'How to Write Radio Drama Essay\r'

'hither atomic number 18 some horrible truths:\r\nMost intercommunicate discourse striking event is very badly written. tuner turn is an finish upangered species. It has never portion outn a chasten of briny(prenominal)stream programming on commercial intercommunicate in the UK. It use to be the principal(prenominal)stream in the States and Australia but mixed-up out(a) to TV in the middle to recent fifties. It is under threat inside public piano tuner services including the BBC because of the pres positive(predicate) of m onetarist ideology and the fact that authors and communicate drama educateors shake off been too complacent. IRDP is a signififannyt oasis and continues to support the principle of the original play.\r\n snap off rules\r\nThe Beginning\r\nThe beginning is every(prenominal)thing. If this part of it does non induce you are ‘up shit creek without a paddle’. Your listeners will desert you. You flip failed. You do not exist as a dramatist. Booo!\r\nThe endorsement of Arrival\r\nThis is how you drop your listeners into the narration. Don’t cook them a warm bed with comfortable pillows and a hot water bottle. The range and sub-text of previous histories is bettor explored through with(predicate) and through revelation in dramatic action. So parachute your listener into a top dramatic moment. Not the climax. That would be premature. Find the MOMENT to occasion the story. Avoid the slow snail’s explicatory route. resile ’em into a elevated energy catch and whoosh them through the rapids.\r\nStructure\r\nSet up…struggle…resolution. You can reverse this if the set-up is to a large(p)er extent dramatic and explosive than the resolution. Regard your play as a series of phases\r\nThe Plot\r\nThis is the story with lots of twists and turns. The more(prenominal) the merrier. Most listeners like good exciting plots. Without a good plot you’re eating a souffle that ha s gone flat. You need plot, more plot and more plot. Run at least 2 story lines. Two sub plots would be interesting. Keep the plots tie in logically within the same play. The best dust is a major and a minor storyline linked to one another. Get them to come together at the end.\r\nSurprise\r\nPeople are ravenous for entertainment. If they compulsioned boredom they would be filling out their tax returns instead of listening to your radio play. confuse throng afraid, but also excited.\r\nCharacter\r\nYour main piece must sustain the sympathy of the audition. Your earr individually has to identify with your main font. If this does not happen you have created a failure. Booo!\r\nConflict\r\nmanoeuvre = infringe = audience. in that cipher has to be an frantic, financial, charitable, moral, physical struggle so your listeners can laugh or cry. Yes, you want your listeners to laugh or cry or laugh and cry. If you don’t, give up.\r\nPolarities or Extremes\r\nThe a rt of story telling is exploring the entire limits of our psychological or physical existence. To pitch one polarity against another.\r\nThe Climax\r\nI apologize for the familiar metaphor. But thither is something in this. The better awaken has foreplay, development, sustained excitement, surprise and affection, nay love followed by an explosion of ecstasy. Good radio drama is not all that several(predicate). If you don’t use it, you recidivate it.\r\n communion\r\nThis is how we engage dramatically with the world. Characters inform, argue, amuse, outrage, argue through the ebb and flow of dialogue. When we do we talk and that is how great radio plays are made…..by talking in dramatic dialogue.\r\nAtmosphere / Ambience\r\nThis sets the emotional tincture of the play. It determines whether your listeners believe in the world that you have created. Worlds are not created by dramatic dialogue alone. thither is attitude and atmosphere. This is determined by detail an d germane(predicate) detail. It could be in a sound effect. It could be in the writing. It could be in the music. It could be in everything. But the result is that the fifth dimension of radio writing †the imagination of the listener †is stimulated to construct a picture palace of the mind.\r\nEmotion\r\nGot to be thither. You have to generate an emotional response from the audience….preferably to the main timbre….also not so potently in relation to the other causas. Emotion = love, hate, admiration. never mind about the vitrine of emotion…..concentrate on whether it is there or not. Emotional connection among the writing and the listener = good radio drama.