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Amazing Stories

It was a year ago that I was invited to attend STEAM Infusion, a curriculum writing retreat offered by the Richmond Art Center. What a privilege it was to participate with about fourteen other artists. We spent six days over three weekends to focus on creating curriculum. Each of us focused on designing a class with core elements of Science, Technology Engineering Art and Math for the RAC Art in the Community Program. This focused effort gave me the opportunity to create a Stop Motion Animation class that I give once this past fall and hope to do again this coming fall. 

One objective I had for the start the class was to remind students that their imagination was a big place we could explore and that we didn’t need cameras to see what was there. With that in mind I tried to introduce radio drama on the first day of class. Needless to say it's a good idea that still needs work. Maybe a podcast would help.  

Preparing a plan for a podcast was theme for week 9 in AAU Integrating Technology Into Art Education Settings. With this in mind I started developing a podcast devoted to learning about radio drama. 

In my first effort to learn about radio drama I found several old time radio websites. My favorite was a list of Digital Eel radio shows.  From that list I picked a radio drama called Mars Is Heaven, from 1955. I liked if for several reasons. There are fun special effects right at the beginning of the drama. I wanted students to hear some of these fun noises right up front. 

It was also fun to find the script text for this radio drama at Generic Radio Workshop along with a long list of other scripts and related resources. 

The story has a crew of astronauts who are landing on Mars. The drama takes place in a future relative to1955. They are landing on Mars in 1987. The crew is landing on an unknown planet with the possibility of aliens ready to shoot them down out of the sky if it was daylight. There was no rover mission data to reflect on. Also a sign of the times is all the noises are ship noises. These are all ideas for discussion that come up in the first few minutes of the drama. 

Mars Excursion Module

I spend a little time in this podcast talking about what radio drama is and a little of it’s history. For this podcast I offer an overview as to what is necessary to create a radio drama with the idea that I can get into specific elements in future podcasts. Really all you need is a script, some actors, a microphone and recording device, sound effects and music. 

I discovered several sites with recorded radio dramas and others with radio drama scripts. These range from old time favorites to new, recently written and performed scripts. Some of these sites are specially for teachers and students. One example is Raven Radio Theater. Here you will find scripts and general instructions on how to create a radio drama. 

FAP radio show

There are also many sites devoted to royalty free music. My favorite is CC Mixer. They feature a wide variety of very talented music and production artists. The site easy to sort through and is very clear about various levels licensing for each music file. Sorting through music like this is quite fun for me. For this reason I considered music exploration as another podcast topic. 

As I proceed with creating this first podcast I am looking for further insight about how I might integrate radio drama into my stop motion class. I hope I can offerer one or more episodes as a point of inspiration for that class.