Gear Junky – The On Location Audio Drama Field Recording Blog

Yes, you heard that right! On Aug 1-3 we got the opportunity to record with John Dryden, an independent producer whose work is regularly commissioned by the BBC.

John's impressive production credits include the Peabody-winning The Day That Lehmann Died, A Tokyo Murder, The Handmaid's Tale, and Fatherland.

The show this time is Severed Threads, a mini series which follows three stories - an investigative journalist uncovering child labor in India, a boy in the United Kingdom obsessed with violent YouTube videos, and a born again Christian in Minneapolis who's about to have his whole life unravel.

Each story was recorded in the continent where it takes place. In our case, we were recording scenes in New York City intended to take place in small town Minnesota - around a dinner table, in an office building, outside a church.

See some of the terrific actors we worked with during this scene, when Jim is sliced and diced by a television reporter:

The show will be airing on BBC Radio 4 in October, and we'll definitely let you know when you can hear it!

In the meantime, check out The Day That Lehman Died (BBC Radio Stream) for a taste of this documentary-style field recorded radio drama.

Killer artwork by Simon Adams

After several months of hard work, FinalRune is proud to release The Troll of Stony Brook, our first original title since the Ogle-award winning Waiting for a Window in 2008.

An awkward teenager, Jamie, is driving home one night from a party when he hits something - something big. His pushy co-worker, Rick, talks him into going back to the scene of the accident, where they find a creature pushed to the brink by human progress.

What follows is a startling and brutal experience - something that will change Jamie's life forever.

The show is available now as a free podcast and a paid download.

Wait, Why Do I Want to Pay for Something that is Free?

Good question. Here's how it works:

• To listen for free, simply go to www.finalrune.com/troll each Friday in July to download a new episode, or keep track of our podcast - either through RSS or through iTunes.
• That's it. Free is free. BUT, the catch - you only get to hear the show in 6-7 minute installments. There will be five podcast episodes altogether.
• If you don't want to wait to hear the end, you can buy the whole thing now for $2.99. Safe and secure through Paypal.
• In addition to the show, with the paid version you get two special music tracks - one long spacey jam by Barb Truex and a rockin' Bad Religion-esque tune from the Big Coffin Hunters - plus the warm and fuzzy feeling that you've made a meaningful contribution to independent art.

Killer artwork by Simon Adams

What would happen if a troll still lived in the diminishing wild around us?

To explore that question comes FinalRune's new show, The Troll of Stony Brook.

An awkward teenager, Jamie, is driving home one night from a party when he hits something - something big. His pushy co-worker, Rick, talks him into going back to the scene of the accident... and what they find will change them both forever.

This exciting story of what happens when nature is pushed to the brink takes place largely outdoors. So, in a true test of the field recording experience, the intrepid FinalRune cast and crew set out on a sunny spring day to record in the woods being Fred's off-grid homestead in Alfred, Maine.

As always, adventure happened - inevitable when you get a group of actors and interesting looking gear in random places.

We had kids looking on, were kicked off one prospective location, and even had a few people get lost as they made their way back from the woods! (For the record, Fred is not a registered Maine Guide).

Anyways, the audio is excellent, and in a bold coup there were even some scenes recorded in Bill Dufris' audiobook voice-over studio. Stay tuned for release in early June.

Here are some pictures (plenty more in our photo gallery):

The Troll (Bill Dufris) begs Jamie (Philip Hobby) to remember the wild things.

Reporter (Christine Marshall) and Sargeant (Christopher Price) at the scene of a horrific crime.

Fred giving direction at a car scene recorded in the woods.

The story's namesake - a new development in Southern Maine.

FinalRune is proud to announce plans for our next original show (the last one was the award-winning Waiting for a Window back in 2008, wow!), titled The Troll of Stony Brook.

Like Window, Troll tells a somber story using wit, humor, and a bit of magic. It all starts when a teenager, Jamie, hits something in the woods while reaching for his cell phone. The creature runs off, but he can't help but return with a friend later to see what it was.

The result is a tragic and terrifying exploration of what happens when wild things are pushed to the brink by human expansion. Troll will be recorded on-location in early April 2009, and will be available as a free download later in April.

