For this guest lecture Dan Shepherd discussed his experience as a feature radio producer. He gave us two different examples of radio features and described the thought process into making these and the actual production process. The first piece is a montage piece on a train journey across Australia called ‘indian pacific’, he explained how a good feature will be able to exploit your imagination, this train journey achieves this through a mixture of interviews and sounds you would hear if you were on a train. The second was a different type of radio feature which was presenter led; this involved having the presenter as the main focus and then having layers of sounds behind the main focus.
What can be learnt from Dan Shepherds work is the amount that sound can actually do. The type of features Dan works on are essentially the same process’ you go through with sound for film, however with feature for radio you can go into a lot more depth with the sound as sound is the sole component to it. Sound has to do everything as there are no other elements. What I took from Dan’s talk is to be able to portray an experience it is important to experience it yourself. We have adapted this to our film through getting a lot of our ambient sounds and prop sounds on the film set rather than in the studio. Throughout the making of Dan’s feature indian pacific he had issues with some of the audio not being the quality he needed for the feature. What can be learnt from this as for any other production it is important to go in with a great deal of organisation and the ability to problem solve on set. Skills which I have learnt from our specific project through complications with our director.
Dan’s ability to make something interesting to listen to whilst tell a story all through sound can certainly be admired. A lot of his skills used will be taken into account whilst looking into my own project.