- Artist: ABC Radio National
- Title: tna 373 Tower Sun2
- Album: The Night air
- Genre: Easy Listening
- Year: 2008
- Length: 53:58 minutes (49.41 MB)
- Format: Stereo 44kHz 128Kbps (CBR)
- Stats: , 0 downloads, 16 plays
Audio: Tower part 2 - The Night Air. A remixed radio feature
This is an example of the Night Air, Radio National's remix show.
We are using it to discuss how we make our program to help others pitch freelance contributions to our show, to foster the work of radio remixing and open up a critical discussion around this practice.
The Night Air team; Diane Dean Brent Clough and John Jacobs.
The original program's site is here
The following are notes from a presentation about this episode given at a Radio National Features conference in March 2009.
A walk through a typical night air
Where do the ideas come from – how does all the audio accumulate – how do we generate a narrative – do we generate a narrative ?
What is the Night Air?
The Night Air is a variety show made up of excerpts of existing mixes with music and sounds.
These component pieces are all gathered around a loose theme, keyword or notion.
This association allows the components to talk to each other as they are cut and mixed up to form a new conversation.
The inter-cutting can be used to create dramatic tension and propulsion like sub plots of a movie.
Music and sound beds and interventions can take texts on detours.
Times with just music and/or sounds allow room for the listener's imagination to weave a new narrative with new meanings.
By working with ready mixed material this allows you as a Night Air producer to step out of your traditional features producer role of engaged story teller and move into more of a composer or orchestrator.
This allows you to paint with a broad brush. To work quickly. To step back and think of the full arc of the program. To consider the material for pace or texture rather than meaning of the moment.
Don't bog down getting it just right or finding the perfect thing, just use the next best thing to hand as there is no "right" way to go.
There is no time to get bogged down anyway. Rely on the previous producer to have done the nit picking. Focus on mood and direction.
This big picture thinking is what makes the Night Air an entertaining audio adventure.
Leave it to John to fix up the lumps and bumps.
Common errors
- Not enough or too much deviation from the keyword.
- Cutting up texts too finely
- Not allowing breathing space and pauses for music and sound effects.
- Not using pre-existing material and attempting to create the whole program from scratch.
- Writing too much explanation. Keep script short but open or purely functional – IDs, credits, etc.
- Spending too much time finessing the mix, just get the overall structure in place and John can smooth over the joins.
An example of the Night Air - Tower (second hour)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nightair/stories/2009/2477255.htm
- Engineering:
Transmitter: A Radio Eye feature about the erection of a satellite dish on the Cocos Keeling Islands
Exhaust vent: Stack
Launching pad: space exploration
Toastal engineering (CD)*
- Architecture:
Manhattan Tower – ex vinyl
Twin Towers
Advertising (tins of tomatoes on the empire state building)
- Historic-gothic:
BBC Transcriptions short story
* Symbolic:
Gene Pitney track (I gave my love a diamond … tower tall)
Finding the materials, an example
The Night Air uses a keyword to generate associations. ‘Tower’ can have a literal meaning of a structure like transmitter or column but there are also analogies about size, tallness, remoteness, exploration. We like to integrate the two.
Tower started as a chance find of a vinyl LP: Manhattan Tower. A search through SOLID (internal ABC intranet Sound Library database) found songs about a towers of emotional strength and small diamond rings with towering possibilities - and a horror story about climbing a derelict tower.
Other searches on the RN site (public internet) and Audio Arts database (internal ABC intranet) gave the satellite dish sequence from Only Connect made by a freelance who we knew and could easily ask permission of, and Ros Bandt’s ‘Stack’ – an acoustic art work and commercial CD release, so okay to use.
We have the rights to re-use most everything made by the ABC, part of our mission is to highlight and cross promote. ABC Radio national programs are best because we can easily ask permission and importantly may be able to access the full montage with all the separate tracks of audio - great for remixing.
A CD compilation of adverts – ‘Who put tomatoes on the Empire State’ – helped to extend the engineering idea (Toastal Engineering skit: how can we mend the world if we don’t’ get the toast right?).
How to do the montage
First lay up the biggest pieces on separate tracks – all starting at zero on the time line. Treat each item as a ‘slab’ and cut each into mini-slabs around the natural pauses.
For example, the Manhattan piece was about an hour long with various ‘scenes’, such as the Introduction; the party; the traffic; the love affair, etc. Stack has individual tracks.
The short story was a reasonable ending to the show overall. Aim to get at least 3 (pre-made) slabs for each half of the show.
Develop your cuts into a new narrative by alternating the mini-slabs. When you get stuck or an idea is exhausted, look for transitional music – either on message or some which can lead to a new idea.
Maybe look for more material if the mini-cuts don’t throw well enough – try RADA (internal ABC intranet archives database), other RN shows, local radio, databases like archive.org, freesound.org and soundtransit.nl.
Keep a record as you gater materials from open media sites like these so you can attribute the creators of the materials you use.
If you would like to use copyright material e.g. TV, movies, Youtube etc check with the Night Air team first - there may be a "fair use" case, for review and critique" or some other way forward.
Put ‘bed’ music (as much as you want) beneath the gaps in the mini-slabs. John can finesse this mix for you.
Insert nonsequiturs/stings/network i.d.s/ and short joining pieces. We can give you a CD of stings and voices saying " You are on The Night Air" etc
Other tasks
- Find a image to illustrate your show a good place is at Flickr, go to the By atrribution Creative Commons section and try entering your key word in the search. That's what we did for the picture on this webpage. Remember to note the creatours flickr home page URL for atttribution pourposes.
- Write a simple script for our announcer. The bare minimum is 1 an intro to name the topic, frame the piece and orient the audience 2 a couple of network and program and keyword idents 3 any front or back announcements that are needed, if not needed don't say anything let the listener figure it out. 4 an outro that includes all credits and necessary annotation.
- From this script write a short paragraph describing the program, this will be used as pre show publicity and text for website as well as being used in the podcast metadata.
- Write a log of your program. this is a chronological list of announcements, music, exerpted media materials and sound effects. From this log you can extract the next 2 things for our website.
- The names and URLs of any excerpted media. We like to link back to pages of the ABC shows for example and
- A list in chronological order of all the music details, this is
used on the website and given to our rights management dept. for
artists payments.
It should be in this format:
- Track: Walking in the Air
- Composer: Blake, Howard
- CD title: Kids Stuff
- CD label: EMI CDC7478702
- Artist: Kings Singers & Judy Dench narr.
- Dur: 2'00"
Note Dur: is the duration used in the program not of the track on the CD/LP
Tags
Derived from
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drtonygeorge/
Program: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nightair/stories/2009/2477255.htm
Alert Moderator
Comments
0 comments
