A Radio Styled Drama Done Dictation Style
Last time on Inside The LightMinded Lab, I fulfilled one of the last assignments in my new book, which just got release: Drafting Out Loud: A Creative’s Guide To Dictation. This book is all about learning how to dictate your writing.
I strongly suggest you check it out, its available anywhere books are sold. But on to today’s topic. Last time, I promised that I’d turn my dictated story into a radio styled drama. That I did.
- Making A Radio Styled Drama
The first part of making a production like this, is actually telling the story. There’s multiple ways to do this, but since I was trying to learn dictation, I obviously went that route. You could do the same thing writing it down. The trick is to be careful about the way we describe things, as there are no visuals to go along with this.
So I dictated it, and at the end of that, I had a rough draft that really didn’t need a ton of revisions. I still did a few passes, but really, I wasn’t going for perfection on this story. What I was trying to do, was prove that in only one hour, I could come up with a complete idea and flesh it out into a full short story, which I did, and which I hope to do with other guests in the future.
From there, I poor-boyed the production. I went into my recording studio and recorded every person’s lines all at once, ie- all of Bernie’s lines in one recording, then all the waitresses lines in another recording, and so on.
From there, I edited out the mistakes, and chopped them into portions that were the maximum size that eleven labs could do a voice change on. From there, it was just a matter of finding the right ai voices to swap out with my own.
I could have just given the script to it to read, and I tried that, but I’ve learned, for now at least, that the voice changer there gives the best results, as it tries to mimic my acting, but in the new voice.
If only my acting was good. You’ll notice if you listen to it, especially in the beginning, that my characters don’t sound right. That’s because I did a single take, and forgot in a few places how I should be acting. But I was rushing and didn’t feel like correcting it. So you get an unprofessional take on my end.
Then the hardest part, is assembling all the parts together. That done, I sent it off to a sound designer Fivver and for very little cost got all the sound effects added in.
Finally, I present it to you.
Yes, I could have, and probably should have polished it and taken a little more time to make it really good, but when you have a blog, a YouTube channel, and a podcast to run, all on the side, while investing in the stock market, working construction, and most of all, spending most of my time writing books, screenplays, and producing films, its easy to get stretched a little thin sometimes.
So please forgive any imperfections, and enjoy All You Can Eat.
And don’t forget to check out my latest book if you want to learn how to write by dictation. It’s awesome when you can find time to write in the cracks of your life, and fulfill that cliché advice of write every day.
Chow.
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