An Introduction to Writing For Audio Drama with Alternative Stories

As well as making drama, poetry and fiction podcasts we work with writers, poets, actors and musicians to help them adapt their skills to working in spoken word audible media.  We offer workshops in audio drama for writers and producers.  We also offer sessions for poets looking to record themselves and distribute their work by means of podcasting.  We coach actors in the techniques they'll need for working in audio drama or radio theatre and we work with sound professionals from other mediums such as music and TV production to help them acquire skills to work in podcasting.

Alternative Stories

In this 2 hour workshop we'll offer an introduction to writing audio drama.  The session will include interaction and audio visual materials

Alternative Stories have made numerous audio drama productions working with writers and actors to turn their stories into compelling, immersive listening experiences. We have provided content to the BBC and to overseas broadcasters, represented the UK at the International Radio Drama Festival and been nominated in the international AudioVerse Awards for podcast dramas. Our podcast is frequently heard in the upper reaches of the Apple podcast charts in the UK and elsewhere.In this workshop we&#x27;ll use clips from our own productions as examples. You&#x27;ll see some of our scripts in development and hear from our actors on what they expect from writers . We&#x27;ll offer real life experience to help you get started on your own script and we&#x27;ll take you through all the stages from your intial idea to going into production and distributing your drama via podcasting. Audio drama is a rapidly growing and evolving medium with podcasting as well as traditional radio stations allowing writers to get their scripts and stories heard. As a relatively cheap and fast means of getting a story into production we argue that audio drama represents a fantastic learning environment for would-be playwrights and screen writers and offers novelists a route to honing and improving their dialogue as well as being an exciting and challenging medium in its own right.Here&#x27;s a brief overview of what you can expect from the workshop Introduction
 Why audio drama? Restrictions and advantages of working in audio drama. The different types of audio drama.

Writing for audio drama: dialogue and devices
 An introduction to audio drama techniques and devices. We look at some of the devices that audio dramatists can use to explain and tell their story to listeners in a natural sounding way.

Dialogue for audio drama: A practical overview
 Dialogue is the cornerstone of your audio drama. We look at ways in which dialogue can make up for the lack of visual clues, how audio drama dialogue might differ from dialogue in visual scripted media and how you can make your dialogue sound more natural.

The importance of place in audio drama
 Place can seem very important in visual media (Inspector Morse in Oxford for example) but what role does it play in audio productions?

Writing in sound: Using stage and sound directions to design your drama
 An introduction to the art of the possible in sound design and the role of the writer in describing sound (This section includes practical examples via videos). 

Working with actors
 In this section we’ll look at the ways in which audio drama writers and directors should guide actors (including video content from one of our professional actors) We look at what actors will expect from writers and the ways in which a writer’s guidance to actors (within and outside the script) can result in a more natural and nuanced performance.

Honing your script
 Table reads, working with your director and sound designer to finalise your script 

A very brief introduction to recording, producing and distributing your audio drama
 This section acknowledges that a writer’s first audio drama may be a home-produced piece of work in which the writer also directs, designs the sound and edits the piece. We offer a very brief overview of techniques and point dramatists in the direction of more information. This section will conclude with a short look at the world of podcasts as a medium for disseminating audio drama.

Questions and Close
 All participants will receive a fact sheet including further reading and listening, access to the video materials shared during the session and access to our podcast series on making audio drama. Listen to Alternative Stories and Fake Realities, our podcast free here https://www.buzzsprout.com/411730

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An Introduction to Writing For Audio Drama with Alternative Stories

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