UNIT 5

Audio Production and Technology

Potential ideas for Unit 5.

Primary research.

Idea number 1:

Two people are talking about a game in a review style podcast. They both have their own take on the game. One thinks it is great and the other thinks it is complete shite. They try to convince the other that the game in question is either good or bad.

Idea number 2:

A man is on the brink of execution, but the one who sentenced him to death, makes him an offer - to find the real criminal. He will have the next five days to find the real culprit. The man who ordered the execution, also said that for the next five days, while he is trying to find the murderer, he will be followed. The man was sentenced to death because he could not provide any evidence to prove that he was not the killer. He claimed that his memory was a blur. However, as the story unfolds the man gains flashbacks of how the murder happened by the clues that they found. Is he guilty? Who knows?

The story fits into the mystery / psychological genre.

Idea number 3:

A normal group of five friends are going camping. They are all set for the best weekend of their life. They thought they would all go home unharmed but none of them ever returned, except for the youngest who was only fourteen years old. The story follows the fourteen year old as he battles the great outdoors and the thing inside of him.

Mystery / horror genre.

The idea that gained the most votes was the third one. The first one received zero votes, the second idea, two votes and the third idea, four votes. People liked the third idea because it is not the classic 'everyone lives happily ever after'. In the third story line, almost all of them die. It also has the advantage of leaving the audience on a cliffhanger because the description that I outlined above is vague in order to make the audience think about what's happened.

Analysis of Primary Research

From this exercise, I gathered that he third idea was the most favoured, therefore that is the story line that I will work on. Additionally I also recorded the faces of my group when my play was read. Unfortunately, I am unable to include that on my blog but it did give me valuable information to use in my play.

Mood Board

Secondary research.

For secondary research, I decided to look at a serial podcast about Hae Min Lee who, a popular high-school senior, disappeared after school one day. Six weeks later detectives arrest her classmate and ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, for her murder. He says he's innocent - though he can't exactly remember what he was doing on that January afternoon. But someone can. A classmate at Woodlawn High School says she knows where Adnan was. The trouble is, she too is nowhere to be found.

I researched how popular this serial podcast was and it enjoyed a noticeable amount of success. I really enjoyed it myself and therefore was not surprised that other people also liked it.

For me, the target audience I will most likely be aiming at is 17 to 19 year old teenagers. Clearly they would be interested in crime and murder cases.

For these next questions I will be focusing on the first episode as I think that this will be the one that you have to hear in order to be drawn in to the story. That being said the podcast draws in its audiences by say that they have to remember key characters that play a role in the end result. It also has the fact that it is a murder mystery story and that will encourage the audience to keep listening to find out how it ends.

The serial podcast achieved this by having key characters in the play, having a conversation with the narrator. They also bring in other characters to make you think that what they have to say will help the defendant's case, but it does not.

Music used

Season One’s original score comes from both Nick Thorburn, who wrote the theme song, and Mark Henry Phillips, who mixed the show. Mark is a composer and sound designer and has worked on many films such as the Oscar-nominated Cutie and the Boxer. When not scoring and mixing films, he releases music under the name Sono Oto.

This podcast will inform my own podcasts by having a narrator at the beginning and end. The narrator in my idea will be the 14 year old. At the start of the play he would say something thing like; "I always enjoyed camping with my friends. We went regularly and would always be prepared for anything but nothing prepared us for our last camping trip. This is my story." That opening would create an atmosphere of respect for the 14 year old and start the intrigue.

The second influence that relates to my podcast is the classic Friday the 13th film from 1980.

This film has had numerous sequels that refer back to the original so it would stand to reason that it would have a large amount of success.

The target audience is young teenagers, perhaps 15 to 19 becayse the murder is gory but not too graphic that would lead it to be rated as an 18 certificate. Friday the 13th may also target young adults because, after all, who doesn't love a good murder story?

The film cleverly draw's the audience in by having all the characters die in different ways - not one of them is killed in a similar way to another.

In addition, the people watching will want to know the identity of the killer, so by waiting until the end for the big reveal. it keeps the audience watching and on the edge of their seats.

This will inform my radio podcast because I will see that if every time a character dies, the 14 year old might have said something to darken the mood.

Additionally I researched a real life event, the Billy Milligan story, an American who was the subject of a highly publicised court case in Ohio in the late 1970s. The way that I saw the story was that he had a multiple personality disorder and it was one of those personalities in his head that made him commit murder and rape.

I thought that this was very interesting and that it would be good to include a similar disorder. However the thing is, his head controls his body but allows his mind to be aware of what is happening. I am using this in my research as my podcast has a psychological aspect to it .

This is a video that i watched about him.

Target audiences

My target audience comprises teenagers from approximately the age of 14 to 19 who enjoy podcasts with a supernatural and psychological genre. of podcasts. The audience will also like to hear something where all the characters don't have a happy ending. My guess is that they will have heard Serile Season One and want to enjoy more podcasts like that one.

Script

Script for podcast

Script for podcast page 2

Script for podcast page 3

Script for podcast page 4

Script for podcast page 6

Script for podcast page 5

Script for podcast page 7

After recording the script I put it all in to Audition and edited it to fit what I had envisioned what it should sound like. This is the final project.

Evaluation

My script took time and effort to make but I believe that the story flows well and the sound effects work, where they have been included, to enhance the overall feel. This makes the finished piece of work a good script. The formatting that I used also makes it easier to read and all the characters have been given clear breaks in the script to highlight where their particular lines end and start.

The acting in my podcast took many tries to get right because some lines were said incorrectly or background sound made it hard to hear the actors. Some actors found it hard to make realistic sounding voices or laughter. In the end though the actors worked hard, pulled through and got through the script without making any mistakes or laughing which would have meant scrapping that recording and starting again.

My sound effects did not take long to find. They were sometimes too long but I cut them down to the right length. I also had to find the right part of the sound to make it all sound realistic and good in the final project. For example I used a thundering sound in the editing which was 25 minutes long. In order to use it I had to go through the entire 25 minutes to find the parts that I wanted to use in my podcast. The same thing happened with the sounds of cars passing by at the beginning..

The technical aspects were basically what worked on in Audition, meaning all of the editing. During the editing process, there were a lot of long pauses where some of the actors had forgotten their lines, so those gaps had to be cut out to make the dialogue run more smoothly and not make it blindingly obvious that they had forgotten their lines. I also had to cut out all of the background sounds that were not going over any of the lines but were still picked up on the recording. I used this trick in reverse by adding a pause for the sound effects to fit in were they were supposed to be. I also used some of the effects so that the voices that were meant to be inhuman sounded inhuman.