• Weekly diary detailing the production process
• Time management
• Development
• Social media – links, strategy

Week 1:

During the summer break, my team and I spoke about what was going to happen and the ideas that we were going to do for our drama piece that were put forward. Through this we started to think of what the narrative as a whole could be and what kind of protagonists we were going to have within the drama whether it just focuses on one individual, a pairing or a group of people. The idea of doing a  modern day adaptation of the radio version of H.G. Wells’ War of The Worlds.

The first meeting we had as a team after the summer break consisted of getting together and discussing the original drama and briefly start to discuss how we could adapt it for ourselves. During this meeting we started to mind map our ideas in order to visualise everything we discussed.

Week 2:

During this week, we as a team had our first meeting with our tutor in which we discussed the idea behind the drama and whether or not there were any areas to focus on in order to solidify the idea and what research to undertake in preparation for making the drama. Within this meeting our tutor suggested a few areas to think about in the research period of the project such as; what sound effects are going to be used, how we were going to get the audience to understand what our story is and why we have done what we will do and are people going to understand that it is an abstract modern version of War of The Worlds.

Week 3:

We started off this week by going through what we all needed to research individually in preparation for the production and the blog was created ready for any and all paperwork to go on to. During the meeting of this week we discussed the copyright aspects of our drama and whom we needed to contact in order to make sure we didn’t break any copyright laws. We also all received a piece of paper detailing the contents of the blog and what we all needed to do towards it.

Week 4:

During this week we tried, as a group, to finalise our idea as much as possible in preparation for the proposal hand in at the end of this week. This included discussing multiple aspects including our overall aim from the drama, a basic structure and outline of the narrative, and our research agenda ready for the production phase. The remainder of the week was spent working on our individual proposals ready for hand in.

Individual proposal link: Media Project 1 Individual Proposal AMB

Weeks 5/6/7:

During these weeks, we decided to mainly focus on the research behind the production of the drama ready for when we cast and record the drama in the next couple of weeks. Throughout these weeks we also focused upon the writing of the script for the drama which was done by the other two members of my group, Emma and Callum whilst I focused upon writing up character profiles to send out to our actors in order for them to prepare for the parts before they can in to record. In these weeks we decided it would be easier to hold Skype meetings as a group instead of in person due to the fact that everyone was doing work individually towards the piece. In these Skype meetings we discussed where everyone was up to, what else they could work on and how we could improve what we had done up until this point. Having these meetings allowed me to contribute towards the creating of the script by providing ideas and lines suiting the characters and the biographies that I had written for each major protagonist.

Weeks 8/9:

During these two weeks we, as a team, focused largely on the casting for our radio drama. In order to find our actors and actresses we put out a casting call, detailing our drama and what we were looking for on the website ‘Star Now.co.uk’. It took a small while until we got any responses but luckily we received multiple applications all of whom were interested in the drama and the roles. Following on from this we sent out the character biographies that I had worked on in the previous weeks to the respective actors and then got them in to audition during week 9 ready to record in week 10. One issue that arose during these weeks were that we could not find an actor suitable to play our main protagonist, the father Edward Riverton, but luckily a member of our group had worked with a good actor in the past who was suitable for the character, so we decided to email him to see if he would be interesting and he happily said yes meaning that we had our full cast ready for the recording sessions.

Week 10:

During this week we focused solely on the recording of our drama, making sure that we could get all of the actors in on certain days and that we could record multiple versions of the script to help later on in the editing process. In order to make sure we didn’t miss out any lines or words we decided to record each actors/actress’ lines twice, once where they were in conversation with another actor in order to provide the back and forth between the actors and a second time to provide us with back up audio in case something doesn’t sound right in post production in order to make the editing process as easy as possible for the team. We were lucky enough to get all of our main protagonist’s audio filmed over one day during this week meaning that we only needed to come back to the studio briefly for the secondary characters who only have a handful of lines which meant we could go into the last 2 weeks of production without having to worry about any missing audio.

Weeks 11/12:

These two weeks comprised of editing the radio drama and finishing off any supporting paperwork for the radio drama. The editing was split between two members of our group, me and Emma, we decided to do this because we both have an interest within editing and having two sets of ears for the drama helped as we were able to pick up on bits that needed changing or adjusting that the other person had missed. During these weeks we found out that we had received an extension for our project due to a personal issue with a member of our team meaning that our deadline was pushed back until the 5th January . However, despite having the deadline we were able to finish most of the project in time for the original deadline meaning that we now had extra time to do any finishing touches and complete any remaining paperwork ready to be uploaded to the blog such as production diaries, evaluations and any copyright/technical research done.