99% Invisible is my new favorite podcast. A little bit RadioLab, a touch of This American Life, and a lot of Roman Mars, the producer. There’s everything to like about the podcast.
Each episode makes visible some “in-broad-daylight-but-you-never-noticed-it-until-this-podcast” element of architecture and design. If you’re not curious about the built environment — which is just about everything from escalators to the pyramids — then listen to this instead.
On this edition of HowSound, Roman talks about a bit about the design of the podcast and podcasting writ large.
I should mention, too, Roman’s other major audio endeavor, Public Radio Remix. It’s a montage of ear candy produced for PRX — documentaries, sound art, features, podcasts, aural treasures…. Roman’s the DJ, if you will.
Hillary Frank launched a decade-long career in radio with an answering machine as a tape recorder.
In college, Hillary was dead-set on getting a story on This American Life. The fact that she had no radio experience what-so-ever didn’t matter. She just made a story and sent it in. But, instead of a professional mic and recorder, she used the built in mic on an answering machine and then edited on a boom box cassette player.
Really.
Eventually, Hillary worked at This American Life and half-a-dozen other radio programs. Now, she’s harnessed the creative spark again, this time with a podcast — The Longest, Shortest Time.
On this HowSound, Hillary talks about inspiration, podcasting, and motherhood.
Imagine this: You’ve met a total character. She’s kind of eccentric. She has forty-one animals in her backyard and it’s not a farm. And, just about every time she talks, she says something amazing. In radio parlance, she ‘spits tape.’
But, there’s no story. You pull out all the stops trying cull out a story by interviewing and spending time with the woman and her animals. Nothing works. All you’re left with is a bunch of great tape and no clear way to organize it — no story.
What do you do?
In short, that’s what happened to producer Joel Supple. This fall, Joel attended the Transom Story Workshop to learn the craft of radio storytelling. While she was there….. I guess I should probably say “here” not “there” since I taught the workshop….. so….. While she was here, Joel stumbled upon Veronica Worthington and her menagerie in West Dennis on Cape Cod. Joel spent a few hours with Veronica and collected a ton of great tape but….. no story.
On this HowSound we feature to Joel’s piece — her first ever — and I talk about solving the conundrum: How do you produce a story when there is no story?
Listen to the audio in this video. It’s perfect for radio. With some clever editing, narration, and other content such as interviews with survivors of the crash, you could easily turn this into a radio story.
Why doesn’t that happen more often? The 20th century was captured in sound. Why aren’t there more radio stories featuring archive audio — oral histories, news reels, odd bits of audio flotsam? It seems like an obvious source of content and story ideas, doesn’t it?
Fortunately, producer Joe Richman understands the power and pleasure of storytelling with archive tape. On this edition of HowSound, we feature Joe’s radio story about the historic crash of a B-52 bomber into the Empire State Building — the video alchemized for radio.
Joe’s not alone, of course, but the field of producers using archive tape isn’t crowded. American Radio Works comes to mind. So, too, does Lost and Found Sound by the Kitchen Sisters. And, there’s Talking History, a radio program produced at the State University of New York at Albany. Anybody I’ve missed?
There seems to be a trend afoot in documentary radio — working directly with musicians to compose music for a story. In fact, some producers are using music to tell the story, not just score it. That’s one hundred eighty degrees in opposition to standard journalistic practice of not using music at all. And, it’s pretty damn interesting.
“Kohn” by Andy Mills is a compelling example of this trend. (So, is Long Haul Productions’ “The Natural State” which we featured on HowSound a few episodes back.) Andy worked with Hudson Branch, a band from Chicago. They composed music to accompany and become part of the story about Andy’s friend, Kohn. Other people working in this vein are Charles Spearin and The Books.
Andy received the “Best New Artist” award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival in 2011 for his production. Well deserved, I’d say. And, RadioLab picked up the story and produced their own version. Andy’s version and RadioLab’s version make for an interesting comparison.
Speaking of comparisons, Kohn is accompanied by Hudson Branch as he sings a unique version of Grey Room by Damien Rice. Check out the original.
Have a listen and post your thoughts about music and documentary storytelling.
“As a teacher of new radio producers, I encourage students to do something risky – plan a story before going out to report it.
Sounds counterintuitive, right? Producers are supposed to enter the field to find the story, not impose one. Well, I agree with that, to be sure. But I also think it’s important to dream about what a story could be in advance.”
“Norman Corwin, a creative giant of the Golden Age of Radio whose programs chronicling World War II are milestones in broadcasting, has died. He was 101….
During a career that spanned more than 70 years, Corwin wrote, produced and directed for radio, television, film and the stage.
His insightful writing earned Emmy and Golden Globe awards. He received an Academy Award nomination for his script for the 1956 film Lust for Life, the biography of Vincent van Gogh starring Kirk Douglas.
“NPR has long been accused of being liberal, but a review of the coverage these past four months of a story tailor-made for liberal fangs may be instructive over how true the charge really is. The story is the ongoing phone-tapping and bribery scandal battering Rupert Murdoch and his media conglomerate, News Corp.”
Read more of Shumacher-Matos’ October 17, 2011 blog post here.
Tobacco warehouse, Richmond, Virginia, circa 1918.
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Keys to good storytelling: strong, simple writing; solid voicing; professional recording and mixing; compelling characters; a seductive narrative; visuals…..
What else?
John Biewen says “sure-handedness,” a compelling, internal logic where one idea flows seamlessly into the next.
John’s a freelance radio producer and the Audio Program Director at the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS). He’s taught techniques for sure-handedness to hundreds of students and shares a few of those tips on this edition of HowSound. We also listen to a CDS student production from 2003 about Edward Stephenson, a tobacco auctioneer. It’s produced by Mara Zepada and Kate Waters. John says it’s a great example of sure-handedness.
The Christian Science Monitor recently asked the age old question: wither radio?
“The latest suspect in radio’s impending extinction is Internet music services such as Spotify and Pandora that promise to offer a level of personalization and user control that commercial, or terrestrial, radio can’t match. But radio stubbornly lives on: According to the research firm Arbitron, 190 million Americans ages 12 and older listen to radio on a weekly basis. What’s more is that for musicians, despite the utility of YouTube, Twitter, or iTunes, the mass reach of radio is still the easiest way to break out big as an artist.”
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Rob Rosenthal
Rob is a radio teacher and freelance producer. He taught radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies for eleven years. In the fall of 2011, he's teaching a seven-week, radio storytelling workshop with Transom.org. Currently, he's producing audio slideshows for the Open Society Institute.
Rob is a radio teacher and freelance producer. He taught radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies for eleven years. In the fall of 2011, he's teaching a seven-week, radio storytelling workshop with Transom.org. Currently, he's producing audio slideshows for the Open Society Institute.