My audio for a radio drama

For this project we had to make an audio drama but before we started anything we looked at different types of radio dramas, that already existed. to get an idea in our head of what we want to do for our own audio.

We then got given a task to come up with our own but we did get two examples of what we could create an audio drama for, just in case we were struggling to come up with ideas. The examples where: A monopoly game that gets nasty and police are called because people get into a fight. The second one was where a violent vigilante that shoots it’s way into a criminal hideout because they need to rescue a kidnapped child. However, I didn’t want to use any of these, so came up with my own.

This is the link that helped me come up with ideas for my own audio drama: https://discoverpods.com/audio-drama-podcasts-fiction/

After thinking of ideas for a radio drama we had to create a “Treatment” , which is basically a short paragraph of what’s going to happen in your drama. Once I wrote a treatment of my radio drama, called ‘The game that turned into a horror prank’, I then timed it including all the actions because the audio had to be approximately 2 minutes long.

My treatment:

I’m sorry about the fact the picture is blurry it’s because we typed it up using macs and it wouldn’t let me print screen so it was quicker to just take a picture of it with my phone. I hope you can still manage to read it.

I then started to think of dialogue for a script. My first version of the script timed to being exactly 1 minute 58 seconds with changing a few bits as I was timing it. Although, when I completed my audio I noticed that audacity said it was 1 minute 40 seconds and as you know my radio needed to be 2 minutes. Therefore, I decided to include a voice over of which you can see in my script below.

Here is my script:

Again, the pictures are blurry but I hope you can still read it.

One thing that I forgot to mention in my script is how I used quiet music, that plays along with my voice over. This is the website I got my copyright free music from:

To create the voices I used a website called https://notevibes.com/ and with this website there are many accents to choose from and you can change the speed and pitch of the voice but when I tried them out by changing the voices I preferred the original so kept them both the same. The ones I chose where Rick (standard US) and David (standard US). Even though we had a chose to record our own voice, I wanted to use note vibes because when your using your own voice you tend to make more mistakes, so by using this website I think it was generally quicker. One bad thing about note vibes is that the voices are quite emotionless, which isn’t good especially if you want a character to sound scared.

Furthermore, I moved on to important the voices and sound effects to audacity, which is a software on the macs. In my opinion, the first couple goes on audacity are quite difficult but then practice makes perfect and it becomes easier to work around.

This is what audacity looks like when you are editing all your different dialogue and sounds:

If you listen to my audio and look back at my script you can see I have included a few sound effects and I got the majority of them from this website because they were copy right free: http://soundbible.com/. I didn’t make my own sound effects because I feel like it would’ve took longer to create.

We also had a chose to record our own sound effects or use ones from the internet and the reason I chose ones from the internet is because I felt like it would be quicker as recording your own can take a bit of time to get it perfect to how you want the sound to be.

The video below is my first version:

The reason that I am calling this my first version is because we had some technical difficulties with the Macs, which made it remove my final version with the voice overs because of that the Macs where updated and deleted audacity, so we had problems with downloading audacity onto the software but eventually I was able to get access to audacity.

Here is my final audio drama:

Before I talk about how my audio went, I would like to give some examples of audios that gave me inspiration for mine. Here are some of the audios below:

https://player.fm/series/fireside-mystery-theatre/ep-481-holiday-haunts-2019-the-gingerbread-man

https://player.fm/series/the-two-princes/ep-03-cracking-up-and-crashing-down

The audios above are all drama audios but based they all have different stories. One of the things that these audios have in common (which inspired me for my idea) is that they use many sound effects. I like the idea of sound effects because if you close your eyes (for example) you can imagine the whole scene whereas without sound effects it doesn’t give the same effect, therefore that is why I have used sound effects in my audio.

Overall, the thing that went well is the use of the sound effects because they all turned out really good just how I wanted them to be but the reason being is that I used effects that already exist. Moreover, if I were to make my audio drama again the thing that I would definitely change is to have other people be my characters voices only because the notevibes voices where/are quite boring and emotionless and I need them (at some parts of my audio) to sound scared or to whisper. On the other hand, I am very impressed with the outcome of my audio drama, I hope you like it too!