Well, call it a festival of short-form audio fiction. This week we hear the first serialized episode of FinalRune’s new tale, The Troll of Stony Brook, an exciting completely original audio drama that makes it out to the world and to your ears first.
Stay tuned all this month for additional episodes of the new show, or head to FinalRune to purchase the whole show now (for the ridiculously low price of $2.99).
So, let’s enjoy this excellent work. Just don’t ask me about the mysterious latin music in the background.
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At last! We kick off the audio serial series on Radio Drama Revival, starting with an excellent show we featured back in November – We’re Alive, A Story of Survival.. AKA “The Zombie Podcast.”
We’re Alive is now reaching its season 1 finale, and it is a blast (literally and figuratively). Zombies assault the tower and our beleaguered characters need to make a stand… So starts “War,” episode 1 of 4.
Following the teaser season finale, we have an interview with show creators Kc Wayland and Shane Salk, who talk about their background in audio and media, and why creating a zombie podcast makes such great sense.
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Fresh from Ireland, a cool new video from a new show, ‘THE BEE-LOUD GLADE: A Living Anthology of Contemporary Irish Poetry,’ with music by Roger Gregg & Crazy Dog Audio Theatre.
Behind all this is the well-entrenched paradigm which has been embraced since the year dot over here.
Namely that ‘Radio Drama’ is Theatre on the radio and that ‘theatre’ must always come in the form of ‘plays’.
‘Plays’ are presented in long formats, 90 minutes, an hour, 45 minutes.
Half hour things are ‘Light Entertainment’ or half-hour or less slot ‘Serials’ such as the Archers [which I think is around the 15 minute mark]. … The Radio Networks do the research and time and time again it comes back to them that relatively NO ONE listens to the long-form ‘drama’ – go over half an hour and the numbers go down…down…after 45 minutes down…down…over that .. down …down… gone.
But since ‘Theatre’ and ‘Drama’ MUST always in their paradigm be about presenting ‘Plays’ they are stuck.
I don’t know how many times I’ve banged the drum for SHORT slots citing the wonderful success Dirk Maggs achieved with
so much of his BBC Radio 2 adventure series. Daily in short segments, an omnibus on the weekends and if and when a CD is released or it’s put up on the internet, then you can connect all the daily segments together with discrete track i.d.s between each segment for easy cueing. I have said this in writing to RTE and Radio 2 as well as suggested in writing to a couple of the independent stations,
but NO ONE is interested.
The emprical marketing and listening pattern research is there. Time and time again the statistics and conclusions therefrom are plain to see. Station Programmers meticulously study this data and have adapted old and created new highly successful programming and
styles and modes of presentation.
YET the bastion of ‘Radio Drama’ remains impervious to this. This is one reason why they do themselves no favours and are often regarded as the hindbound nuisance in stations compelled to produce drama.
Youch! Hard truths but worth meditating on. I know that plenty of people listen to long-form drama – on demand – but on broadcast radio it’s a whole different beast.
Roger’s comments bring Tom Lopez’s work on 2 Minute Film Noir, indeed, his work with Ruby and Jack Flanders being released as ongoing serialized shorts. In an environment where attention spans are short and time is precious, less is more.
So was the challenge presented by Lance Axt in his contest “You Have Five Minutes.” What follows is a thirty-minute show of dazzling diversity, showcasing what unique things can happen in short-form sound!
Get it while you can, as we’re posting it for only two weeks and then it will only be available as a pay-per-download from the Spoken Network.
Also! Don’t forget to pitch in to help Radio Drama Revival. Please donate 5 bucks to WMPG and voice your support for this podcast. Just click the Paypal link below:
COMMITTED TO THE RADIO DRAMA REVIVAL ARCHIVES! Details on when you can purchase this show will go up as they are available…
Today we feature this very exciting, on-location recorded audio drama. Yes, the snow you hear is snow!
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Well, call it a festival of short-form audio fiction. This week we hear the first serialized episode of FinalRune’s new tale, The Troll of Stony Brook, an exciting completely original audio drama that makes it out to the world and to your ears first.
At last! We kick off the audio serial series on Radio Drama Revival, starting with an excellent show we featured back in November – We’re Alive, A Story of Survival.. AKA “
You have minutes to tell a story… Go!
Phew, so, if you looked at