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:
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 At the University of Southern Maine, unpublished, he rewrote one of them as a radio script, replacing sights with sounds, as in: “Storm increases with violent intensity until it unleashes a mighty burst of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!