Audio – Advice and Hands-On

The following are from Transom.org, including their description of each piece:   This is a terrific website about audio/radio documentary work.  It has a variety of interesting stories and articles, plus reviews of tools.  I’d like to just tell you “read everything.”

Things We’ve Learned So Far from the Transom Story Workshop 

Imagining The Story  Transom Story Workshop’s Rob Rosenthal on creating a “narrative-to-do list” before you head out to collect tape.

Radiolab: An Appreciation by Ira Glass 

The Power of Voice – by Siobhan McHugh  April 2011  Australian journalist, Siobhan McHugh on what’s lost in transcription. She writes, “I began to get frustrated, when the characters who were so full-blooded and passionate on the tape translated as cold and uninspiring on the page…”

Three Secret Ingredients in Great Features   Chris Brookes shares his secrets for making great radio. He states, “A Good Feature sets out to entice the gods, to cross its fingers, to whistle through the graveyard, to dare the impossible.”

Chana Joffe-Walt January 2011 Next time you have a complicated story to tell—or worse yet, a complicated subject to make a story from—you’re going to want to dig out your PDF file of Chana Joffe-Walt’s Transom Review. Chana gives a few simple tricks for organizing and presenting in her original Manifesto, and amplifies them in the discussion that followed. Very useful stuff, we promise. Come and get it.

Ben Shapiro July 2007 These days, newspaper reporters carry microphones and radio producers carry cameras. Everybodys scrambling to get on the multimedia bandwagon. We can debate whether this convergence is value-added or watered-down, but its certainly a trend. Radio producers, accustomed to rendering stories in time and having some mastery of technical tools, are well-positioned to move on this turf. But what do images add or take away? And how do you get the damn software to work anyway?

Radio and video maker Ben Shapiro offers a thoughtful guide, complete with plenty of examples and tips in our new Transom Manifesto. In the coming weeks, well feature some sound-driven stories with images to help us ponder this new media era in which radio is once again about to become obsolete.

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