Another Year Older, Another Year Wiser | a micro audio drama

I referenced an audio production challenge in my last post, which prompted that audio essay. After deciding not to use that project for the challenge, I went back to the drawing board and tossed around a few other ideas, all based on the challenge theme of "Lost And Found". Additionally, the final duration of the project could not exceed 5 minutes, and the final mix had to be submitted by the end of the month.

Eventually, I settled on the idea of a young man who is dealing with the death of his father. As the characters and scene began to take shape in my mind, I started to see this also being a story about life in a small town. Though I currently live in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the nation, I spent over half of my life in much smaller cities and towns and I often miss the community feel of those places so I wanted to attempt to capture that in my story.

So I wrote the first draft of the script, sent it for feedback to a couple friends, made some revisions, and finalized it over just a couple days. I reached out to a few contacts to ask them to play some of the characters for me. Once everyone was confirmed, I think I had all the actor's recordings within about a week and a half. As I mentioned to the cast, the story might be a tad bit on the sweet side, but I think it works alright, considering how short it had to be. And I did try to build as much subtext into it as could with a script of this length.

And then it was on to post-production. Now I do not consider myself a sound designer. I know enough to get myself in trouble. LOL But I do have fun working on this aspect of audio drama, especially since the project was so small. I would have liked to record more original Foley effects, but due to the time constraints of the challenge, coupled with my schedule, I had to rely on sound effects libraries aside from just a few vocal efforts that I recorded at the same time as the lines for my character. Since I can't play any instruments, I likewise had to use music libraries for the project. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but again, being under a time crunch, I didn't have much time to pore through music to search for the absolute best selections. 

But given all the parameters of the audio production challenge, I am quite happy with how this piece turned out. (Did I include enough caveats and qualifiers to keep your expectations sufficiently low? 😀) Thanks to everyone who contributed to this project in some way. They're listed in the credits below. And now I present to you, Another Year Older, Another Year Wiser, a micro audio drama!

@jd

Credits:

Another Year Older, Another Year Wiser was written, directed, and produced by J.D. Sutter.

Featuring:

Rose Beasley as Kate

J.D. Sutter as Tom

Christopher Green as Hank and Charlie

Glenn Hascall as Tom's Dad

Script review by Christopher Green and Nicole Rodrigues.

All music tracks are courtesy of the YouTube Audio Library and feature the following artists; Telecasted, Myuu, Freedom Trail Studio, and Track Tribe.

Here's a little snippet from the remote recording session between Rose, the voice of Kate, and me.

Here is a peek at my view as I worked on the sound design for this project:

Please let me know what you think in the comments below!

See more episodes in this series here.