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.