Radio Drama as a form

Radio is something that you can't see so obviously you have to use your imagination a lot whilst listening to it. In order to create a good picture for the audience, radio drama's have to contain a lot of description. Things such as scenery, time, place, characters images and clothes all have to be imagined and with a really good descriptive drama this often becomes quite easy.
By definition "Radio Drama is a form of audio storytelling broadcast on radio. With no visual component radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the story."
Forms of radio drama can include opera; which is a dramatic art form, Pantomime; which follows in the tradition of fables and folk tales and Creative drama; which refers to dramatic activities and games used primarily in educational settings with children.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 1

Well...what can i say about this week, it was really hard when trying to produce our radio drama. I worked in a group of 4 including me and it was very hard work at times! In order to come up with a storyline we all pitched in different ideas from various books we had read to get a few storylines that we could take from each in order to create a brand new drama. There were a lot of arguements, but we managed to get through them eventually and decided on a very exciting storyline which consisted of best friends, boyfriends, rape, suicide and trust. We just wrote down a few of our ideas to start with and hopefully get a bit further in following sessions.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 2

We started pitching ideas about the plot this week. I then decided we should all write down our ideas and the first thing was to come up with the characters names. This happened quickly and selected a role for each character. We managed to come up with a lot of ideas for the plot and we got the inspiration for our plot from a book written by katie price called 'Angel'.

As a group we plotted a few previous episodes to help us get the idea of what could happen in the main part of the drama. This also happened quite quickly and we soon realise if we actually started working as a team then things got done a lot quicker.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 3

In the next couple of weeks we had a lot of trouble with the whole group making it to certain sessions. I felt slightly let down with this because getting the radio drama recorded was something I really wanted to focus on. Due to the absences with people in the group we took it in turns to write certain parts to the main episode of the radio drama. This week Emmy wrote down a lot of suicide notes that we could use in our radio drama but none of them sounded dramatic enough for what we wanted so Steph took Emmy's notes away and came up with a really dramatic and gripping suicide note that we used on the final script.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 4

We were due to record our radio drama but with people missing in the group it became increasingly hard to record it without someone being missed out. Even though this was our own faults we were all really annoyed about the fact we wouldn’t have as much time to edit our final piece. Me and Steph had a lot of free's this week so we kept coming up and editing the scirpt to think of possible ways that it could be made a bit better. We did some research into rape and suicide so that we could try and make the situations seem as realistic as possible.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 5

We had finally recorded our piece and managed to get it onto soundtrack pro. Recording the drama was really hard because the radio studio was new to all of us however we did get some help and eventually managed to get the hang of it. We struggled with background noise and found some of the parts harder to record than others. Emmy played the main character and did a fantastic job and managed to keep serious thoughtout the whole drama. Chris played the main boy in the drama and it took him a while to get into his role but once he had relaxed everything managed to fall into place.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 6

Whilst everyone else in the group looked for certain sound effects I decided to start editing the drama so that there was no background noise and that it all linked together properly. This took me quite a while as I wasn’t very experienced with using the program but I managed to complete it all and was really happy with the final product as I felt like I had completed something of a good standard. We had to then begin adding in sound effects. Due to not having recorded our radio drama till very late we had limited time to add in the sound effects and had to come into college during the half term in order to complete this. However when I come to college on the Tuesday I was the only one who had turned up. I did feel let down but I was excited to get on with adding the sound effects to make the drama start to sounds really good. I got playing around with soundtrack pro and added the particular sounds that I needed to relate with the drama. After being in the editing studio for over 2 hours I had finished adding in the sound effects, however I was unsure of how to add a theme tune to the beginning of the piece but thought that I would leave that until we came back to college in case I ruined what I had already done. I felt really proud of myself because of what I had completed however I did feel as though our group work really let us down, when it came to editing and adding sound effects I was the only person who turned up to do the work but on the other hand I enjoyed doing it so I wouldn’t change what I did.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 7

In my spare time I went back to the radio suite and added in the final parts to the radio drama such as the theme tune. We then had the opportunity to attend a lesson of listening to everyones radio drama's and see what the other groups had produced. Everyone did really well and the feedback was all very positive. When listening to our radio drama there were a few things that I would go back and edit and we found that there was a random bang at the end of the drama which needed to be edited out. I think the fact we got to listen to our radio drama's was really good because we got to listen to the different standards of work throughout the group.

