reading | Action Science Theatre

Editing Episode 3 – Things That Sound Like Other Things

Posted on September 6, 2012 by Producer Dan in The making of... Leave a comment

Science Brian has promised that Episode 3 will have only a few simple sound effects, so I shall look forward to that
– My Episode 2 Blog

So, “a few simple sound effects,” is it? Let’s look at that statement, shall we? Firstly, “a”. Can’t argue with that. At the other end we have, “sound effects”, and yes, there were indeed sound effects in Episode 3; can’t fault Science Brian there. But, between these two unarguable bookends, we have the words, “few” and “simple”. This is where the sentence starts to fall apart. If you listen to Episode 3 again (because you’ve listened to it already, yes?) you’ll notice that the 21-minute running time consists of about 3 minutes of dialogue and 18 minutes of sound effects. Give or take.

Pythagoras has a posse

Let’s talk about Pythagoras for a moment, shall we? Everyone learns his theorem in school – the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides. So if you take the length of one side of a right-angled triangle, and square it; then take the length of the next side, and square it; add up those two numbers and it will equal, as if by magic, the length of the hypotenuse (the long side of the triangle), squared.

3 squared + 4 squared = 5 squared

It’s a beautiful thing.

And as any pulp novel will tell you, people kill for beautiful things all the time.

Editing Episode 1

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Producer Dan in The making of... Leave a comment

It’s about 10 o’clock at night, a tiresome collection of buffoons has just lef… *ahem* the cast has just left my house, the place is a mess, and England are in the process of being knocked out of Euro 2012 on penalties. Time to go to work.

Editing a radio play seems a bit like a jigsaw puzzle. I am faced with a huge collection of dialogue tracks, sound effects and ambient noises; somehow I have to combine them into a coherent whole. This bit of dialogue goes here, this sound effect goes there, this sound effect… doesn’t exist. Ah.

Recording Episode 1

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Action Dan in The making of... 3 Comments

A sleepy suburban house in Watford. 6 people, 2 cats and a selection of food. This can mean only one thing: Action Science Theatre has begun.

First step: tea.

Everyone is professionally focused at the read-through

Next, time for a read-through. Already problems. Science Brian wants to change things; as a result Producer Dan wants to have him thrown out. We clear the air and continue…

A physical push is required in the script. A cast member is almost thrown from the sofa.

The word “I’m” causes an unexpected problem. Resolved with a change to the script. The writers promise to avoid cunningly simple words in the future.

Read-through finished.

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