Little Wonder Radio Plays presents its fourth production: Outside, bunker sci-fi horror from, erm, me. Check it out via Soundcloud and YouTube, think “hey, whoever did the SFX was awesome”, and then read on while I talk about what I think of this play. As the eijit who wrote it.
The Good: It’s a decent listen for an experiment
I wrote this script as an exercise while I was completing the Aaron Sorkin Masterclass, which, by the by, was worth every penny. The task was to write a short screenplay based on an old myth or story. I took a story from Eric the Viking by Terry Jones, which I think in turn was based on an old Norse story, where a little girl is rescued from the snow and turns out to be a monster. My ending place was rather a long way from this – which I think demonstrates the force of the exercise. In the process of rewriting a story it almost always becomes something else.
I wanted to write something that was physically complicated – where all the characters were constantly in motion, constantly racing the clock and each other. Then, later, having written something highly dependent on levers and green lights and locked doors, the idea of trying to reproduce it in radio was irresistible. How to we make the visual aural?
And I think it is a success, mostly thanks to the exceptional SFX works by Chris Taylor. Pace and tension builds. Mystery unravels in sections, the climax is exciting, and it is a story that has something to say. Note that there is always a soundscape adding to the action: the rumble of the crank, the hum of the power. Say what you like about the play, it ‘isn’t boring. And that’s pretty good going!
The Bad
Ah, there’s some real clonking dialogue in here. An example, from the first ten seconds:
MICHELLE: No filters, no primary power. The unit won’t start without primary power. Laura?
You’ll notice the actress struggles a bit with the repetition of primary power. It’s subtle and given another rehearsal she would have made it sound natural (the danger of good actors is they can make shit lines sound good, so you come away thinking it was great because you’re an amazing writer.) But the line should have been:
MICHELLE: No filters, and the unit won’t start without primary power. Laura?
Repetition is an incredibly powerful tool. Here I’m trying to use it to make clear the different parts of the setup: the crank, the door, the sensors, the filtration unit, the primary and secondary power. That’s a lot to keep track of and you can understand why I’d want to say it more than once.
But overused and all the audience hear is technobabble. The conflict here isn’t about secondary power. It’s about whether they go outside to rescue Jackie. The smoother and simpler I make the dialogue, the more the actors can concentrate on conveying the stress of the situation: the audience don’t need to understand WHY the door won’t work, they just need to understand that the characters understand why the door won’t work. Did that sentence follow? I got wrapped up in trying to show I had figured out why everything worked the way it did. This led to redundant, difficult dialogue. And repetition of the wrong things.
Thankfully, by the time we get to the second half and the conflict between John and Nancy, things got a lot better. It’s the god damned opening exposition that always kills you in a sci-fi short.
The Ugly
This was our first big recording day: in one day we recorded Trifles, a complicated play with five parts, The Boor, a lyrical marvel by Anton Chekov, and Outside. It was my first time directing radio plays and I made some mistakes.
The most obvious mistakes are in the quality of the sound – there’s some echo in there that Chris did wonders to clear out, the levels don’t always match, and the actors are approaching the mikes in different ways because I had no idea how an actor should approach a mike. I’ve learned a lot more about that since then.
But the real problem was rehearsal. I underestimated the length of The Boor (it has lots of long speeches), and we had a late start, so by the time we got to Outside we only had time to just go ahead and record the whole thing in one take, without even reading through the script first. After all, it was simple action dialogue, as opposed to all the clever stuff Glaspell and Chekov get up to, so it would be straight forward.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Directors: Sci-Fi demands respect or it will bite you!
Science Fiction is hard on actors. It asks them to say, with conviction, lots of stuff they probably don’t understand and that may not make sense. The dialogue is notoriously hard to learn (read an interview with anyone who has ever played Doctor Who). And, even worse, action scenes with quick, overlapping dialogue are tough to get right and require a lot of energy.
Basically, we should have done Outside first, and we should have made sure we rehearsed. My actors did a great job with what I gave them, but I did them a criminal disservice by throwing them such a difficult script at the end of a long day. If we’d finished with the Chekhov than the natural flow of that piece would have been a relaxing bath after the hot and sweaty sci-fi. But, for the future, do the sci-fi action stuff first. It’s much harder than you think.
I’m going to emphasise: my actors did amazingly in the circumstances, and I think the quality is fantastic given I just threw it at them and said “go.” But it needed a read through and two takes so that everyone was clear what the hell was going on. Sing it with me: we could have had it aaaaall.
Conclusions: A successful failure
As a first-time radio director, I made a lot of mistakes, and thankfully I had a great team of actors to help cover them up for me, and Chris working miracles with SFX. But as an experiment this was a huge success. I learned loads about directing action and getting sound balances right (mostly by getting them wrong). We discovered a great deal about just how much you can show with a soundscape, and the extent to which music, and rhythmic background noise, can help ramp up the tension and drive the story forward. And, for all it’s faults, I think Outside is a good fun listen and a cracking way to spend 15 minutes. Job done. I hope you enjoyed listening!
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