Week 1 – 31st January 

During the week Jeremy sent extracts from 8 scripts to us all, for us to read. In class we took turns reading through each of them. After this we were put into our groups, and went away to decide what our roles would be and pic out top three favourite scripts.

The roles for my group are;

Me (charity) – Producer

Connor – Director

Callum – Studio Manager

Vanessa – Production Co-Ordinator

Alex I – Script Editor

When we got to do our top choice for our audio drama, which was “Out of Bounds”

Week 2 – 7th February

This week we got to work on mic technique and how to place and direct people in the room. We learnt about the 5 positions that actors can be in, and how they are used to create different sounds.

After we went through these techniques as a class, we were given scripts to choose a few pages from and practice recording and directing them. My group tested out the difference in sound between the room and the booth. Which was ver useful, as we realised it will be important for us to use the booth to create the atmosphere of a plane (where the majority of our drama is set)

Week 3 – 14th February 

I was wasn’t feeling very well this week and so I couldn’t make it to class. I did do some work from home though, going through my script and annotating it with any points I felt are in need of attention or alteration. I was told by the rest of my group and other members of the class, that they spent the day mostly doing more practice recordings, this time of the real script’s that we are using.

Week 4 – 21st February 

Today, we had a talk from John Wakefield who produced Wooden Overcoats. This was a brilliant opportunity to learn about the do’s and don’t of radio drama. He talked about ways he decided to do things that went really well and then things that just didn’t work, this was really helpful information to have as it gave me a clearer idea of how we should be going about recording. In the afternoon we got the chance to have a go at editing together some audio that he had provided for us. This was to teach us about how to use reverb, compression etc to achieve a sense of space and dimension in an auditory world. I found this very helpful as my teams audio drama is set mostly on a plane, and so we are going to need to use a decent amount of effects to make it sound believable.

Week 5 – 28th February 

I was agin feeling under the weather this week, so didn’t make it into class. I spend my day going through the essay questions, weighing up the pros and cons of each, planning out how I could answer them, and then finally deciding which if the questions I am going to do for my essay. I also started thinking more in depth about how we are going to edit our drama to make it feel as though it is really taking place on a plane.

Week 6 – 6th February

This was the final week for pre-production, and so I arranged for my group to meet and go through everyones thoughts of the script, and any ways in which people felt tat it should be changed. We also discussed the logistics of how we are going to record our audio, and generally ensured that everyone present was sure of exactly what all of our on the day roles are.

Week 7 – 13th February

This was our production/recording day. We were assigned the morning slot, so I arrived at 9am to ensure everything was in order. There were some issues with transport so some of the team arrived later than planned but most of us were still able to make it before our actors. We has a bit of a rough start to the morning as all of the nearest printers were jammed and so Connor had to run all the way to the library to print of the scripts. After we got to the read through things started going better.  There was a little bit of a learning curve at the beginning as none of us had experience recording, directing or producing an audio drama and our actors seemed a little unsure of how to act things out without people seeing them. After a short while, I think we all started to get the hang of it. Once Connor and I explained that even though people wouldn’t see the actions that our actors were doing, it would still sound better with movement they all seemed to get more into it, and they became more relaxed as the morning went on. We managed to make up the time that we lost and finished recording on time, this was helped by making sure that we had the next scene we wanted to record ready to go and planned out before they finished the last, and by having Alex in the room with the actors to move boards and panels when we needed it. Overall I think our recording went really well, and we got plenty of different versions of scenes to make a brilliant audio drama.

Week 8 – 20th February 

I arranged a group meeting for Tuesday to begin editing the drama, not everyone was able to make it but we did managed to make a good start on it and put all of the dialogue clips in the correct order. We also selected which takes were the best and put them all together to make it run smoothly. Unfortunately, there was some sort of interference with our audio, meaning there is a static sound over all of the audio we recorded. I ran noise reduction on it to remove as much as possible, and although it did effect the quality of the sound, I think we did the best we could with what we had. Due to the Uni closing and government enforced lockdown and social distancing we are not able to meet and edit the drama together. This was obviously a very unexpected road block, but I think I managed to come up with a fair and creative way to combat the problem. As all of us had to take part in the edit process, I decided It would be fairest to give Connor, Alex I, and Callum 5 minutes of the drama each and dedicated days for them as well. Vanessa had never edited any audio before and so it wasn’t really feasible for her to physically get involved with editing the drama. In oder to make sure she was still involved she was given the opportunity to select and music or sound effects she thought would work well, as well as an ideas for how the drama should sound. I took care of the opening and closing credits, and also went through the drama after they had made all of their edits and did a bit of fine tuning. It was mostly okay, there were just a few little pieces missing (the twitter scene, and pilot announcements), some of the effects were too loud or too quiet and at some points there was too much or too little atmos. I smoothed out all of these little bumps and then had a call with each of the group members to make sure everyone was happy with the final outcome before submitting. It is unfortunate that we encountered the problems that we did, and sadly they were out of our control. I do feel that had things gone differently, our final output would have been better. However, I think we did the best we possibly could given the circumstances.

Out of Bounds –