Group Project

The group project consisted of 5 people within my group and decided on a piece which would show our voice capability, being more than one character in an audio play would show our versatility. We decided to work with a well known sci-fi comedy from the 1980's called 'Flash Gorden' . I took most of the priority over this choice, mainly because sci-fi is my favorite theme in any audio story. A good example of a very popular sci-fi audio work which i have already mentioned before is war of the worlds. It has the same elements as flash Gorden in the ways of all the characters being unique and different to the ears to hear. For example the narrator has a very clear, slow and crisp voice, introducing the play just like in Flash Gorden. So in order to have that same effect as what the war of the worlds audio did, we needed to make sure the narrator introduced the play with guts, energy and Strength. Getting the listeners attention and giving them the plot for whats going to happen.

However before detailing our audio piece of flash Gorden, we needed to show to the rest of the group what characterisations vocally we had came up with for our self-cast characters from the show. I got the characters 'slave' who is a servant to the alien planet and 'Princess Aura' who is the princess of the planet and daughter of king of 'Mongo', the planets name. For the slave i wanted to show  very low status and i imagined the slave to be very short and have a hunch back, almost Igor like. So having that growling speech and stutter showing that she has been a slave for too long. The strengths of this would be that it completely contrasts with my princess Auras characters voice to which was a low tone yet sexy and flirtatious. it sounds in-human and unnatural to the ear so would stand out more to the listener, giving it a comical effect by the way the slave speaks. Also completely contrasted to other characters voices decided on within out group for example the doctor would have a smart, punctual and articulate voice while Flash would be very strong and powerful with his. The weaknesses though were that it did strain my voice even with vocal exercises, giving me a strained voice and risking my chances of damaging my vocal folds. So to help improve this i lowered the tone of the slave voice but eased the growling noises so it's less of a strain. As i have heard from radio audios from my research i noticed that strained voices really show especially in audio. It makes the listeners almost cringe when they strain or try to hard at a specific voice. A good example of this is when i researched and listened to 'the children of Witchwood'. When the actress who was playing the 17 year old girl started to cry, you could tell by the strain in her voice that she was trying too hard and could hear her real voice come through the audio, realising too much maturity to the characters voice. So this was once main thing i had to be cautious of.

Once we settled on characters, we focused on how to speak the lines, using performance techniques to get used to having a microphone. For example when shouting certain lines such as:

'Quick earth man! to my rocket ship!'

If shouted from standing right in front of the microphone not only would it be too loud and blasted unexpectedly and not very professional, so with advice giving by my mentor to use and study microphone and audio performance techniques in my own time, many simple ideas work very effect ivy such as standing at a certain distance away then shouting the line, not only making it sound more realistic but the actors can play with it such as if two people are talking they can stand right next to the mic as normal then with the other character at a distance and shout, makes it so much more imaginative and easier for the listener to picture. I got this idea from when i was listening to an audio performance of 'The Archers', a country/ farm, based audio soap and in one element you could hear a man shouting in the distance and i realized that they managed to do this realistic effect just by simply standing away from the mic. Shouting 'Oi, I'm here' from about 2 foot away from the mic and projecting loudly gave this the effect of him shouting as if he was across the other side of the field. A simple yet very effective method to which we used to our advantage.

Of course for a group audio we needed a lot of sfx and music. For it being a sci-fi it needed a lot of futuristic noises, again linking back to war of the worlds with it's massive following for it's music and sound effects. Such as laser/ ray guns, Background/ instrumental music whether it be for a scene change or for a tense or climatic moment such as the aliens coming out of the pods for the first time in war of the worlds. The Flash Gorden script had most of it's sound effects all ready put within the script, it was just the little details such as shouting from a distance, heavy breathing and grunts with thuds which were done just by our bodies and vocal techniques. As shown from below, the anotation of the script for the sound effects is pretty much like this thorughout, of course it had different sound effects such as animal noises, laser guns and doors openign and shutting. Music was used in this radio to add tension but also know to the audio listener that the scene has changed. This goes for many Radio shows that are listened to today such as '2525' which is a futuristic sci-fi radio show with elements of comedy like flash Gorden, in which music is used to emphasise the moments as well as the scene changes been shown very clearly for example the scene change music being a futuristic/ electronic sound effect: