How does your radio drama use, develop or challenge forms and conventions?

A radio convention is something which you expect to see/hear and which are the same across a certain genre. There are many radio conventions which are in radio dramas, such as sound effects, volume, interaction, lexical choices, and also if the narrative is open or closed. Many radio dramas also include enigma which is when the audience doesn't know a particular piece of information until the end when everything is tied up and becomes clear.

After researching radio dramas I found that there was not many horror themed radio dramas so I will compare my radio drama to horror films. We used sound effects in our radio drama to make it sound more realistic and enables the listener to picture the drama in their heads. We also used sound effects to create tension. Many horror films use silence with sound effects to create tension for example footsteps. In our radio drama I think we could have used more sound effects to create tension to give off the impression that something freaky was going on. We gave a few clues away that something was wrong by the smell of the hotel room and the smell on the wall but i feel we could have included some more build up of tension by adding spookier sound effects.

The volume of the three main characters stay pretty much the same all the way through, but when Olga is introduced she comes across alot louder, also Olga has an transylvanian accent, which helps differentiate characters and it also adds tot he spookiness of the drama. Films also use this effect too, for example Daybreakers. Also when Mr Pike is introduced he has quite a low toned voice and speaks slowly. When recording our drama we had to ensure we carried out the characters dialect and pitch all the way through as not to confuse. The 3 main characters didn't have and different accents because we wanted to keep it as realistic as possible and there was no need for them.

In our radio drama we created enigma, we did this because then when ending the drama it made it easier to tie up. In our radio drama the audience doesn't know that there is a dead body under the matrress in the hotel until right at the end. They might have a clue something is not quite right because of a few clues throughout the drama but they wont fully know and shouldnt lead the drama to be predictable.

When writing out script we didnt have to think much about our lexical choices because we were trying to keep it as realistic as possible so we just wrote what we would say in real life. When we recorded the drama we realised some things just didn't sound right so at time we didnt just stick strictly to the script. I think this allows the drama to sound like how we wanted it to as we just play off each other.