Radio Drama: Production Diary; 8

We began to take some pictures so that we could make a start on our advertising. We thought of many different styles of photo we could take and we just opted for a simple photo with all the characters involved. In order to take the picture we used a white backdrop and some lighting which made it more yellow and asked a friend who was a photographer to help take the photos. He then gave us some ideas of what poses we could do in order to create a good photo which would be gripping to the audience. These are some of the original photos we took.

We then took these photo's and edited a few of them on photoshop. The photo i decided to use was the one that all four characters were in. I thought this gave a better view for the audience if all characters were involved. In this picture it shows that there is hatred, love and jealousy so I found it really appropriate for our drama. After editing the photo and adding different effects to it, I came up with the final picture which was this..

Cues and Links within our radio drama

When writing the script for our radio drama we had to consider when we needed cues for sound affects and background activity. These were importants because then when it came to editing our radio drama and adding sound affects it would be easier and also the characters would know how to react to certain lines.
Cues are used to prompt a character that something is about to happen or prompt then that it is their turn to speak. They are normally used between different scenes to fill the spaces.
In our script we used cues and links to show when there was action happening in between the scenes. We also used silences to show that a scene may be changing and to make the audeince aware of this and had a theme tunes for the introduction and the credits at the end. We used a few scenes to create previous episodes for our radio drama and had to use a lot of cues and links to show this.
For example..

(Music plays, people chatting in the background, clinging of glasses)

Belle: You have to meet him babe, he is just amazing
Roxy: Oh I can't wait, I'm so happy for you!
Belle: I'll ring him now to come down for a drink if you like.

(telephone rings)(ringing noise whilst previous music, chatting and clinging of glasses continues)
(Max's voice comes through sounding like its coming from a telephone)


We put the cues in italics so we could tell them apart from the script. We had quite a detailed description of what was going on during the speech and just by reading the cues it gave the characters enough time to think about what lines were coming up next.

During the pervious episodes we used a fade in and out techniques whilst we had the bar music continuing throughout the scenes..

'(bar music continues)(fade in)'

This is an example of what we had written on our script to make everyone aware of how the finish piece was going to be edited.

Here are a few of the cues that we used throughout the radio drama..

"Footsteps fade, sounding out of breathe, dramatic music"

"shouting loudly indicating panic"

"street traffic, people walking past, speech in a quiet muttering voice"

"roxy runs off crying, devastated and hurt and goes to see Belle, Roxy knocks on the door"

"rustles of paper, footsteps, slam of a door, cue next scene"

These are just a few of the many cues we used. We found them very helpful in our scrpit because it made the speakers aware of what was going on aswell as helping the audience to know when there is a scene change. I felt like we had included all the cues we needed in order to create a convincing drama.

The creation of our radio drama.

Sound effects: Sound effects are very important because they give the audience an idea of what is going on or where abouts you are and the activities you are doing. This was one of the longest things and most time consuming out of all the elements we needed. In order to add the sound effects into the drama we had to edit the drama and make sure that all the scenes were in the correct order. After that we uploaded the drama onto 'Soundtrack Pro' where there was a selection of sound affects there for us to chose from. This is where we got the majority of our sounds from apart from the music. When it came to getting sound effects that weren't available on soundtrack pro we used a program on the MAC computers called 'Audio Hijack Pro'. This gave us the opportunity to record sounds from the internet and gave us a wider variety of choice especially when looking for the theme tune to our drama. We then just imported these sounds though an MP3. file onto soundtrack pro and edited them to fit in with our radio drama. Luckily we managed to find all the sounds that we needed although it did take a long time which meant we didn't actually record any of our own. If I was to do it again I would probably record my own sound effects because then it would have been a lot more unique.
Below is a few examples of how sound effects really helped our radio drama get a more dramtic feel to it and make it more original.

This clip is of one of the previous episodes. It contains no sound effects at all.

This is the same clip but with the sound effects of footsteps included.


I feel that the footsteps add a dramatic difference and gives the impression that they are walking along whilst talking which is what we wanted to achieve. We got this sound effect of soundtrack pro and we thought it was really simple but worked affectively where we needed it.

