Fiona Thraille - Voice Actor, Audio Adventurer
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Cooperantem Audio

4/12/2012

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With some excitement I can announce the coming of Cooperantem Audio. 

It's a new platform for original audio drama, set up by Chris Brittain, M Sieiro Garcia and myself.


We'll be releasing series and one-offs later in 2013. 

And that means we've all been doing a lot of writing.

I've gone through some unfinished projects and finished them, so at editing stage are a one-off 45 minute play (a straightforward drama, although with slightly skew-wiff reality and some Welsh mythology) and a horror short, again with some mythology - although made up this time - hopefully for Halloween. 

Otherwise, I have written two and three quarter episodes of a mini-series for preschoolers, "Mr Mostyn's Box of Magical Noises". As there may only be one more story, it will truly be mini at this rate!

Red Sands Investigations II is still on the back-burner for a while, although I did write more during Nanowrimo. It was a scene based in a cafe, and with cat-loving owners in mind, I wondered whether they could actually run a cafe full of cats, and was amazed and delighted to find that such cafes do exist in Japan. And now in Red Sands, too.

Taking part in Nanowrimo (albeit at a reduced rate of words per day) was, as ever, fun and also enlightening. I would heartily recommend it, alone, for bringing a social aspect to writing. Every time, taking part teaches everyone something new. This time, it was that I find prose much, much harder to write than dialogue now. 

Writing is not simply writing - and the skills for writing novels can be quite different from those for writing audio, or poetry or anything else. Books are wonderful gateways into worlds and I would love to write one, but for the moment it's audio that has that immediacy, action, that challenge of succinctness that's so exciting.

I think I'm also finding a pattern in things I love writing about: mythology, whether real or invented, intruding on 'normal' lives; phony, melodramatic end of the pier history, be it fortune-tellers, conjurers, music hall performers, etc. ; alternate worlds; and mystery of some form, with a real-world backdrop.  Thinking about it, I've not really grown up from my young adolescent days, being knocked sideways by the creepy mythical rumblings and time-slip adventures of Alan Garner, Penelope Farmer, Catherine Storr, Gillian Cross and E Nesbitt, just for starters. And Philippa Pearce's 'Tom's Midnight Garden' remains my favourite book of all time. 


They say 'write what you know', but perhaps it's more 'write what you want to read'. Or listen to.
So that's where I'll be aiming from now on. Whether it works out or not, then at least the process will be enjoyable, and that's what counts.


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From the Archives - Red Sands Investigations #8

28/1/2012

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_Posted by fthrll on June 12, 2009 at 1:16 AM
Episode 1 is now complete and has been accepted by Pendant as is, which is very heartening. It's a real boost to know that they think the style works - it'll make it much easier to continue that with the music and fx in the next episode, now.

Episode 2 is a little trickier to mix than 1 as it has musical numbers in it, for starters, but I prefer it as a story, which also helps. Episode 1 was really establishing the main characters.

The musical number is going to be fun - I've done it once before in this way. The actor listens to the music and then performs the song. The job then is to match the timing of the original music to the actor's singing, through extending or adding or removing notes or part of them. In the last case, it was a sung piece over arpeggios - it was easy to break up the accompaniment because it was all individual notes, but it took a couple of hundred cuts to edit and the timing itself wasn't so easy. I really enjoyed doing it, but it was very much a trial and error thing (with lots of error!) 

In this case, I'm hoping it'll be simpler, as it's a rehearsal situation in a theatre with an elderly pianist. T actor is performing a Music Hall-style song, so has sent along a semi-sung, semi-spoken version. (Which, I have to say, has fantastic delivery - I was blown away by it). So it isn't meant to be melodic or polished, anyway, which hopefully will make it easier to tackle.

Six weeks left to mix Eps2-4. Episode 2 should be done by the end of next week. It's just about doable. Just...


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From the archives Red Sands Investigations #1

26/1/2012

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_First posted on August 7, 2008 at 12:15 AM
I'm going to use this blog to scribble notes about the status of this show.

Red Sands Investigations is a 5 part mini-series that I'm currently writing and will hopefully start producing in the next couple of months, under the production company title of The Picture Postcard Audio Playhouse.

Actually, by my original timetable, I'm meant to have started producing it ... ooooh... about 2 weeks ago, but it's taking a little longer to write than I'd hoped...
It's a post- noir detective series set in an English seaside town. The blurb goes like this...

Carla, the sole benefactor of her detective uncle?s will, travels to the town to sort through his affairs? and soon becomes entangled in new cases.

All is not as it seems. Did her Uncle jump from Red Sands pier or was he pushed? Who in the town knows the truth? Only his pile of dictaphone tapes and his infatuated assistant, Tiff, can help solve the mystery? and maybe avenge his death.

I've written episode 1 & most of episode 2. It is a lot of fun and I'm happy with most of the characters, but there are just a couple who are not so easy to get right.
I originally planned on writing an episode every 2 weeks, but episode 2 has taken double that already.

An old friend, a musician, is coming over this weekend & we're going to work on music for the show while she's here. She plays violin and piano and we have a few other instruments around. It's going to be fairly sparse, obviously, as it's different from using fully orchestrated creative commons music, but that suits the production. She's played a couple of tunes down the phone & I'm really excited to hear them properly as they sounded fantastic.

She's going to do the theme tune and a lot of underscoring music - she asked for a list, so she has one along the lines of:

melancholic, lost love theme
fortune teller's mystical theme
gypsy curse
nothingish curious
nothingish tense and building
nothingish action, fight.

The nothingish thing is kind of important. She writes very lovely melodies, but I've found from directing Wonder Woman, that in fact it's music that's bland that works best under dialogue. Anything too melodic and it's distracting. I will use some creative commons stuff for source music - in the casino, hotel & amusement arcade, etc.

In episode 2 there's also a music hall number, which I had great fun in making as filthy as possible whilst being absolutely clean & innocent: it's a song about drinking, which sounds like it's much, much dirtier. I love music hall songs of that style, so it was great to write an homage. I'll just have to find a bloke with a really filthy vocal delivery to sing it (I'm imagining kind of Sid James/Stanley Holloway style), and it should come off.

Otherwise I have done a couple of pictures for the show (one of which is above). I'm fairly happy with them - they're about to the best of my abilities using coloured pencils and MS Paint. It doesn't matter to me that it's not great - it's more to give an idea of the tone of it.

Other than that I have a Wordpress site to release it on when the time comes. And that's it so far. So yeah... a bit of a way to go still... but it'll come together.

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    Fiona Thraille is an actor, writer, audio drama creator and active member of the internet audio drama community. She also provides voiceover and narration for educational and commercial projects.

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