With Marc Beeby-
This brilliant session focused on the exploration and recording of crowd scenarios/effects in radio drama.
Marc played us some tracks that had been recorded as specific crowd scenarios: eg: men before battle,people in a recruiting office etc. As he played the tracks we attempted to guess what the scenarios might have been and although our responses were sometimes amusingly good guesses, Marc alerted us to the fact that the tracks themselves were after all not incredibly specific but were rather "generic backgrounds with a specific purpose in mind".
He pointed out that when you ask actors to wild track something everybody has the instinct to do too much and that if you are, for example going to record a piece set at the scene of an accident people might not be listening to eachother, if you do set a piece in a recruiting office everyone in that scene has to have a specific aim or need. Very Factory.
One idea that really stayed with me was the idea of the mid-range, it was almost as though Marc was describing a painting when he mentioned "the texture between the focus(the story perhaps) and the background."
He also described mid-range as "the aural space that fills what's in between front and back stage" and suggested that when the background is not really there the actors don't have anything to play against or in fact with.
He talked about some of the problems with using pre-recorded backgrounds: one being that a pre-recorded sound effects can sound anachronistic. I particularly liked his example of a random american voice shouting out "Hey where's my burger!!!" in an english pub scene.
Another issue raised was that without the creation if the mid-ground or mid-range the background can simply have the effect of sounding miles and miles away from the foreground.
Our task for this session was to create a three minute piece of radio drama using only a crowd.To create "layers of noise and texture within a group sound". The following pieces are what we came up with.
What struck me most about this session was that Marc never talked about colouring or creating the impression of...but rather being specific in our aim and in the excecution of our ideas.

Elena Pavli

London Eye

Safe way

The Event