The Creation of our Radio drama - Sound effects, Voice, Music and Silence

Sound effects
When choosing our sound effects it was very important that we choose the correct ones in order for them to run smoothly within our Radio drama. sound effects also take a great role in addressing the audience with the scene of which the characters are in and what sort of activities are taking place. choosing and placing the sound effect into our piece was one of the longest processes for the construction of our radio drama out of all the elements we used. We recorded our drama directly on to the programme sound track pro directly from the radio studio. On sound track pro there was a variety of sound effects to choose from, we decided to include the ones we found most useful with our drama e.g. Police sirens, swimming pool ( of which surprisingly was used for the background sound of the bar scene), helicopter and footsteps e.t.c. all of our sound effects we used came from sound track pro.

Voice
The voice we used for our characters were the members of our group along with adopting a person from another group to play the second male within our piece. As our radio drama was aimed particularly at teenage students we decided to play the characters ourselves. Us being teenage students ourselves made it easier for us to act the correct age. Also due to this we decied to just talk as we talk normally and not apply accents to our piece due to thinking it would not be consistant throughout. Everyone in the group at first had some embarrassment issues but we quickly over looked them and got on with our recording. Emmy played the main character in our recording and had to adjust the volume, pitch and tone of her voice many times throughout our piece. Her voice had to adjust from really loud and high pitched with a angry tone to really slow quiet and more deep in other scenes. This was quite hard to do with all the sudden shifts but we managed it in the end. The way we had to express our voice also had great effect due to being able to help the audience interact with the feelings just by hearing someone sound depressive or angry. At the end of our piece we had in involve a loud scream to show the dramatic suicide of which Roxy commits this took numerous attempts to get both me playing Belle and Emmy play Roxy to do whilst sounding effective and not out of place within our script.

Music
We didn't apply too much music to our radio drama as we mostly used sound effect for our piece in combination with the audio vocals. Although we used two music sounds one being the background track to our suicide monologue and one being our theme tune. We did this to our piece as the suicide monologue of the character Roxy needed to be as dramatically effective as possible to express the depression and deep emotion connected with the characters feelings. This worked well due to the track being a slow sober track. The other music track we used we for our theme tune again we wanted to use music here to have a more upbeat start and finish to our piece. although we used a music track here we edited it with sound effects from soundtrack pro of police sirens and traffic we did this to emphasise the dramatic issues in our drama. To gather the music we used a programme called Audio Hijack Pro this allowed us to record the tracks we wanted to use. we had to export these sounds as MP3 files and then import them onto our radio drama piece on sound track pro. We then had to edit the file to make sure it fitted in the places we wanted it making sure it ran smoothly.

silence
When is came to silence my group didn't use much of it as we see many opportunities within our script where it could be appropriate. Where we did use it however was in some cases to indicate change of scene. This was effective was it helped us link together our piece resulting in the radio drama running more smoothly and convincingly. We also used silence within some parts of our script.
e.g. Roxy: It's Belle's new boyfriend (2) he(.) he (.) he raped me!
the pauses indicated here are the dramatic effect within this sentence due to showing that the character is emphasise struggling to express her feelings.