Hi. This is Kyle Bondo, and this is between the pauses, the making of pause for dramatic effect. And today we're gonna talk about mistakes. These are the kind of things in an audio drama that they kinda tell you about a little bit, but until you start producing and directing and working with actors, writing scripts, getting stuff down on tracks, you don't realize these can actually are way more difficult than you ever thought.
And the first time the first thing I wanna talk about is and I have 5 of these I wanna talk about in particular. The first 1 I wanna talk about is time. The time it takes to write a script and then get the tracks recorded and then do the production and then put everything together in a final mix and produce will take you a lot longer than a normal podcast.
A normal podcast. Usually, it's a couple voices. You go back and forth. Remove some clutch words, throw in some music, producing out the door. In an audio drama, when you've got multiple actors, multiple sound effects going on, different music is coming in and coming out, the timing of things has to be orchestrated in a certain way. The time is easily 10 x. In fact, to produce a 5 to 10 minute audio drama like this 1 has been. It has taken me at least an hour for every minute of audio drama.
Now, put that into your equation. An hour for every minute Now, this is after the script has been created. So even after the script creation, which can take a lot of bit of time, is you now have all the time in recording and post production to do too. So just know that. It takes a long time to cut this stuff up to know how you wanna place it and then how you place it also matters because timing with certain musical elements can can change the way you kind of conceive of a of a of a scene.
Or a different sound effect. Maybe you don't find the right sound effect, and you kinda have it to improvise. Improvise. So that's that's the idea of time. Know that it'll take a lot mistakes. Yeah. I didn't plan. I didn't plan a lot of this. So in understanding how much time this takes, you really have have to if you have a a time schedule out there, triple net easily. 10 x, I would. Okay. Second thing is Double clips. Organization is crucial. You have to really micromanage
the different type of clips you have. 1 voice is this letter, another voice is that letter, or what sequence they go in, what numbers they go in. A lot of times I'll annotate the script itself when I cut to clip them together.
This does not prevent you though from already putting in a clip that you already put in. And sometimes the clip could be so short that even after re listening to it, after you put it together, you miss until you produce it. And I just did 1 the other day where I had a double clip in there. I had 2 of the same lines said twice right at back to back.
And that can happen. So organization is key in figuring out how you're doing it, and then you have to really test post production to make sure you didn't do that. What's a third thing? Sound. A big challenge I had with this was the music overpowering the actor's voices and vice versa. There were sometimes when
certain clips are too soft, other clips are too loud. And when you put it into addition, like I was using, sometimes the the normalization or the match, the clip loudness thing doesn't always work the way you intended to, and you have to really kinda get into the weeds of how some of the editing is done. You really have to play sometimes with the 2 and you have to give some some more power, a little more d b here, a little s d b there to make it flow. Otherwise, You're clipping out. You got sounds either too quiet or sounds way too loud. It's blowing out the microphone or blowing out the speakers. You don't wanna do that. That's that's a huge challenge. And I struggle with it still.
Depending, especially you've got multiple voices, then things really get complicated. What's another 1? Number 4, typos and word choice. Sometimes things you write do not translate into things that you're spoken well. Now I write a lot like how I speak,
so I can really get about 80% of that down and not have to worry about it. But sometimes a typo can throw the whole script out of whack when the actor hits that typo and has to start all over, especially in a good flow where it sounds good, it just kinda makes good sense that the rhythm is good. And then you hit a typo and they're like, they see they say the wrong word, or they say the right word. It just you wrote it wrong.
So that's a huge 1. Your word choice is another 1. Sometimes, you say a line and you're like, people wouldn't really say that. That's a silly line. It's a literal line, not a, you know, spoken word or vocalized line. So you have to really worry about food and word choice too and have to be as a director and a writer, be comfortable with just changing it on the fly right there to say, you know what? Let's just change this to something that sounds better.
And and using your actors to kinda guide off that. The mistakes I made early on was just not proofreading very well. And so sometimes we're choice and typos, we're just in there. You just have to roll with that stuff. And finally, lastly, is mistakes, is is length. Sometimes what you think takes so long to be said takes longer
because they enunciate, they put pauses in there, there's some dramatic effect to that, and also finding the fast sound effects that fit that scene also take longer. This is the time crunch that you won't really anticipate.
Or you'll think a scene, which because you only limit yourself to I only limit myself to 6 pages of actual writing. There are no more. The script is 7 pages and that's it. And if it goes any longer, I got to cut stuff. That's a rule I have with writing this this this thing to try to keep it within 5 minutes. But however, some of my flashback scenes and some of the scenes that involve special effects, expand that because the word just says sound direction,
sounds of combat or helicopter crash or things like that, that sound effect actually takes 20 to 40 to 60 seconds longer than I thought it would. Just to make it sound right because it sped up. It sounded weird. And it was too slow. It wasn't really didn't have the same effect. So to do that stuff, special effects, or sound effects within an audio drama
have impact on the time and your schedule and you have to be prepared for that. Anyway, that is really That's my top 5 things that I've learned from making this audio drama over the past couple weeks for a Nad pod promo. And I hope you learned something from these kind of making behind the scenes. And thank you again for joining me for the pauses between the pauses.
I'm Kyle Bondo, and thank you also for listening to for pot to paws. Pinematic effect. I really appreciate you listening to this. And I look forward to sending more episodes your way so you could enjoy this this drama as much as I haven't truly creating it. Thank you. For more tales of woe, please visit pause for dramatic effect.com.