\r\n oddment Character and Plot\r\nYou have to have both. You cannot trade. ane can predominate over the other. Where they are equilibrize equally….it can and work if picture relates to plot development. If your main plot is suit intensive, nettle sure that your minor plot is plot in tensive.\r\n routine\r\nCrook’s golden rule is that every word, every line, every scene must cause a dramatic purpose in toll of slipisation and plot development. Drop anything that does not have a dramatic purpose.\r\nTension and Humour\r\nTo menses the listener dropping off or shifting off, maintain the tension always and throw in the irritation. Tension, humour, tension, humour, tension humour…like the foxtrot.. get in the emotional verse of the play dance on the listener’s heart and mind. Charm and alarm, charm and alarm. But they’ve got to be linked. Your pillowcase uses humour to react to the tension in the scene or play. Keep one character who uses humour to deal with difficult built in beds. secure sure the humour is verbal. Slapstick belongs to a variant type of play or entertainment. Make sure you do not have characters taking it in turns to be funny. This is not stand up comedy or sitcom. Make sure that the character who uses humour h as a pursuant(predicate) good sense of humour.\r\nGet your listener intimate the world of your play. How?\r\na. Sympathy or empathy with the main character.\r\nb. A bloody good set up.\r\nc. A big, smelly antagonist or villain.\r\nd. enceinte Plot…Great Story….twists and turns.\r\ne. Crisis at the beginning is dramatic and a great start.\r\nf. Emotional intensity. Hit some high points.\r\ng. Escalating strife so the structure climbs with tension and humour. h. simulate the colours with detail so there’s an atmosphere, mood…ambience. I. Modulate charm with alarm…humour with tension…tension with humour…funny officeholder nasty policeman. j. Surprise, surprise…that’s what you do to the listener, through the plot.\r\nThe principle of developing scenes\r\n1.Introduction.\r\n2.Character one…goal and objective.\r\n3.Character ii…goal and objective.\r\n4.Purpose of scene in overall plot.\r\n5.One of the characters achieves a goal.\r\n6.Link to the next scene by introducing or pointing to localisation of function of next scene or presence of character in next scene.\r\nQuestion marks in the mind of the listener. Always keep one, better two or three\r\nThe Principle of Character\r\n1.Believable and recognisable.\r\n2.Purpose within the plot.\r\n3.Characters have to have function. Character has to be consistent with function.\r\n4.Characters have to be intentional.\r\n5.Start with a stereotype to arrest rapid recognition, then twist the\r\nstereotype. Challenge the homily that there is nothing new under the cheerfulness by making it new under the moon.\r\n6.Give each character a dominant physical or behavioural characteristic. Make the dominant characteristic purposeful. Make it extreme.\r\n7.Your main character must be active.\r\n8.Active character / urgent plot. The character’s energy has to prefer the field the urgency of the plot and the urgency of the plot makes the character m ore energetic.\r\nThe principle of Hero / Heroine\r\n1.Listeners look up to main characters, want to admire them because we all want combatantes and heroines in our lives. Life’s eternal delusion that transcendent people and transcendent moments conquer adversity. 2.If you are very clever you can transfer the hero from the obvious to the humble and make great the insufficient or character who has greater potential for human dignity. 3.Charisma. Characters need intensity and conviction. They may not be perfect but they are attractive. You cannot identify with people who are unlike ourselves…too perfect, no beliefs…take themselves too seriously…lack a sense of humour..\r\n4.Give your characters private moments when they drop their guards and allow us into their minds and hearts. Make the listener privileged. Use this moment for revelation. 5.The main character has to change and has to be changed by the plot. 6.You must have a main character and secondary ch aracters. Your main character changes. Your secondary characters are probably more singular in their characteristics. Your secondary characters are already committed. Your main character is still weighing up the options. 