Unit 11 - Radio Pre-Production

At the start of the academic year, we introduced with a new task which is to create a radio drama based on a play produced at our college named "Parallel" before we got to start the actual production, we had to create a pre-production as a way to practice with the recording room, equipment and editing software. All of this was to prepare us for a larger project as we would have to record multiple scenes from the play then edit them all together in group to make it easier for us. The whole purpose of the pre-production is the system that leads to the production faze easier as you will have a specific guide follow and will lead to less stress in the long run.

Pre-Production

Me and my partner had scenes 24-30 in the play but we only recorded the audio for one scene as we didn't have to record much all of the scenes so that we didn't have as much stress as well as practising with everything to make sure that we could do it thoroughly and efficiently so that we could practise setting up the equipment so that when it came to actually recording (never got to record due to lockdown) we would take less time to set up all of the equipment such as the microphone and the sound recording software which is the same software used to edit the audio (Logic Pro X) one thing we had to do every time we recorded our pre-production, was to place a USB stick or SD card into the computer so that we could automatically save our sound recordings directly into our device, so we could move the audio into the class to edit on our Mac's. It took my group about three weeks to record all of the audio that we needed and then we began the editing process which took a few weeks longer to complete.

Once I got the audio onto Logic Pro, I began to cut out all of the mistakes, bloopers/outtakes and long silences between the lines that we were reading. Once I'd gotten through all of the cutting of the audio tracks, I began to move the tracks into order to match with the script so that the story flows as smoothly as it does in actual production. One of the ways I made it seem more like a conversation rather than script reading, was by leaving small gaps between each audio track this was to give the impression that both of the characters in this scene needed a split second to think about how they could respond to what the other character had just said and to also hint that they did not want to upset the other character in any way. I tried putting the tracks together to see what it would sound like, but it didn't flow as smoothly as it does with small breaks between each section of audio. In the background of the scene that I was editing, I added in quiet jazz music as this scene was meant to be located inside a house so music was included to create the effect that this household liked the calming and catchy music of jazz. I added some sound effects into my piece to make it more effective and to practice with the software, some of the effects I used were:

Door opening, someone entering and closing the door - the reason for this was to have a small introduction to the scene so that it doesn't just jump straight into the dialogue and the drama of this scene.

Keys getting placed down - this was also to add to the introduction so that we know that the person who entered the house had a key so must live in the house and has been out so they have come home after a long day.

Baby crying - throughout this scene one of the characters keeps telling his wife to keep a baby quiet, this led to a really easy sound track being used of a baby crying to create more immersion for the audience as well as create an understanding as to why one of the characters is annoyed as some people find a baby's crying to be annoying.

Backhand sound effect - for this sound effect I thought with the scene being an argument and with both characters getting more and more annoyed, I thought eventually the man would have reached his breaking point and with this being set in the 40s or 50s some men still struck women and I thought this in this scene the character could have been so annoyed that he turned the argument physical rather than just using their words.

The microphone we used to record our scene, was a Tonar podcast microphone and the reason we used this microphone was because my partner had just bought it off me and he wanted more reasons to use it and once we figured out it could be connected to the college equipment we decided to use it. With the microphone being a podcast microphone, it came with an adjustable arm so we could move the microphone around and get it into a position that worked for us. On top of this, the microphone has good audio quality as well as not being able to pick up background noise so the audio that gets received is crystal clear.