By definition, conventions are things that are the same across the genre and include things that we as an audience expect to see/hear. They may include narrative, sound effects and lexical choices. In our radio drama, we used, developed and challenged such conventions.
A major convention common in such radio dramas as ‘War of the Worlds’ is the inclusion of fades in and fades out at the beginning and end of each scene. In a similar way, in our radio drama we used a fade in at the start and a fade out at the end of each scene, as well as fading in at the beginning of the drama overall. Like other contemporary radio dramas as described above, we did this to indicate the change in scene.
Most contemporary serial radio dramas such as ‘The Archers’ have multi-linear, open narratives. In our radio drama, we originally went against this convention and only followed a single narrative. After receiving the audience feedback, however, we realised that this single narrative approach was not dramatic enough to represent real radio dramas. We then decided to include another, more serious decision to be made in addition to the choice of which University to go to. We needed one that represented realistic teenage problems. Eventually we landed on the idea of teenage pregnancy. This meant that we had to re-write our script and re-record certain scenes to include this decision and to make our radio drama multi-linear and more conventional.
We also followed the convention of sound effects. In a radio drama, there is no visual representation or understanding, and so the audience must, therefore, rely on aspects such as sound effects and tone of voice in order to gain an understanding of the storyline. In our radio drama, we used a number of different sound effects in order to improve the audiences understanding and also to represent certain scenes. For example, in the bar scene, we used the effect of loud background conversation and classes clinking to represent a real bar.
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