After nearly two years of working on an audio drama, I’ve come to wonder if I should have spent more time thinking about the audio part and less on the drama.
It’s not that we haven’t sweated the details. I don’t think I’ve ever sweated the details so much in my life. It’s that the story engine might possibly be better if it were more closely tied to what we hear.
In this story, I stole (or copied) from The Conversation, a movie about sound. And so the hearing that matters is largely dialogue. Which is fine. We remember the things people tell us more than any discrete sound.
But I wonder if it wouldn’t have been a more interesting experience for the listener if the protagonist was actively seeking out sounds; if they were walking into different audio environments searching for specific sounds.
That would have been a more lean-forward experience. And I guess those are the ones that animate me the most.
postscript
I’ve been told: your audio drama has to play well when someone is doing the dishes. Why, though? Can people play video games while doing the dishes?
Are video games more or less popular today than 10, 20, 30 years ago?
The more we make video and audio work as “background”, the less engaging it becomes. The less engaging, the less popular.