Individual supervision of all students in the conception, production, and finalization of their pieces within the seminar ‘The Audio Drama' (lead by Hannah Schwegel a.o.), as a mentor.
When you cover your ears during a horror film, the fear ceases. Audiobooks and audio dramas are booming. What is the secret of the power of listening — the force that so vividly ignites our imagination?
The oldest form of transmission is storytelling. Stories were sung, performed, recited. The voice is the most important instrument of the audio drama, setting the emotional tone of each scene. Just as we ask colloquially — How was the mood at the party? or What kind of mood are you in? — voices carry the emotional tonality of the audio play.
The dramaturgical and narrative possibilities of playing with voices and moods, through the intelligent use of acoustic means, stimulate our imagination in ways that make images arise before our inner eye. We surrender to the invisible pull of these mental pictures and lose ourselves within them. Does the distant hum of a Cessna high in the sky recall the feeling of endless childhood summers? Does the clicking of footsteps, embedded in the whistling of swifts, evoke the image of a lonely walker or that of an early summer morning? What does a melancholic kitchen sound like, or the shadow on my skin?
The audio drama seeks to sharpen our perception of the ear’s power. Within the seminar, participants will engage in all the stages that constitute a professional audio play production: from developing an acoustic scenography, selecting voices and creating sound effects, to mixing and mastering.
At the same time, the craft of audio drama is to be understood as a foundation of filmmaking itself. What does it mean to exist — and to concentrate — when one’s being is reflected back through sound?
By the end of the seminar, a complete audio play will have been produced, to be included in each participant’s portfolio and to serve as a basis for further work in this field.