Internet-Created Free Audio Dramas? 215
fraser_joat asks: "The other day I finally took the time to watch Starship Exeter, previously reported on Slashdot. Coincidentally, I also revisited the BBC's excellent radio adaptation of The Lord Of The Rings, following the hype caused by the recent movies.
The two of these got me thinking: while _Exeter_ was clearly a huge effort, it looks like they had a lot of fun making it. In many ways they are scratching the same sort of itch that generates free software. So what about audio drama? The technology needed to produce it is freely available, things like Ardour and Csound. So is it possible to produce an audio drama based on free texts such as those from Project Gutenberg in a distributed fashion, with contributers from all across the Net, just like with software? Would they even be useful as an introduction to classic fiction or just as pure entertainment?"
"While the technology exists to cut a play together, I see several possible problems:
- High-quality audio recording equipment is expensive, and homes are not ideal environments. Can source material of sufficiently good quality be generated without professional facilities?
- Since the actors could be widely separated, can they act in isolation in a sufficiently convincing manner that they can be cut together later, in the same way that film actors must pretend that the special effects exist during shooting?
- Are there good (royalty-)free sound effect libraries available?
It would need to be a real community effort - I fancy that I could produce a passable script adaptation of a book and help with the audio production and sound effects, but I'm no actor, nor do I have equipment at home that even approaches what would be required. What about it?"
Nice niche (Score:2, Insightful)
AKA--Community Theatre (Score:3, Insightful)
take away the thrill of being on stage, and I'm not sure how much merit there is to producing "Spartacus meets Elvis" for display in a browser window
Plays and actors... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really sorry to break it to all the geeks here BUT you do actually need to act to do Radio plays. It can be much harder to convey feeling when all you have is a voice.
People who can act have a skill, just like coders. And lets face it...
No one has ever said that communication is the strongest skill that a geek ever had.
Dramatizations vs. Audio Books (Score:3, Insightful)
The example you gave, BBC's dramatization of Lord of the Rings is very poor compared to the performance of Rob Inglis in his unabridged "reading" of those books.
This is even more apparent with the American dramatizations of LotR's or for the BBC dramatization of The Hobbit vs. Inglis' performance.
The most difficulty is in the abridgement -- especially for an amateur cast -- the author doing the shortening had better be good.
However, a dramatic reading could be done by a single person with modern technology and you wouldn't have the problems of remote communications you mentioned.
Re:Still need talent... (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, though I think there would be a *plethora* (SAT word of the day) of volunteers, many would be geeks/nerds, who tend to have the least inflection in their voices of anybody...
Auditioning people to do the voices might be worse than what the judges of American Idol have to sit through. You saw how suprised the tonedeaf people were when they were told they couldn't sing...
imagine the DDoS attack from a vengeful nerd who you told couldn't speak well.
Audio drama is perfect for science fiction (Score:5, Insightful)
Consider something like the the bar with the aliens in "Star Wars". In an audio drama, all you have to do is have a few words by the narrator (something about a typical seedy spaceport dive, with a band of aliens playing exotic instruments), and then some simple sound effects, and the listener gets an image of the place.
Not "the" image...but "an" image...which is better, because everyone gets the image of the perfect seedy spaceport dive for them.
In a movie, all we get is the director's image...and unless they spend a lot on costumes and effects, it's a cheesy image at that.
When you don't have to spend most of your budget on effects, you can spend more on story. Many classic SF stories that we'll probably never seen done well on the screen were done in the 50's on radio.
Finally, audio works great in the car.
While this could certainly be done (Score:3, Insightful)
If you've got a net everything starts to look like a net problem I guess. I've never known any physical local that suffered a shortage of dramatic wannabes. I know towns with populations in the hundreds that have *more* than one community theater.
While the net would be an ideal medium for *distributing* such works just putting a notice on a college bulliten board should turn up more actors than you need to stage the complete works of Shakepeare without repeating anybody.
Of course the college is likely to bust you for distributing those "illegal" mp3 files, but that's a different issue.
KFG
Re:Plays and actors... (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't read anybody talking about destroying Hollywood and ushering in a new era of Internet-produced audio drama as our only form of entertainment. All I read was somebody offering up an idea. Sounds like fun to me. Don't be a dick.
Futuristic Wasteland Original Audio Drama (Score:2, Insightful)
Called 'Tales from the Afternow' [theafternow.com], it's pretty damn creative and if you take into account that NONE of it is pre-written and all spoken on the fly your mind will be blown away. With background sound effects etc.. etc.. it's a good listen.
FINALLY! (Score:3, Insightful)
Gripping audio versions of The Inferno and Tom Jones! I cannot wait to fall asleep at the wheel while Virgil (in a nasally German voice) goes on for eight hours. Whee!
...should be easy to do (Score:3, Insightful)
"While the technology exists to cut a play together, I see several possible problems:
Since the actors could be widely separated, can they act in isolation in a sufficiently convincing manner that they can be cut together later, in the same way that film actors must pretend that the special effects exist during shooting?
To the first point... high quality computer audio is dirt-cheap these days. A SB Live Value has better record/play fidelity than the majority of pro broadcast gear used in the 60' to 80's. 24-bit cards can be had for under $300. Decent mics are an order of magnitude less expensive than 10 years ago - eg a Chinese large diaphragm condenser for $99 (Nady, Marshall, APEX etc). Very effective multitrack software can be had for well under $100 (example www.ntrack.com). So the gear is THERE!
As far as a recording space...funnily enough, many radio drama studios pride themselves on how realistic a 'room' sound they can create. Amazing how much a living room can be made to sound like
The best sound effects for radio drama are custom-created and recorded, libraries might get used for hard-to-get stuff, or for less critical backgrounds. Again, a guy with a MD recorder (or a rented DAT) and a mic can gather just about any required effect.
The sellers of pro libraries have fallen on hard times. Pro Hollywood-grade libraries are selling at 50% or more off usual price. A good general 10-CD library can be had for under $300 on sale. Check out the Blue Plate Special at www.sound-ideas.com. And there's alot on $ 10 "multimedia" library CDs. And finally, tons of free stuff on the 'Net.
Regarding actor collaboration, yes you will still get the best results with the actors playing off each other in the same studio.
So, it would be easy and rewarding to do this over the Internet. Let's go!