Author Topic: Radio plays  (Read 4325 times)

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leastlikely

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Radio plays
« on: Dec 27, 2012, 11:55 am »
Does anybody have any experience in managing a radio play (or podcast, or something along those lines)? I'm entering completely new territory and am wondering if anybody has any words of wisdom.

nick_tochelli

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Re: Radio plays
« Reply #1 on: Dec 27, 2012, 04:12 pm »
Like a live Radio Play? Is it staged as if it were a Radio play?

I produce a podcast on a near weekly basis but it's basically just an analysis podcast (think of it like the Talking Dead airing after the Walking Dead except I was podcasting about zombies before they were talking about them...).

So what else can you tell us about the production?

Liz113

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Re: Radio plays
« Reply #2 on: Dec 27, 2012, 09:56 pm »
I don't have experience SMing them but my girlfriend directed both It's A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol the radio plays. If your talking about plays done as though they are radio plays- the actors play many characters, read off of scripts, stand at mics with on air signs and a foley artist doing all the cool sound effects that is....

If this is what you mean then my main advice from watching those processes is to bring a tape recorder (or use your computer) to record the actors doing different voices so they can refer back to what they've tried and the director can make decisions on the voices.

What play are you doing?

leastlikely

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Re: Radio plays
« Reply #3 on: Dec 28, 2012, 02:45 am »
Yes, it's staged as a radio play. This company does one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare and airs them on our local NPR affiliate. Well actually we have 58:30, because of intro/outro text framing our one-hour slot. This is a six-person production of Taming of the Shrew (bilingual with Spanish, because we needed another challenge!).

We have the enormous luxury of being allowed to use the NPR studio for a couple of our rehearsals, so we will be doing recorded readings throughout the rehearsal process and sending the CDs home with the actors each time so they can work on their voices (since nobody plays fewer than 2 characters). So we have actual radio engineers working with us on mic technique ("if you're going to be yelling this line, you need to be at this angle so you don't pop your plosives, and this distance so you don't blow out the speakers" etc) which is super helpful.

We have a designer who will write the foley, but the actors will be performing it. In addition to that, I'll be running music and other sound cues. The extent of the blocking is "Actor X crosses to Foley Table" and "Actor X crosses back to mic."

megf

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Re: Radio plays
« Reply #4 on: Dec 28, 2012, 11:21 am »
I did It's a Wonderful Life with live foley! Really fun. One actor was cast as the Foley Artist, and did about 90 percent of the cues live onstage, and the designer supplemented with a handful of called cues. What the cast found most helpful was a LOT of practice with the foley props - we had foodstuffs, water, bells, rocks, hammers, trays of stuff, several pairs of shoes, a foley door, etc. Running the lines wasn't quite enough; we learned that the foley had to be treated as another voice, and given space to land, just as a speaking part would be. (I played the foley part during some early rehearsals: banging on the table and calling out "door opens!")