Voice: Due to our script being aimed at teenagers, these are the voices we decided to work with. So rather than putting on accents we decided to just be ourselfs and be a lot more natural. At first everyone in the group was really nervous about recording and adding drama into their voices but after a few minutes everyone forgot about the embarassment and did a really good job. Emmy played one of the main characters, Roxy, and she had to do a lot of dramatic scenes where it involved her talking really loud and nearly shouting in some scenes to being really down and depressed in others. She compromised really well and I thought that the way everyone used their voices also helped the audience understand what sort of mood everyone was in. Turning pages of the script interferred a lot within our recording because none of us realised that it would pick up the sound of it as much as it did so this resulted in us having to record the drama several times to make sure we got a perfect part for each scene.
Here is an example of the suicide at the end where Emmy and Steph use their voices to show their anger. This clip contains no effects so you can see how they use their voices without sound effects being involved.



Music: We felt that music wasnt such a key point for our drama because we mainly used sound effects however it was really usefull when it came to reading out the suicide note because it made the scene feel a lot more dramatic and depressing. We decided to use the instrumental to the song 'Listen' by Beyonce. We felt this was appropriate because it gave the impression of sadness and made the suicide note seem even more dull. We used 'Audio Hijack Pro' to record the song off an internet site we had found. It look a while to find a version without the words. As well as this song we also used a short clip of the song 'Shut up and Drive' by Rihanna. In with the clip from the Rihanna song we also added traffic noise and police sirens to make it our own sound. I thought this made it really catchey and a good theme tune to remember.
Here is a clip of the suicide note without the music in the background..

Here is a clip with the music in the background..


I think when the music is included it makes the scene a lot more sad and I think the track that we picked works really well with the whole drama.

Silence: There wasn't a lot of silence involved in our script. However we used it when we wanted to change scenes just to let the audience know that the setting was changing. We also used silence at the end of our drama when Roxy commits suicide as it gives it a really dramatic ending along with the police siren fading away. During the dialect we used slight pauses such as..
Roxy: 'It's Belle new boyfriend(2)he(.)he(.)he raped me!'

We decided to add pauses here because it made the line a bit more intense as it was a build up to what Roxy was going to tell Joe her boyfriend.

Evaluation: How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

Newspaper advert: For the ancillary tasks, we were asked to produce an advertisement for our radio drama. This was where we took the pictures of ourself's in order to produce a decent photo to use as the background.This was the final picture that I produced and decided to use for the advert.

I then took this photo and uploaded it onto InDesign where it was ready to be edited. I first had to decide when I wanted to the radio drama to be launched and on what radio station. I chose to launch my radio drama on BBC Radio 2. In order to show that this was where is was going to be launched I placed the BBC Radio 2 logo in the corner of the picture. I then had to add our names to the advertisement so wrote them along with top where they were visible but out of the way. I also decided to add a quote from the newspaper 'The Times' to make it seem as though a preview had already been sold to the newspapers. By adding the stars it gives a good impression that the drama is good. I made sure the title was big and bold so it stood out. This is what my final poster looked like..

Double page spread: After producing the advertisement for the radio drama I then had to produce a radio listings page that included our drama in the listings. Along with this we had to write a small column which showed what our radio drama was all about and when it was on. I created this radio listings page by using InDesign again on the MAC computers. I am really familiar with this program now after having used it for the past couple of years with various media related projects. In order to create the listings page I used an A3 sized page as I wanted it to be put as a double page spread. I started by splitting the page up into columns and researching on various radio stations such as BBC Radio 1,2,3 and 4, and various music stations as to what was going to be playing that day. Within this I added our

radio drama and wrote a small piece about it. This is what my final double page radio listings looked like...

In the column I wrote about our radio drama, I added a quote saying "This is a very exciting new drama to hit radio and I'm sure it will be a great success. It was put together by college students and they have really exceeded their levels with this drama, showing the audeince that they are capable of anything. Its one of those programs that once you start listening to, you have to no what happens. It really is gripping" I think quotes work really effectively because it is giving the reader someones opinion who wasn't actually in the drama. Even though it may be biased because we are trying to launch the drama, it makes the reader believe that everyone loves the drama.

Combination of the main product and the ancillary task:
By creating an advertisment and a radio listings page this made the the whole task seem a lot more professional and felt that we had achieved a lot once all the pieces were created. The radio listings page and advertisement work really well together in order to help launch the radio drama. By placing the advertisment in a seperate column on the radio listing it gave the auidence the impression that it would be a popular choice. By importing the advert onto the radio listings gives the audience a visual image of what the characters will look like and make them feel more involved with the drama. I used the line "Listen...and make sure you hear" on my poster and I think this is another effective way of attracting the audience because its quite a witty line but it also refers to what happens in the drama. By having a few different ways to try and promote our radio drama, it is more likely that it is going to popular and listened to by the public.