Want to know when this new show is out? Sign up for FinalRune Runescapes (our free monthly newsletter)!

We're often asked: when are you going to start charging for downloads?!

Well, my philosophy is simple. I want more people to hear this work, not to earn a few extra dollars per month.

Combine that attitude with the freeconomics of digital distribution and you start to come to the unusual economic path that is FinalRune.

A few years back I tried the experiment of charging for downloads - $1.99 for an MP3 of Fall of the Hero or Blind Man's Confession, which I thought was pretty reasonable - barely more than a song, and ten times as long!

The phenomenon? We went from several hundred downloads per week to practically none. I had maybe $10 more at the end of the month, but was failing at my bigger mission, which is to further the medium of audio drama and get people interested in my work.

Since then, everything's been free and downloads have really shot up - even before the Wall Street Journal we'd average about 1000 downloads a month, meanwhile, Radio Drama Revival gets upwards of 10,000 downloads a month!

The lesson? It's not hard to give away good content. And making this freely available is at least part of the reason we ended up in The Wall Street Journal to begin with - and how can you put a price on that?

But let's examine the question a bit more deeply.

Making the product freely available, without the foggiest expectation of pay, seems a bit ludicrous on the surface. The productions do, after all, cost money to make!

I've never bothered to track how many hours it takes me to write, cast, record, post-produce and market this work, but even myself aside we have actors, musicians, and a recordist who all show up when we produce this, and lately I've taken to paying these people!

But my underlying motivation is not to earn a buck, it's to create good art.

Free as a Business Model

While in our economy it is an implied assumption that if something is given away for free, it must not have value (or else that value must be picked up by another party, e.g. advertisers), to me, it's very different: I am going to do this anyways, because I love it. Because I'm hard-wired to tell stories.

Ask pretty much any artist, and you'll run into the same attitude, just varying extents of how much they've accepted the economic reality of our society. We can choose to go the way of the record companies, fighting tooth and nail to stop our audience from getting content the way that makes sense and is convenient for them, or we can choose to embrace digital technology and forge a different path.

So, all that being said, am I allergic to money? No. I'm in the process of looking for grants and other sources of funds to finance new productions - not because I'm sick of paying for it out of pocket, but only because my pockets are so small!

It's very possible that out of some of these new funding options we will create content that's not free - paid podcasts, commercially released audiobooks, etc. - FinalRune will always be creating some sort of free product in the interests of attracting, entertaining, and retaining new listeners.

Cash Isn't The Only Way to Get Rich

Let it be said that even when you don't receive cash, you can receive payment that is richer than gold. Here's what some listeners have said to us lately:

"My job is boring - boring - boring. What gets me through is listening to MP3 downloads ... Found your website and.... all I have to say is Thank You. You made my days a little better."

"I love the work you do. To me radio is everything... When I was born back in 1955 I was legally blind. Radio to me was my entire "field of vision" ... I hope this helps get the message out that the 'audio arts' are alive and well and living in our hEARtS"

Last but not least, the pitch: some listeners are so kind that with no request to do so at all, they have sent us some money. To these people, I bow low and offer my sincerest thanks. These generous donations make a tangible difference in our ability to make new shows!

If you believe in what we're doing, and want to help both fund new audio drama, won't you send us whatever you can afford? You can donate safely using Paypal:

But if you can't swing it, don't worry. We're still going to make these shows, and they're still going to be free. Free as in beer.

We're giddy beyond words to announce that FinalRune was featured in the Wall Street Journal on February 25, 2010.

The article, entitled "Return With Us to the Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear—Via the Internet," heavily focused on our signature field recording style and director Fred Greenhalgh's passion for reviving audio drama in an age of the iPod.

Quick Link: The project featured in the story in the Joe Gunther Pilot

Listen to the FIRST EPISODE of this New Production:

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Download the Joe Gunther Pilot! (MP3)

Reporter Barry Newman writes:

Radio drama, ranging from "Captain Midnight" to the high art of Orson Welles, thrived for 40 years in America. It was all but gone by the 1960s, killed off by television. Yet now that TV must contend with the Internet, the Internet has given radio drama a whisper of new life. It can't be called "radio drama" anymore, since hardly any of it gets on the radio. Mr. Greenhalgh settles for "audio drama," but the catchiest name for it is "mind movie."

