Hi folks,
I’m taking another look this week at the advice offered by Erik Barnouw in his Handbook of Radio Writing (1947). This time the attention is focused on “shifting the scene” of a radio drama using a technique known as the “narration transition”. These techniques are common sense but nonetheless easy to overlook.
Routine Technique
Scene Shifting Part 2
Narration
Sometimes the transition from one scene to another is handled by a narrator saying something like “Meanwhile, three miles out of town camping in a dried up creek bed the Dalton gang plan their next move”.
Narration doesn’t quite provide the effect of a curtain on its own so the fade out of the old scene is usually still needed. Generally only a three to five word fade is required (unlike the pause transition which requires a longer fade).Advantages
The story doesn’t need to halt when a narrator aids the transition. The pause between dialogue and narration can be almost negligibly short.
Narration-transitions come in at full volume and do not needed to be faded in.
Narration also allows the writer to introduce fast and frequent changes of scene.Disadvantages
The narrator can be used in a clumsy manner if a proxy-listener character must be brought to the foreground. Transitions are better handled by the narrator alone rather than the narrator in dialogue with a proxy-listener.
Some folks feel narration breaks the sense of immersion built up by the dialogue. This is not necessarily the case since the listener participates actively in maintaining the illusion of being present on the scene.
The above point is very controversial for some folks (many producers of modern audio drama are highly vocal in their dislike of narration in general). Personally I enjoy it, even if I don’t use it much in my own scripts.
In our scripts we generally don’t use the narrated transition but it does get used to good effect in our Fantasy Noir serial.
If you’d like to see some examples of how scene setting is handled in the scripts we publish be sure to visit http://weirdworldstudios.com/product-category/our-products/. We have lots of free samples you can download.
See you next time.
– Philip Craig Robotham
