On writing audio - Action sequences

Writing for audio offers a similar relationship to the listener that I imagine a novelist has with the reader: it's a partnership; you're not letting people sit back and passively watch something, you are asking them to actively participate, to conjure images in their mind's eye that are sparked by the sound cues you're giving them. And because audio has, to an extent at least, fairly fixed costs, it is as easy to set an audio drama on Mars as it is to place it in contemporary Birmingham. So the canvas you have to work on is seemingly limitless, the story possibilities infinite.

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Technique, though, has seemed for a while to have stagnated. Where cinema is a visual medium and we understand that the story is told with the image as much as it is with dialogue, too many audio dramas are little more than actors talking while sound effects provide a sonic backdrop that illustrates the dialogue. We hear the wind in the trees and some birds chirping and a character says "Here we are in the garden". The writer doesn't trust the audience, doesn't trust the process, doesn't trust sound.

"Sound design", the clue is in the title. And yet most of the time it is little more than "pretty noises".

I think I was lucky. My first ever radio commission came when producers Karen Rose and Lisa Osborne came to me with the idea of doing a ten minute piece for Radio 4. The object of the exercise was to tell a story through sound. Not with it, but through it. I didn't listen to audio drama, was only dimly aware of the medium. And I didn't bother to educate myself, I just wrote something where visual storytelling was replaced by audio storytelling. It partly worked but, more importantly, it set the challenge.

The next few radio plays I did, I tried to expand on this idea. To push the boundaries of what you could get away with without dialogue. I still wasn't listening to other dramas, so it took a while to realise that not everyone was doing this. Just as not everyone was recording on location, with all the actors together - I didn't realise that we were almost unique in doing this, and I still don't really understand why you would choose not to.

With the latest Aldrich Kemp season, "Who Killed Aldrich Kemp?", I have pushed the idea of storytelling through sound even further. This time out, I wanted to tackle action, I wanted to pull off the kind of sequences that the Mission: Impossible movies tackle, but do them without pictures.

Action has always been the hardest thing to do with audio. It's easy to give you the sonic cues to let you know that we are in a garden without someone having to actually say it, but letting you know that we have just been thrown out of an exploding building, 14 storeys above Lagos, and are now in free-fall, is a little more difficult. Because, even if we were to do it for real and just record the whole thing on a microphone, your brain would struggle to make sense of the cacophony of noises; it just wouldn't hold together.

And so this is where a really gifted sound designer comes in. We're lucky, we have David Thomas, who is inarguably the best in the business. The trick, we have found, is to pick out those sounds which will define the experience, and then to bed them into a backdrop that is atmospheric, but doesn't distract. I write specific cues into the script, but I'm not as precise on this as I used to be, because David and I have developed a shorthand over the years so that I am no longer writing every cue that will then be added to the audio like someone going over a shopping list. Nowadays, I'm just giving David the scaffolding on which to build a sequence of his own.

Here's an excerpt from the scene in question, with a few annotations. To set it up, Clara Page is in an office building in Lagos, that is about to explode...

The door CRASHES IN--

SABINE: TURUN! <Get down!>

Bec Boey, playing Sabine, speaks Malay throughout this scene

GUNSHOTS, the TV screen shatters--

David Thomas is going to know that this is more than just the sound of breaking glass; to understand that it's a TV, we need something fizzy and electronic to happen within this effect

SABINE grabs CLARA--

This is physical, and it's one of the reasons we record on location. In this instance Bec Boey is going to physically grab Phoebe Fox (playing Clara Page) and we'll hear the contact, the grunt of breath, the movement etc. You can fake it in a studio, but it will sound fake.

SABINE: LARI! <Run!>

CLARA: I don't know what that--

SABINE: LARI!

--and is now running with CLARA across the room, FIRING repeatedly at the windows, the shots impacting with dull THUMPS--

How do we know this is happening? Gunfire is pretty clear, but the glass not breaking? We need a line of dialogue to cover the action. It's going to be a cheat, but let's make it something that this character would actually say, rather than just bald narration…

CLARA: It's armoured glass! All you're doing is weakening--

A series of MUFFLED CRUMPS behind them; INCENDIARY and DEMOLITION DEVICES going off in series, getting closer--

We've set up earlier that the building is rigged with explosives, so these sound effects have already been cued-up in the listener's mind

The doors behind them blast off their hinges, the PRESSURE WAVE SWEEPS ACROSS THE ROOM, destroying everything in its path--

I really don't know what this will sound like when I'm writing it, but I know it's enough of a description to allow David free rein to build something effective

CLARA: Crap.

We sell the explosion simply by having Phoebe shout this line - she has to project OVER an incredibly loud sound that isn't there yet. If she's too quiet, the explosion will sound rubbish, however good it is.

And she and SABINE are HURLED against the window, which SHATTERS, due to the gunfire. And suddenly, CLARA and SABINE are...

EXT. OFFICE BUILDING, LAGOS - CONTINUOUS

...fourteen storeys above the city of LAGOS, flying through the air--

The wind whistling around them as they drop--

And so the sudden change in atmosphere, from interior to exterior, is stark. And David added faint city sounds from below, and then raised them in the mix as the characters fall

CLARA: OH CRAP!

The simplest effect in the world - David Thomas moves the microphone AWAY from Phoebe as she shouts, and it sounds exactly as if she is falling away from us

SABINE: Bertahanlah! <Hold on!>

CLARA: I have no idea what you're--

And then we hear a COMPACT PARACHUTE deploying, the WHOOSH and CLAP as the canopy unfurls and arrests their descent--

CLARA: Ah! OK. Parachute. Good.

And that last line is there just to bring the audience up to speed with what is happening. Even if the last few seconds has confused someone, they know we are now gliding in a parachute and they are back in lock-step with the story. This is a cheat, but I think it's necessary to cheat sometimes, just to help the listener along a little bit.

There are a number of sequences like this in the new series, some more successful that others, and each trying to do a slightly different thing. I'm not reinventing the wheel here, but I do think there is a lot of space within the audio medium to experiment and to play around with ideas.

Audio is a relatively inexpensive medium - the sequence above was recorded on location in just a few minutes and then built out by David in post. The movie version would take days and would cost a fortune.

We can do incredible things with audio. We can take you anywhere on the planet, anywhere in the universe, anywhere in your imagination. And yet, for some reason, we mostly don't. The average UK audio drama seems to be set in the here and now, in a house or in a pub... And I don't know why. I'm sure some of these stories are important and vital and good. But a lot of the time they just feel... Unambitious.

The BBC are steadily reducing their audio drama budgets and slots, just as the big US companies are starting to discover the medium. The skills are in the UK, because we've been making these things for decades, but we squander those skills too often, and we still don't really use sound as a storytelling device.

If we're going to make this medium work, if we're going to compete on the world stage, then we need to embrace audio for all it can do. This isn't cheap movies, or talking books, it's its own thing. The Americans are starting to throw money at it but they want to spend that money on movie star voices, which doesn't actually aid the form at all (some brilliant movie actors lose all their power when you only hear their voice), and movie stars don't want to spend a week on location for no money, so the shows are recorded over a morning in a studio and the quality suffers as a result.

We are capable of making extraordinary pieces of audio in the UK; we have great voice actors, brilliant technicians, and producers who understand the medium. What we need now are ambitious, imaginative storytellers, and an industry that doesn't turn its back on the medium just as it is approaching its heyday.

WHO KILLED ALDRICH KEMP? starts Friday 24 March on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. You can listen to the trailer HERE.