Sue Zizza, a sound-effects artist who teaches at New York University, figures there are about 300 "true, quality audio dramatists" active in the U.S. She helps put on a one-week "audio theater" summer workshop that has lately been attracting 100 trainees. In 2006, one was Fred Greenhalgh.

"What amazes me is that audio drama just won't go away," Ms. Zizza says. "It's so primal in us. No matter how much we ignore it, there are still people out there like Fred."

He grew up on the Maine coast writing short stories. At the University of Southern Maine, unpublished, he rewrote one of them as a radio script, replacing sights with sounds, as in: "Storm increases with violent intensity until it unleashes a mighty burst of lightning."

Mighty bursts were produced in radio's golden age by shaking tin sheets in a studio. Now, mighty bursts are downloadable. But Mr. Greenhalgh can't afford studio rent and prefers not to buy (or steal) anyone else's thunder. He harvests lightning by walking out into a storm with a recorder and a microphone.

We have a ton of people to thank, in no particular order:

• Reporter Barry Newman who made the journey all the way to Maine in the midst of a snowstorm (remember those?)
• Marty Cohn and Archer Mayor of Vermont Audio Drama Podcasting (VTAD) for kick starting an amazing new project
• Mad Horse Theater Company for letting us use their space for the field recording
• The awesome cast and crew who showed what FinalRune is made of!

Image courtesy of Maine Farmhouse Journal

The Mad Horse Theatre Company and FinalRune Productions will present a night of BEAN SUPPER and LIVE RADIO DRAMA on Saturday, February 27, at Mad Horse headquarters, 24 Mosher St, South Portland, ME (Map).

The evening, running from 5-7PM (show at 6), promises the fare of a traditional New England bean supper followed by a series of plays performed in the style of old time radio of the 40s and 50s.

Programming will be a mix of new and old, featuring a riff on the classic Sorry, Wrong Number (With Christine Marshall returning as Mrs. Stevenson) entitled "Sorry, Wrong Cell Phone" and Waiting for a Window, written by FinalRune’s director Fred Greenhalgh, and winner of the 2008 Gold Ogle Award for fantasy audio drama.

Originally recorded on-location in South Portland and other locations in the Greater Portland area, Waiting for a Window has been revised to take advantage of live performance.

Dubbed a “nautical version of Waiting for Godot” by the SFF Audio blog, Window tells the story of Norman, a waylaid sailor who washes up on a strange island where no one ever wants to leave.

Admission is by donation, with a suggested donation of $10 at the door. Seating is first-come, first-serve, with a capacity of 50.

FinalRune is proud to announce the availability of short videos from our first-ever live radio drama held on Halloween 2009. All footage was shot with the snazzy Zoom Q3 camera.

Here's an example of some stuff behind the scenes:

See the rest on YouTube or on our Halloween video footage page.

Image from Dvorak Blog

FinalRune is proud to announce the release of our third and final (for 2009!) installment in our Old Time Radio re-creation project with The Mad Horse Theater Company: Three Skeleton Key.

And what a doozy it is! Three men who tend the light at a reclusive island off the coast of French Guiana see a rogue ship adrift in the Atlantic. The reason for the derelict ship soon becomes obvious - it has been overrun by hundreds of thousands of ferocious ship's rats.

The rats land on the isle and soon we are in for a claustrophobic tale of terror as the three men struggle to keep their minds from cracking under the pressure of thousands and thousands of squeaking, scratching, hungry rats.

"Three Skeleton Key" is among the most famous of old time radio tales, learn much more about its history on the Escape and Suspense! Blog.

This production also brought FinalRune players to perhaps the most interesting field location yet: Goat Island Lighthouse off the coast of Cape Porpoise, Maine. Plenty of pictures up on Flickr (and note! The light is delightful and beautiful, acoustically perfect for this tale of terror but much better suited for a picnic lunch if you have your eyes with you).

Anyways, this is a great production. Go to the Three Skeleton Key page to listen for free.