Greetings. I am Kyle in Bondo, and this is between the pauses. Where we get into the details behind how the pause for dramatic effect audio drama was created. In this episode, I'd like to give you a little bit about my process. Now in the past few episodes to talk about voices and a little bit about the creativity, way behind this. But let's really get into some of the details. So I'm gonna start with the first real big detail, and that is the script.
Now the script, of course, is divided into different people, and those people have different lines. So when recording this a lot of times because I do a lot of the voices with some some new help from from some new voice talent, Zachary and and Emmett,
where I just have them read their lines. And we'll do ones where I'll say something, but, really, they'll read their lines perfectly, and they'll just get an understanding of what the feel for the directing for this is about. So there's some directing involved, and they'll read their lines. And then I'll go through through the script once with 1 voice and then go to the script to another with, like, the narrator's voice, and then go through the third time with the the villain's voice.
And then clean it up with with any of the voices that I need to do. And why I do that is I'll record different tracks. And each pass through of the recording, I'll have a zababatrack and I'll have a dire track, and I'll have a narrator track, and I'll need to have the characters I have. And what that gives me is p a bureausch, chunks, then I know that I can just parse out, and then put together, kind of a weave together, and kind of a quilt, if you would, of audio clips.
So once the recording is done and the scripts been read, and we've gotten rid of all the typos and we've kind of there's some creativity goes in that sometimes myself in the fly will think of a better word or better way to say something or 1 of the voice actors will come up with a better way of saying something, or it won't make sense the way I wrote it. So they'll say it a little bit differently. So there'll be some variations. And I'll have take them I'll have them take 2 or 3 takes.
So I'll get a a 1 version, another version, 1 with some emphasis emphasis, 1 with a little less emphasis. We'll practice sometimes. Sometimes the giggles happen, there's outtakes, things like that. Once I have all those files, I'll download those into my computer, and they're really just WAV files. And the WAV files are then uploaded into, and I use Adobe Edition. In Adobe Edition, I'll take each file, and
I'll start to segment them. And what I'll do is I'll listen to the file and I'll find the clip I want and I'll just cut it out and create a new audio file and drop it in there and name it. So I'll call it, like, Dyer 1, 2, 3, 4, narrator, 5, 6, 7, 8, Subaba, 1, 2, 3, 4, intro, clapper board, teaser, any kind of the pieces I wanna build. And once I have that, I'll open a multitrack file within
Adobe Edition. And also piecing this stuff together. Now I have a template I created for the very first episode that I just kind of reuse over and over again. It it's got the perfect placement for
my theme music, which is a cello. And then there's some other music that takes place, sound effects, things like that. And I have a bunch of different closer sound effects, and I've got some foley stuff I do. Usually, I do it. A lot of foley stuff is just things I found around the house. It sounds like the thing I'm doing. Or sound effects I find on on online, YouTube free, common,
creative commons, those kind of things. And I'll get a I'll get a library of of special effects that I know I want because in the script, I've created areas where I said, this effect goes here or this effect goes there. And I'll start stitching those together. So what'll happen is I now have this whole library of clips in sequence. And in the script, I'll I'll annotate each of the lines with the the name of the clip. And then I start stitching
like a quilt. I start stitching the patches together. I start seaming the seams together. I put the frame around it. I start dropping the clips in. I start playing with the sound to make sure one's not too loud or one's not too soft.
And I string them together. I figure out where the music is gonna start. I fade in, fade out. I figure out at what point There's a you know, if I need more space, more more, you know, silence in an area, and I'll piece all those pieces out until I have the complete layout. With that clip layout, I listened to it once. Get a good idea for what for it. Do any kind of changes I need to do. And at that point, really, it's just a
of course, you save it often, early and often. And I save the clips out of the raw file and I leave the raw file alone. I do this for 2 reasons. 1, if I make a mistake and save over the raw file, I've lost it forever. If I have to go back and rerecord everything, that's horrible. Also,
the raw file acts as an archive that if I wanna pull out takes because there's a lot of, like, side chat and different laughter things that takes takes place in the in the actual creation process that becomes good sawdust for later. And so once I have all my clips set up, all my sound effects in there, all my music set up on different tracks, I do a mix down. I save the whole thing, mix down it into
really, I do it into an m p 3. I could do it into a wave, but I do it into m p 3. And once I have an m p 3 file mixed down, I listen to it, and I take a good listen to it, and they're only 5 or 6 minutes long. Take a good listen. If it's good, I use alphonic, which I use a download desktop app, but you could use the online version too. I use alphonic to kinda clean it up a little get rid of the highs and lows and kind of take make the compression really nice. It makes the file size even smaller.
And once I have a final m p 3, that's when I load it to the to the host. And that's really kind of the process. And from there, I have the script. It would give me some of the notes I have the name of the chapter. I've already kind of you know, I have all these ideas encapsulated in notes that I've done to write the script and I'd put in that for the description, the show notes, and an episode is born.
And that really is the process behind making this mini audio drama I've created called pause for dramatic effect. I look forward to you joining me next time for between the pauses. They're kinda behind the scenes of how an audio drama is created. And thank you for listening to pause. Per dramatic effect. For more tales of woe, please visit pause for dramaticaffect.com.