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whoovesnassistant · 4 months

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Tips for making a radio play

We've had a lot of experience making this show, and we've seen a lot of series come and go or even crash and burn before they begin. So we're going to give some tips to hopefully help people avoid the crashing and burning.

1: Start Small

A lot of people make the mistake of starting with a grand idea in mind, like "We're going to do an epic with 3 seasons that comes with animatics, original music, and a large cast of characters and-" Slow down. You don't even know what you're capable of yet, so it's a really bad idea to plan so far ahead without knowing what you can do and how much effort it takes to do it. Before you decide to dedicate yourself to something on a grand scale, start with something small to test the waters. A pilot is a good way to really understand the process and give an audience a chance to get interested. This pilot should not be as long as a full episode unless you plan for your episodes to be relatively short anyways. There should be a small cast, 2-5 characters at most generally. You don't need to go all-in with the pilot, just use what you have to do it and hopefully it should garner enough attention to get more people on board in your project team. Even after your pilot, make small goals. Plan for say, 5 episodes at first, and plan for more once you've gotten a flow and idea of production time and how long you want to be working on this project. Radio plays take a lot of time and effort, they aren't as easy as they seem.

2: Don't Cast Too Early

This is a big one that a lot of people tend to do that's a huge mistake to be making. Do not cast your characters way ahead of when you're going to need them. Generally, you should have your next script done FIRST before you cast the characters for it, and even if you have scripts done for multiple episodes ahead of time, do not cast unless you plan to get the lines done ASAP. You do not want to have idle voice actors waiting a really long time before they can even record lines, because this is a good way to lose voice actors or have people feel you don't really know what you are doing or how to organize a project. The exception to this rule is if you know someone really well and you know they want the role and they will stick around for it. It's good to cast people you are closer with as long term characters than expecting strangers to volunteer all their time, which leads into our next tip...

3: Don't Expect Too Much From People

Unless you plan on paying people, don't expect too much hard work from others. Don't expect voice actors to stay on for years and years and years. Don't expect a musician to volunteer original music for free. Don't expect artists to draw a bunch of scenes or animatics. Expect to start with basic resources, like stock music and one piece of cover art. If people want to volunteer more, they will come in time once you've shown your project is legitimately producing content. People are generally not going to just hop on board when you have no credentials and no examples of what you're capable of.

4: Quality Control

You need to have certain standards of quality, and you need to understand what that means. For example, no matter how much you might like someone's voice, if they have a bad microphone there is no fixing that audio, it will be unpleasant to edit and even more unpleasant for an audience to listen to. You can't just chuck together whatever audio you get or have, you need to research how to clean up noise, how to master vocals, how to level volumes, how to make sure your sound effects are good quality and not distractedly bad. Thankfully, Audacity which is a free program can handle most of your audio editing needs and there are plenty of tutorials for it on youtube so there's no reason not to study this stuff before you dive in.

5: Organization

This one's important. You need an organized system for getting everything done. Have checklists, organized folders, a proper place for crew to communicate. Discord is excellent for organizing a project because you can make different channels for different purposes within one server, such as a place for auditions, a place to submit lines, a place to post art, a place to give instructions, and you can make certain channels accessible to only specific people so spoilers aren't getting out to the wrong people. The more organized your project is, the smoother things will run.

6: Don't Overwork Yourself

It's very tempting to just do all the hard work on your own, like doing all the vocal editing, all the SFX, placing all the music, doing all the scripting. And at first, you'll probably have no choice but to do this. But as your project gets bigger, you should start to divide out the roles for other people to do, otherwise you risk burnout. It might feel fun to get all these things done on your own, but after a while it's going to feel tedious and it's often going to take more time to do. It's okay to have people you trust work on scripts, you would still be the director of what that script is about but you might be surprised what other people can come up with. It might be difficult to find a good audio editing crew but it's worth it if you do.

7: Be Willing to Take Criticism

Nobody's perfect, and sometimes people will have constructive criticism about your project. Don't see criticism as failure, see it as an opportunity to improve. For example, if you're having a hard time casting a character and you hear a lot of people saying they don't want to audition for the character because they don't like the character, don't sit there insisting your writing is gold and everyone else is just rude. Examine why people don't like the character, and adjust. If you notice people aren't really jumping on board with your project, swallow your pride and ask why. Try to figure out what it is that needs improvement, and then move forward with it.

8: Have Voice Actors Record Multiple Takes

Be sure that you're not just getting one take of lines, because you never know when a line might not sound right, or if a different delivery would sound better. Have at least 3 takes of every line recorded, and encourage your voice actors to try different kinds of deliveries. This way you have a much bigger chance of getting quality lines and the best takes!