Evaluation: What have I learned about audience feedback?

When our radio dramas were completed we had the opportunity to listen to feedback of our final piece. This was really exciting because it was the first time that everyone had got together and listened to everyones final radio dramas. After we had listened to all the dramas we got given a lot of feedback for our radio drama and this is what I conducted from that.

What the audience liked about our drama:

After looking at the feedback there were a lot of positive comments about the sound effects especially the phone calls, traffic and police noises. We, as a group also felt that these effects worked really well within the story so we were glad that the audience had also picked up on this. We also had positive comments about the how the music was used in the background whilst one of the characters was reading out the suicide note. They had commented on how it made the setting more sad and believable. I think this is a positive feedback because it was exactly what we were going for so to know that we acheived it was really good. They also wrote about the use of music for our theme tune. With our theme tune we used a song by Rihanna mixed with police sirens and cars crashing and we were hoping for it to be catchy. Along with other comments such as good editing and sound affects we also had a few comments that the storyline was really good. This was the most important part for us because even if the sound effects were amazing, nobody may have understood the story, and one person even commented that the use of raising awareness about rape was really well done seeing as it is something that happens in everyday life.

What the audience disliked about our radio drama:

Finding out what people disliked about our drama was also very important to us because then we can take it away and improve for next time. After looking at the feedback given there was a few mentions that it was hard to hear our voices because of the sound effects. As I was also listening to the drama I thought this was a valid point and something that I had personally written down about things that needed improving. Another point was that the audience thought it was quite staged and they could tell we were acting. Although im some places I have to agree, I felt that everybody acted to the best of their ability and seeing as noone was drama students in our groups we knew that it wasn't going to be the best acting however I thought that this critism may have been unnessecary but however something we will take on board for next time. Aswell as other points being made that it was 'too cheesy', 'mumbling' and 'too loud' we ourselfs were shocked to hear a massive bang at the end of the drama. None of us were really sure where this had come from and it was something that a few people had picked up on however next time we will have to make sure we proof listen to the work right up until the last minute it is sent off incase any adjustments are made that could affect the drama.

What could be technically improved:

When looking at what could be techincally improved from our audience feedback we got similar comments from everyone saying that some of the sound levels needed adjusting as the voices were getting drowned out in the background. I think this is a reasonable comment because sometimes it was hard to hear the actors especially if the music suddenly got really loud. Another point that was made was that the drama seemed a bit rushed and it made it harder for the audience to understand what was going as it was hard to keep up. I think due to the drama only allowed to being a certain length of time, did actually make us rush quite a bit however I felt that we included all the neccessary parts to the drama that were needed.

What could be improved in relation to the plot/storyline:

After seeing the audience feedback for what they believe could be improved we had a lot of positive comments saying that it was a good storyline and that it was fine. However a few people think that the plot could have been a bit more realistic and that they felt that too much happened. People were also interested to hear more about Roxy's boyfriend Joe as he didn't play a huge role in the drama and maybe we could have included him a bit more and told people who and what he was about. Emotion was also another factor that poped up in how we could improve. The audience wanted to see a lot emotion going into the drama in order to make the overall piece sound more realistic. Aswell as these points, transitions between the scenes also came up in the feedback and that the transition from one scene to another needed to be a lot clearer. I think this is true because we had so much going on throughout our drama it was hard to know where the charcters were at certain points throughout the drama.

What I thought of our audience feedback:

I thought the audience feedback helped a lot because it showed us where we need to improve next time and also made us feel really good about the parts that people liked. I felt very proud to know that people enjoyed the drama and thought that the use of sound effects was good as it was something that I worked really hard on. If there was anything I had to change in our drama now we have recieved our audience feedback would be the sound levels and maybe listen to the drama quite a few times in order to see where voices are getting drowned out and where certain sound effects work better than others. Even though these needed improving I was really happy with the sound effects we had used because it was our first times using soundtrack pro it made it a lot harder however I feel that we tackled the task well and managed to use the sound effects in a good way. Another thing I think I would improve would have to be our acting skills, but for our first attempt I was very pleased with what we had produced.

Evaluation: How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evalulation stages?

There were many things that we used to make our drama more convincing and effective. These things include the following..

