Hey, Boomer!

We did another play for humanities! Well, a radio play, but that’s close enough. Just like last time, this was a fascinating project both in concept and in execution. First, the concept. The title of this post is in reference to the baby boom that followed the end of the Second World War. That’s right, we’re talking about the 1950s. Specifically, our radio play¹ aimed to satirize the 50s, showcasing the cultural shifts following the war.

I’ll admit, I didn’t really know much about the 50s before this project, so much of what we learned was new. The 50s are often portrayed as a time of relative perfection, but there was a lot happening behind that facade. As an introduction to the cultural values of the 50s (and the concept of satire), we watched the movie “Pleasantville.” Besides being fairly entertaining, it did contain some legitimate insight about societal norms and the dangers of conformity. Here’s my write-up of my thoughts. If you’d like a proper analysis, here you go:

Our pathway to the swift procurement of tidbits of perfectly parseable, profound, and plausible platitudes pertained mainly to the perusal of a plethora of publications. In short, we looked at a variety of sources, from our textbook to videos, to get a sense of what was going on. Taking good and sensible notes proved to be challenging, particularly when we had to keep up with the video. That said, organizing with headings, main points, and sub-points helped a fair bit to keep things relatively readable. ²

Research over, it was now near time to actually start preparing for the production. With Romeo and Juliet I had wanted to be more involved in the actual production team, which was being expanded for this. We now would have a production team (director, producer, and script supervisor) and a technical team (sound, Foley, and streaming). I ended up getting a role as streaming director, which led to a very interesting experience. My main role was setting up and managing all the technical aspects of our radio play. This meant setting up mics, linking digital sounds, and handling the actual livestream.

Even before I’d gotten my role, I’d had a pretty good idea of how I’d pull this off. ³ Since the radio play had to be live-streamed, I used OBS to develop the stream setup. It was fairly basic, as all I needed from it was a soundboard, background music, some basic graphics to make it less boring to watch, and the ability to interface with 8 microphones simultaneously. One of these was significantly harder than the rest. It was the music.

While the rest of the class was working on the script and the rest of my team was finding sound effects, I started building out a control panel. Without actually having the sound files, I just built out a framework so I could drag and drop them in once I got them. With that done, I moved on to creating the scenes. Since the script had commercials in it, I made these two scenes for the normal play and the breaks. Some retro fonts, an audio visualizer, a complete lack of colour, and a few too many CRT effects made this:

The next step was hooking up all the mics. A Tascam US-16x08 we borrowed from the music department, which only took about an hour and a half to get working! From here we could connect up to 7 mics ⁴, which was hopefully enough for our needs.

Now no more than a day out from our final performance, I got the rest of the digital sound effects and started adding them onto the soundboard. The background music needed a bit of fiddling, but it seemed like it would work just fine.

So on April 30th we took over the choir room and started to set up. We had four mics in the centre of the room, one mic for a narrator, and another (much more fiddly) mic for the sound effects. Props were littered across two tables, my laptop and the audio interface perched on the end. To my surprise, all the mics worked, and people’s performances were great. The practical sound team got everything pretty close to on time.

Now, on my end things didn’t go as great. For one, an issue with the broadcast meant it started about two minutes late. ⁵ On top of that, the mics were way quieter than in practice because something happened when I rebooted the Tascam that knocked everything down a few decibels. Keeping up with all the different settings I had to manage in the panel was a massive headache. Even just switching between scenes was about a 6-step process, ⁶ and whenever I forgot to move a slider, it meant a sound effect was late, or too quiet, or something like that. ⁷ Still, the broadcast did come together, so I’ll let you take a look at it yourself before I point out any more of its flaws.

I’d imagine you didn’t listen to the whole recording, but hopefully you got a sense of how it went. I still think it was a pretty good job for the time we had, especially considering how little of this I’d done before. If we ever do something like this again, I’d definitely want to do a few more runs practicing how to trigger the sounds and trying to simplify everything as much as possible. ⁸ This project really pushed my skills, just by having me figure out a lot of new stuff in not too much time, and it’s definitely ranking high among the projects this year. ⁹ I hope we do something similar again next year, as there’s always new stuff to try and new things to learn.

That said, I think this post is about done. I’m Finn Hofbauer, so long for now.