9: Don't Rely on Artwork

This is an AUDIO drama, you CAN NOT expect everyone to be watching the video if you release a video with it. Some people just play these in the background, or download them to listen while they drive. If you're expecting people to understand what's going on from the artwork alone, you're doing something wrong. Imagine your script not having any images to go with it, and try to imagine what people are going to get out of purely listening. There are a lot of clever ways to help people visualize things without an actual visual. Artwork should be a bonus, not a requirement.

9B: Don't Script Visual Only Cues

Speaking of not relying on art, this goes with the above and is an issue a lot of beginners have. Scripting things like "the character smiles", "character waves", "character stands up" is not helpful for sound design. You need to figure out how those would be conveyed if they are important, like for smiling have the prompt for the actor you can have [Said happily] for a tone, a [shuffle] for standing up, a [whooshing] for waving with a character saying something like 'I'm waving as hard as I can!'. Sound effects and exposition are your friends in radio plays, soundless actions are not.

10: Be Careful About Vocal Effects

Vocal effects can be really cool! You can make someone sound like a demon, or a ghost, or some kind of magical creature. But you also need to be really careful about using those effects, because they can very easily make a person's voice hard to understand. This tip doesn't always work, but sometimes you can have the original voice line overlay the effect and make the effect quieter to keep the voice more clear. Run the effects voices by other people to make sure they can understand them.

11: Organization and Communication is Important

Radio plays have a lot of stuff that goes into them. There's a lot of files, often a lot of people, and a lot of tasks and instructions that need to be made. Discord is an excellent messenger to organize a radio play in, where you can organize things by topic in channels and assign roles to people to make sure they have special access to specific channels so other people don't get content they're not supposed to. You also need to make sure you are communicating with everyone and make sure everyone is on the same page. A discord server can help with this by having things like an announcement channel, an auditions channel, a channel to submit lines, etc. Google docs is also a great resource to keep everyone updated, where you can make things like art claims, and progress checklists, and share scripts. You can change permissions on the documents to let people comment or edit, either anyone viewing it or specific people who can be given access. The more organized you are, the faster things will get done and the more your team will respect the project.

12: Format Your Scripts to be Reader Friendly

We had some fairly messy looking scripts in the past, where there was nothing really making the character names stand out from the rest. Lines weren't spaced properly, names weren't bolded, and as a result voice actors would often miss lines on accident or not realize where a line ended or began. Now, you don't have to format it like we do, but you at least need to make it clear when a new line is being spoken and by who. Space new lines apart. What we do is we bold all the character names at the start of the lines and change the paragraph settings to adding a space after each paragraph. This makes it so when a character has a longer line, the spacing remains close together, but a new line from a new character will be spaced away from the previous line. As a bonus, we highlight all the character names in specific colors for specific characters (Not too bright colors!) and this has majorly solved the issue of people missing their lines and we have gotten many compliments for this formatting.

13: Be Kind and Respectful to Your Crew

I really shouldn't have to say this, but it is incredibly important that you respect the people you're working with. More than likely, they are volunteering their time to you, and you have no right to disrespect them by pushing them, tossing them to the side, being picky with them, getting into arguments, rejecting their feedback, etc. You shouldn't even be treating them like this if you were paying them. If you want people to stay and to provide quality content, they will be at their best when you treat them well

14: Listen a Few Times Before Release

So the audio is done, time to make a video and release it! Right? Wrong! You still need to do more quality control! This time you should listen through a few times and pay close attention to any issues that may occur, such as odd pauses, misplaced sound effects, or accidentally repeated lines. This can be easy to miss if you're not paying attention, and once it's out, your mistakes will be out there for everyone to hear.

15: Don't Get a Big Head

On the one hand, it's good to be proud of your work... but on the other, there's such a thing as being too confident and too prideful, especially if you haven't made a reputation for yourself yet. No matter how good you think your ideas might be, you yourself are not going to be the true judge of that. It's up to other people if they like what you have to give, and if they don't like it, there's probably a good reason for it and you may need to take a big bite of humble pie. This is where you need to be open to feedback and realize no one is perfect, no one has the most amazing idea with no flaws. Even we have made a lot of mistakes and will continue to do so, and we know we are always learning. And because of that, we try to listen to constructive feedback. Sure, we can't do everything people want, but we can try to at least improve. Basically, don't boast without knowing what people actually think of your work, and if they don't like it, don't blame them; be ready to look at yourself.

Also, don't put down other creators' work in order to boast about how much better you could or did do it. We're not here to fight, we're not here to compete, we're all just here making something we're supposed to love and be passionate about. It doesn't matter if you honestly think your work is better, having a nasty attitude about it is not going to make people confident in your work. They're just going to see you as someone with no respect for the craft and therefor probably not having the talent you claim you have.

That's all we could think of for now, but if we think of more tips we'll add them to this post and reblog it to show the new ones. We hope this helps!

#tips #radio play #audio drama #tips and tricks #media

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