Radio - 1

To begin this blog entry I am going to tell you what I have and am doing in the radio section of my two year course. I will be explaining what why and how the script for group project was done. I hope to be able to give a good idea into how all of these choices came about and inform you on the way radio is produced and recorded.

Group Project:
We began the group project by being put into our groups, mine consists of Paige, Dan, Reece, Charlotte and myself. The group started to get into working as a group on the media of radio by reading together an old Flash script from the 1930's which was interesting because we were able to see how radio was performed and annotated in the 30's. Learning about radio for us began with the beginning where the shows performed were quite primitive and the sound effects weren't that good, it gave us a good indicator as to how we didn't want our piece to sound like and how we also wanted it to sound. The choosing process began with each person in the group bringing in a radio script of their choice mine was, The Importance Of Being Earnest. I chose this script because I had previously heard the play on the radio and very much enjoyed it and thought having a go and trying to do our own radio version would be a lot of fun. We all had a look at the different scripts everyone had brought in which presented us with a wide range of choice, in the end we chose Paige's piece which is, The War Of The Worlds. I felt that this was a good choice for our group as it gave us a lot to work with in terms of characters and plot line, The War Of The Worlds is a radio drama that is based on the book of the same name by H.G.Wells the play was originally narrated by Orson Welles and was performed as a special Halloween episode that was so believable that it cased chaos and Orson Welles was forced to come back on air and issue an apology for any problems this may have caused any of the public or anyone else. The drama is dramatic and holds a lot of potential and so it was chosen as our piece. We began by reading the chosen drama through a few times to get a feel for the piece and find our own pace to the play. Once the pace had been established and the play was far more familiar the part choosing began, this was done by finding out which characters we needed people for and then matching everyones strengths to their suitable character choice so as to have the best effect for the piece. We also wanted to get started and start to annotate and learn our roles so that we would find working on the play a lot easier in the long run when we do our final performance and need to be at our best. Once we had finalised all of the main details that we needed to begin such as casting and the play itself, everything started to work a lot faster. Now we are reading and re-reading our script in our roles to try to establish the correct vocal tone and pace that will suit our part, this includes accents, pitch and also annotating so that we are able to remember when these things come into the play and need to be used to create the best performance we can. We started to work on choosing the sound effects that would work well with the piece, this included searching through different ranges of Spanish music for the Ramon Raquello section. The Spanish music was interesting to sort through as we wanted it to retain it's Spanish influence and yet also reflect the atmosphere of the piece and set the scene. We then also chose where we felt sound effects would be appropriate, such as scenes where there is supposed to be an explosion or a crowd behind the reporter. During this process we also went through the script a few times as a group using the effects alongside our words to not only get a real feel as to how the end product would sound like but also to see where we might have missed something and needed to add in the sound effect to make it a better sound piece.

The British Broad Casting company (BBC) was formed in 1922 on the 18th of October, the first play that was written for audio was A Comedy Of Danger and was broadcast on the 15th of January in 1924 this piece was written by Richard Hughes and was revered by the critics, the play was a huge hit mostly because it was written for Radio and not originally as a play it was specifically for the format of Radio Broadcast. Before this monumental step the only type of play that had been shown on Radio was a version of William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, this was broadcast on the 16th of February 1923, this was also well received by the public as it was a new form of entertainment that could be enjoyed from the home. This was a new form of entertainment for the country as it showed that the country was developing well, the 20's were a time of innovation and new trends, the world was changing and so was the aspect of broadcasting. This was the time when plays and dramas were written especially for Radio and it was a huge hit with the public and more were commissioned and so the art of Radio Drama was born.  This changed the way I engaged with my character because of all the things going on in the background of the era. The war happened a year later and even so political tensions were high, this meant that as a reporter I needed to add that level of caution to my voice. The Social and economic situation at the time of the original broadcast was dodgy, there was a recession and nothing was going smoothly especially with the threat of another world war. This changed my ideas of how the presenter would report the bad news of the alien attack, it made me think that a lot more caution is needed in the voice to show the delicate social, political and economic situation. This play uses sci-fi and realism to engage it's audience, creating the realistic approach to a real broadcast on a main channel allowing a lot of listeners to hear the show. The show relies on the way that it is written, with real reporters acting in and producing the effect of a real studio broadcast, this in turn created the mayhem that happened with the original show and made people believe that the alien invasion was real. The original show was done with one narrator, we changed this to a few instead to allow each member of the group to have a good part, we did keep the monologues in as we felt that they made the whole piece more dramatic but divided them up between group members. The pace of the piece is varied, it changes from reporter to reporter, with the main reporters it goes in a much slower and monotone voice, when the reporter is talking from the scene it goes a lot quicker as they are reporting a scene that is changing very quickly.