same place + MOVING SOUND CENTRE - 'we go with') |
