Sound effects, voice, silence and music.

The four main elements of radio production are sound effects, voice, silence and music; we had to consider these elements carefully during the production of our radio drama.

We had to use sound effects to create atmosphere and realism in our piece and we attained sound effects by trawling through the sound effect libraries on the college computers and also by recording audio from the internet. We did this using a programme called Audio Hijack pro, this programme enabled us to record off the internet to use on our recording. We also recorded our own sound effects using college equipment, we recorded the sound of a door opening and closing because the other door sound effects we found didn't sound right on our recording.
I think we used sound effects competently in our radio drama, the sound effects I think work most effectively are in the opening scene when the siren and the helicopter go past. A doppler effect was used on the siren to make it sound like it was going past which adds realism. I also particularly liked the sound effects in La Boosh bar when The Sconer and Abby are talking, these effects are from the sound effect library and I like them because they really set the scene.

Here's a clip of the first scene with all the sound effects, Justice is at the crime scene in the middle of the city.

Here's the same clip, this time without any sound effects. This version was very early on in the editing stage before we had considered sound effects. This version is very rough and unrealistic as it has no supporting sound effects.


Here's a clip of the sound effects in the scene between Sconer and Abby. The sound effects here are the people talking and the 50s jazz music. These sound effects make the scene more convincing and add to the atmosphere.




We set our radio drama in Detroit to stick to the authentic film noir style which meant that we had to record with American accents, as opposed to our English accents, we also had to write the script in a similar way to old film noir scripts by using American terminology and 1950s colloquial language because this added to the realism of the piece. The accents and the strange lingo proved to be quite difficult at first because as we were afraid it might make our radio drama seem light hearted and we kept on slipping back into our original accents but after recording multiple times our accents improved tremendously and we had enough to use in post-production. We needed a lot of material to work with as their were some sound disturbances in our recordings such as page turning and noisy students, but recording multiple times meant we were able to get around any unwanted audio.

Here is a clip from Transgression to illustrate the American accent and language



We used music in our piece as a link at the beginning, after "previously" until the start of the episode, and to set the atmosphere. We found the a short jingle in the royalty free music archive at college and added sound effects to it to create a theme tune for our drama. We also found a 50s style jazz song in the archive which we used in the scene between The Sconer and Abby and added people sound effects to make it sound like people were talking around them.

Silence was the best way to indicate scene changes to the audience without complicating or cheapening the drama. Although it might seem difficult to decipher the sound of silence, it was obvious to the audience which silences were scene changes because the rest of the drama was generally quite noisy; with sound effects and ambient noises etc. Silences and pauses were also used within the script to add emotion and humanity to the dialogue.