The pre-production for our Radio Drama was a new venture for myself and my classmate. Radio is very different from what we were originally used to in our past media projects over the years. The radio itself is a lot different from film and television, with radio being just audio it presents different challenges.
Before we did any recording myself and Ryan Lock were given our extract of the script (who I worked with) and we went through the script and labelled the parts of the script where we thought the non-diegetic sound was necessary. We sourced these effects from the BBC and sites such as Freesound, we read through the script and we labelled where we thought the sound would be more effective, we looked over the script multiple times making sure that we didn't miss any opportunity to add an effect. We didn't use much foley sound as we believed that already existing sound effects could convey meaning better than foley could, that being said we did spend a few minutes creating our own and seeing how well it sounded, we created our own sounds for footsteps which we ended up not using, looking back we probably should've used more just in case we couldn't find the sounds we needed. We also spent time thinking of how we would act out parts of the script. For example: did certain lines in the script need to be said with more emotion to create the intended effect for the scene? There were some parts of the script that we felt needed some small changes, so we made some small alterations to the script, although they were minor. During the 'argument' we decided that we needed to say the lines louder and with more emphasis, as this argument was about a character needing to go back to their wife and as it is a delicate subject matter, any argument on the matter would be tense with a lot of emotion, specifically with the line 'you need to be with your wife Frankie' was a line that we chose to make louder as such a powerful statement needs to stand out from the rest of the script.
On our first day in the studio, we needed to get used to how everything worked and how we would set up for production, this involved needing to plug wires in, plug microphone and plugging the two speaker wires in also (we would do this by plugging in the microphone into the back of the computer) in and then log onto the computer to set up the recording software that we were using (This was Adobe Audition), before we would record we would always have a test recording, this is strictly to test that the microphones are working and that the audio is up to the standard that is required. If it wasn't we would usually just restart and set up all the equipment again and if that didn't fix it, we'd get help. We recorded using only one microphone which didn't set us back as much as I thought it would, as we only had one script we often had to sit over the shoulder of one another which would cause a few issues here and there but ultimately we learned to get used to it, and the recording sessions were successful and we got what we needed recorded without issue. We ran into a few issues throughout the production but the main issue was that in the studio we would record in had an air vent above where the recording equipment was, this meant that we had to say lines a lot louder than we would've wanted, however it was a positive as referenced before there were certain lines we would say louder, so when it came to these lines it wasn't an issue as we had to be louder because of the air vent, also we could counter this issue by editing the audio in post production by raising the decibels. A problem I believe we all didn't think we'd run into was just how much harder voice acting was. As someone looking in you would assume that voice acting is the easiest acting job you get, because unlike other acting jobs, all you need to do is talk, no stunts and no need to do anything extra. We all shared this sentiment when we first walked into the studio, we assumed that it would be easy, it wasn't as there'd be times where we'd be doing lines and one of us would stutter ruining the audio, I remember that we'd be more relaxed as we'd have conversations almost every minute of everyday so we simply thought: we're doing what we do every day, so it was a shock to us when we'd have frequent mistakes. To combat this issue we would have a read through the script before we'd start recording, we'd repeat the lines to each other so we would be more comfortable, as while recording we would sometimes get nervous as we wouldn't want to ruin the record, the irony being that the more we worried the more often we would make mistakes. Like I've referenced many times throughout this was my first time making a radio drama, and as the weeks progressed I was slowly noticing the same mistakes over and over again, and with any mistake, you need to find a solution and I believe that the main solution is that we simply needed more 'experience' working in radio-dramas, our lack of experience with the equipment and editing software did bring us down somewhat, occasionally when we'd set up equipment we'd accidentally not turn on one speaker switch and then when we'd go and record it would a ringing sound, small mistakes like this is a key example of our lack of experience, and I do believe that if we had a few months worth of studio time we'd have a much more successful time.
After finishing the pre-production aspect we then moved onto post-production and this is where we'd be able to get the best quality out of our audio. As referenced before there was an air vent that was above where we'd record, so in Adobe Audition we would certainly need to edit the audio so it was usable. How we'd do this is on Audition we would click on the audio that needs to be edited, go onto the effects menu and click noise removal, there we can choose how we want to edit the audio, we play around with the different settings that are available, we then settled on lowering the decibels which in turn improved the audio. The reason we did this is that we knew that we needed to as the air vent was in every part of our recording, so before we even got into editing we knew that we'd have to deal with it. Also, we spent a long time recording audio and we couldn't have it ruined by an air vent, despite the audio not being perfect we edited it to the best quality that it can be. We also added in the aforementioned sound effects that we downloaded from the sites cited earlier, as we'd managed to edit the air vent noise out of the audio it made it a lot easier to insert the audio as we weren't distracted by any sounds that shouldn't be there. Finally, after a long editing process we finally were finished our radio drama, before being able to say that we were certainly finished. We listened to our whole production from start to finish more than once just so we wouldn't miss any potential edits that we might've needed to do, we wanted to make sure and despite it being a tedious thing for some, I'd rather be safe than sorry. As a precaution we had all the audio and effects that we recorded backed up just in case our file corrupted and we needed to do the entire edit again, the reason we did this as in our past media projects we've all suffered this at least once, losing an entire project through something that wasn't your fault and needing to do an entire edit again (it's happened to me before and the frustration at needing to do it again is something that I wouldn't want to experience again).