Internet Explorer: This was one of the first things we used when researching about rape. We did this in order to help make the scene more realistic and to maybe put ourselfs in that position in terms of emotion. This helped us a lot because none of us were that familiar with the subejct. We also used internet explorer to help us get some of the soundtracks that we used in the drama. The tracks that we got from the internet included 'listen' by Beyonce and 'shut up and drive' by Rihanna.

Radio Recording Suite: We used the radio recording suite to actually record our drama. This was a new experiance for everyone in our group so we had to ask one of our friends to help us out a bit in order to show us what buttons to press and where to speak. This became provingly difficult as the sound levels of our voices became increasingly loud as we got really excited! The computer however helped us to make sure that we all kept our voices at the same level throughout and by wearing headphones it was easy to know when it was everyones turn to say there part.

Soundtrack Pro: By using soundtrack pro it enabled us to edit our radio drama and make sure that it was all in the right order. Having recorded the drama severall times it ment we could edit certain bits in and out to make sure we got the best quality drama. Soundtrack pro was a new program to me and I felt that I soon picked it up very quickly. After editing the whole drama to use for our final piece I had to add sound effects in. This was something that none of us were familiar with but once we got told how to do it, it became increasingly easier and I managed to get them all done fairly quickly. I also important certain music from the internet explorer onto soundtrack pro to use for background music and theme tunes. We used a variety of sound effects from soundtrack pro such as; footsteps, swimming, traffic, police sirens and helicopters. I really enjoyed using soundtrack pro and now I am used to it will definitely use it again in the future when creating similar pieces of radio drama. It played a very important role into creating our final piece.

Audio Hijack Pro: We didn't use this program for a lot of the sounds but just used it to get the music we needed of the internet. It was really usefull as it ment we had the ability to copy any song we wanted off the internet and then modify it ourselfs. Like with the rihanna song we edited it with sound effects and with the beyonce song we had it without the words. I found this program very good.

Digital Photography: We used digital photography in order to produce pictures for our advertisement. I had a really good time doing this and we took over 40 pictures just to make sure we had a good selection of the ones we wanted.

InDesign: I used InDesign a lot thoughtout this project. I used it in order to create the advertisement and the double page spread for radio listings. Having used Indesgin last year i didn't find it that hard. I found that it was the best program to use as it contained all the special features I needed in order to create a really good poster. As well as a good variety of colours and layouts, InDesign also has a lot of guidelines which can help when creating things like a double page spread. I was happy with what I produced on InDesign and found it very valuable to my double page spread an advertisement.

Photoshop: I used photoshop in order to edit the photos we had taken for the advertisement and double page spread. I found photoshop really usefull and having been familiar with it already it made it a lot easier and quicker for me to edit the picture to how i wanted it. I managed to make the picture look quite old and rustic which was what I wanted to go for. Im order to do this I made the picture to greyscale and then added certain colours slowly to give me a more orange/brown effect. After I had done this i changed the curves and blended out any parts of the picture that i felt were irrelevant. I think it was the perfect program to use in order to do what I needed because it was quick and easy and produced a really good finish to the photos.

Evaluation: In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Our radio drama contained a lot of concepts that are used in good radio dramas. In 'The Archers' they have many different storylines and activites going on throughout which is what we had in our radio drama. All radio dramas contain conventions however these change depending on the type of genre the drama is. Our drama contained many different parts to it such as fallouts, rape, suicide and lying. The storyline is a really important part to radio drama conventions because without it the listeners will not be interested in listening to it. Also sound effects are another important convention because it makes the storyline a lot more believable if people can imagine the scene in their heads. Due to radio not being visual, the conventions that are used have a different effect.

When listening back at our drama we realised that some of our sound effects and voices were really loud and that the sound levels needed changing. It is important that the sound levels are all the same pitch so that it is easy to hear what the speaker on the radio is saying. We also reaslised when recieving out audience feedback that some of the characters needed developing more especially Joe. In a radio drama such as 'The Archers' all of the characters are well known to the audeince and the audience find it easier to relate to the characters this way however I felt that we didnt tell the audience enough about Joe's character so some people ended up not really knowing who he was or what role he was playing.

By using a linear storyline means that we have related our drama to other media products because by using a beginning, middle and end it makes the layout of the story a lot easier to follow. We also used a theme tune, speech and music in our radio drama which are all popular conventions of a radio drama.
We have used a lot of the natural conventions used in a radio drama even if they aren't as obvious.