How to make a radio drama Jack Tanner unit 42

1. How To Guide – Radio Drama
By Jack Tanner

2. • One of the sounds you need in radio drama is
silence. Radio is very much like film, a producer
will often use silence and depth of focus to
construct a mental image for the listener - you can
zoom in to things and then leave it quiet, this is a
technique often used.
Codes

3. • Aural signposting a technique used for establishing the location
at the beginning of a scene. This is done by effects, spot or FX,
and can be backed by a description of the surroundings.
• A melodramatic adventure series in which each instalment ends
in suspense (cliff hanger) to keep the listener interested in the
series and make them more likely to tune into the next episode.
• A literary or cinematic device in which an earlier event is inserted
into the normal chronological order of a narrative.
• Characterizing – the artistic representation (as in fiction or
drama) of human character or motives
• The act of developing a character emotionally or physically
through a continued lapse of time.
Conventions

4. • style in your radio drama focus on what your target audience interests
revolve around. Stereotyping your audience is very useful as you can give a
style to your drama that is appropriate to your audience for example if your
target audience is OAP’s then you as a producer may want to use language
relevant to them instead of modern day slang.
• Dramatic reconstruction within a radio drama is recreating a whole scene by
using different sounds, for example a train stations would involve the
sounds of trains coming and leaving, crowds bustling about and the sounds
of people talking on the intercom about train related information. This
sound would be in the background while the main story continues above all
the background noise such as a dialogue or narrator.
• The most common styles and genres within radio dramas are horror,
mystery, post-modern, comedy and creation of mind. The genres are the
most common as the environments are easy to recreate with foley artists
and dialogue.
Styles

5. • When structuring your radio drama it’s important to
consider how long it’s going to be, plot and how the
narrative’s structure is played out.
• Most radio dramas are roughly 20 minutes to an hour Long
• The narration of the drama must be in present tense or
past tense, relevant to what is happening in the scene, but
not bore the audience by being too descriptive by for
example talking for a long period of time about the details
of irrelevant information regarding someone’s pointless
item of clothing. For example “Steve threw his bag onto
his old wooden kitchen table”
Structure