Should I do a Radio Play?

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Radio dramas trace its roots back to the 1880’s but didn’t come into the mainstream until the late 1920’s. It took another 20 years to gain traction and become popular. Until the advent of video in the 1950’s, the radio play was the best form of entertainment.

To this day, the Radio Play is the first thing to assemble when crafting an animated movie or television show. The voices are recorded first and then temp audio is put on the track long before any storyboards are drawn. Usually, the storyboard artists use the radio play to inspire their drawings and compositions.

In Filmatick, it can be the same way.

The radio play is a good way to get rough timing for your scenes and shots. It allows you, as a director, to see the flow of the project. Does it go too slow? Too fast? You are able to make those changes long before getting on set where the costs can be pretty high and the pressure to approve shots even higher.

Maybe it’s because of my animation background but I always do a radio play before putting my projects together. The lines are crudely read and part of that is on purpose, partly because I’m a horrible actor and I use my own voice for a lot of it. Sometimes, I’ll use my friends and family for parts. My female voice is even worse than my regular voice and doesn’t do what is intended for the radio play.

To do the radio play, record all of your parts prior. Filmatick numbers all of the dialog in order so it’s easy to see what number your line is. You can record it any way you like as long as you follow two rules:

1. Record it as an .mp3 file

2. Name it correctly

The second one isn’t as hard as it may seem. Filmatick needs to know what sound file it’s looking for so you only have to call each line this naming convention: 1_CharacterName - where the character name is the name on the line of Dialog.

So say you have the following line in your script:

In Filmatick, the line number could be 456. The number will be next to the line like below.

Name the file, 456_Brody and that’s it! Filmatick can do the rest.

Of course, you don’t have to do a radio play. Filmatick is flexible enough to let you do your shots without any audio at all. If you like to mark your scripts with all of your shots first, you can do that. Whichever way you prefer, you can do it in Filmatick.

Why not try it and add audio before you put your shots together? After you do it once, you may never look back and do it without again.