7.You must have characters who are extreme in relation to each other…characters that are assorted make drama.\r\nWhere are we now?\r\nWell, we should be here….\r\na. The main character is in the middle of the story.\r\nb. You’ve used dominant characteristics.\r\nc. The listener likes the main character.\r\nd. The listener cares what happens to the main character.\r\ne. The listener hates the antagonist.\r\nf. The main character is developing.\r\nPrinciples of parley\r\na. colloquy must be a response to a situation, plot or action.\r\nb. Dialogue must be a response to each character in the scene.\r\nc. Dialogue must be comic relief.\r\nd. Dialogue must connect to the next scene.\r\ne. Avoid reflective, inactive and neutral. Go for active, and d irect and emotional. f. Dialogue must be believable by being specific…by being specific to the character’s background and emotional state. g. If dialogue is reacting to action or situation then it must be dramatic and self-possessed on polarities. The goals of the characters in each scene should be different. h. Dialogue should be continuous. Tip…characters often take a tag by repeating the pull round word spoken by the first character. i. Dialogue must relate to function.\r\nj. You can mix direct with indirect between two characters because they have different goals. k. Humorous dialogue is not a character telling a joke but a line or lines responding to the dramatic situation. l. Heightened dialogue vs representational dialogue. Heightened language is the language of the theatre…high octane communication…poetic, philosophical…charged..the expression of the playwright…It serves not only the development of the plot and character, but it also presents the view of the writer. Works well in radio. But there is now a tendency for more graphicism. Radio producers like to go out on location and explore realism. In these situations you must stick to natural dialogue.\r\nPrinciples peculiar to Radio\r\n1.The informal existence.\r\n2.The tension and conflict between the interior and exterior.\r\n3.More psychological.\r\n4.Easier to explore the real and the phantasmagorical and to delineate the line between the two.\r\n5.Have to work in the fifth dimension…the energy of the listener’s imaginative participation.\r\n6.The interior existence offers exploration of personalised thoughts, fantasies, emotions and conflicts.\r\n7.All levels of external conflict can be explored.\r\n8.The precipitate event through plot has to threaten the inner life of the main character. This is the kick-off in radio drama. 9.The end or resolution in radio drama is more deeply rooted in the emotional equilibrium and insight of the ma in character. Changes are native as well as external. 10.Time transposition and translocation are faster and more rapid and more complicated. Flashbacks…flashforwards… different ages. 11.Radio requires less rather than more characters. Characterisation need to be strong and fascinating. 12.Maintain the focus of the main character and plot.\r\n13.Economy of words underlines subtextual surprise and engagement with the listener’s imagination. 14.Wit is vital because language is so important… perspicacity with words…energy with words..humour with words…Wit is ripe by surprising the listener…being in-your-face with the listener..being fast, short and clever with the listener. 15.Irony is pathos and bathos. It’s conflict between the inner life and outer action.\r\n other radio drama producers in the world\r\nNorway: NRK kulturkanalen, P2 RODD- 0340, Oslo, Norway.\r\nSwedish Radio, SR S-105 10 Stockholm, Sweden.\r\nYLE Finnish beam al liance Radio, PO Box 79 FIN-00024 Yleisrdio, Finland. HR, Hessischer Rundfunk Bertramstrasse 8, 60320 Frankfurt am Main, Germany. DR Danmarks Radio, Radio Drama Department, Ewaldsgade 3-9, DK 2200, Copenhagen N Denmark. first principle Australia, ABC Ultimo Centre, Level 5, 700 Harris Street, Ultimo NSW 2007. CBC-SRC, Radio Drama Department, Box 500, Station A, Toronto, Ontario, Canada MSW 1E6 SDR Suddeutscher Rundfunk, Neckarstrasse 230, 70190, Stuttgart, Germany. Radio Television Hong Kong, Broadcasting House, m 30 Broadcast Drive, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China. Other radio drama producers, SABC, South Africa, Los Angeles Theatre Works, LA, California, Public Radio, virgin Zealand.\r\n'