More on Soap of Fatal Death
It's nearly time for Soap of Fatal Death audio play to be unleashed, and I'm really looking forward to it. The trailer went up at the weekend, and sounds very good. I think the fun we had shines through and we've all learnt a great deal from Echoes of the Protii last year. I'm looking forward to hearing the bits I wasn't involved in, which was rather more than last time round- and so it leaves me with a few more surprises when I hear it. Of course, having written it with Si, I know what's going to happen, but I don't know exactly how our actors have interpreted their parts.
The cover is rather good too- nice and camp, which reflects the rather camp nature of Clear Waters! Pip's done us proud, again! Who'd have thought we'd find the perfect location just round the corner from Si's house?
I really enjoy being involved in the plays. Revisiting the stories we wrote a few years back has been good fun. Certainly with Soap we've managed to expand it and change the bits that wouldn't work for audio and add in more Soap scenes which work better on audio than in prose. Soon we'll have the challenge of writing a play from scratch, which'll be a different challenge. I must knuckle down and do some more work on the research for that one soon...
posted by Si @ 9:03 pm
4 Comments:
Heard the trailer and I'm already hiding behind the sofa ...
Working on it has been both fun and torturous! It's no exaggeration to say I've spent an average of over an hour a day on it for the last six weeks.
Lessons have been learned from "Echoes" but also many have been learnt from "Soap" as well. Without dissing the script, because I think it's highly inventive and ambitious (almost too ambitious in many ways) we wrote way, WAY too much! I learned that "Soap" needed to be roughly 24 minutes an episode. Lots of bits, including lots of "Soap" scenes, needed to be cut to make it flow because I found that it was very easy for the story to lose dramatic pace by the sudden appearance of a lingering "Clear Waters" conversation.
On the plus side, I found that many of the CW scenes were perfect backing for other scenes - so rather than halt the action for a fictional scene, I had it go on while our "real" characters schemed in the foreground.
And why do we put fight scenes in these things! I found myself cursing when two characters are suddenly required to wrestle on audio! On the upside, I am especially fond of one fight scene involving Ant saving the Doctor from being throttled by Virginia. I ended up standing there banging a shoe against the spare room radiator to get the desired 'clanging' of a gantry struggle. And I'm SO proud that all three people in that "fight" were recorded on different days!
I'm really pleased with the play now, because it's been packed down to a taught adventure story, and I think it all works. You have over an hour and a half of story which I think is plenty! But next time we need to script to tight, 16 scene episodes and lose the big conversations and lengthy action sequences! If we do that, we should be able to tape two, maybe three complete stories in the time it took us to make "Soap"! And it'll be a lot easier to edit too!
Si.
Si - that would really have been worthy of a blog entry in it's own right.
I know how difficult putting together an audio can be. I used to do it a lot as a teenager, and spent some time as a DJ on hospital radio (I was dire).
The Crow family theatre recently commited "Percy The Parkkeeper And the Windy Day" to audio as part of Mrs Crow's teaching assistant training ...
It's a pretty steep learning curve isn't it?
I suppose because it was an adaptation, the temptation is to put in everything (and add more) from the original story. That's certainly what I did when I adpated my episodes, and as we saw, Part 4 was far, far too long!
I think scripting the next one will be easier, as it's goign to be designed to be a play, not a short story, so we can work to the strengths that we've got!
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