Radio drama is a dead art. We all know that.
Or is it?
One part is certainly dead, the part where writers and performers paint a “word picture,” spurring the audience to create scenes in their own minds. The best Golden Age radio shows did this so seamlessly that listeners were unaware of the friendly and expert hand that led them through the darkness.
Newer dramas, on the BBC, podcasts, and elsewhere, have tried to bring this art back for decades, but it’s gone, and there’s no link to the past. Find a good episode of Gunsmoke or X Minus One to hear the best at work.
A second part of the art of radio drama, however, does live on. That part is the sound effects, voice, and music that engineers mix together to create the soundscape in the first place.
These two parts of radio drama can be thought of as the language of radio drama (part one), and the medium of radio drama (part two).
The medium of radio drama is very much alive, but not in radio. It’s alive in the movies.
A lot of people still don’t realize that all modern movies are essentially silent films with a radio drama soundtrack created later.
The only sound you hear in a movie that’s actually recorded at the same time as the picture is the dialog. And in many movies—especially effects-heavy movies—most of the dialog is rerecorded also, in an exacting process called ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement), making these movies almost complete radio dramas with pictures.
The Foley artists who used to drum sheets of metal to make thunder on Night Beat or squish corn starch to make the sound of Sergeant Preston trudging through snow with Yukon King on Challenge of the Yukon back in the radio drama days are still using the same tricks today on movie and TV soundtracks.
The sound of every glass clink, door lock, car ignition, and crowd murmur in every movie has to be created from scratch and added in post.
In another life, I was a Foley artist. I worked on my own movies and on a couple of indie films (Yellow and Melvin Goes to Dinner), and then eventually got hired on big films like The Shipping News and Cassanova. I’m pictured here creating gondola sounds for Cassanova.
If I could live other lives and choose different careers, one of them would be Foley artist. It’s a wonderfully specific little art & craft that doesn’t really have any other useful application.
Appreciate it the next time you watch a movie. Try watching it without sound and imagine how you’d fill the silence. Try making your own soundtrack. It’s fun!
I constantly watch movies and TV shows with the sound editing in mind. That’s an art I would have enjoyed doing. One of the things that cracked me up in “Airplane!” was the shots of the jet plane flying with sound of a propellor plane edited in.
Try watching a horror movie without sound. It isn't much horror there.