Theatre has been working on radio shows for three weeks, pulling inspiration from the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s- using sounds, music and scripts to create entertaining radio shows. The tech theatre teacher, Paul Raska has the students use sound effects and sound editing to create their shows based off of vintage radio episodes that aired decades ago. The students could pick a script and do as they pleased with it. The students worked on casting the parts as well as designating certain people for editing and recording. Further, they all pulled inspiration from certain areas that appealed to them and used it to make their show the best it could be.
“It adds in all the work we’ve done in sound with creating sound effects and sound editing on a computer and creating show files for plays. It takes all the things we’ve learned and puts them all together in one project,” said Raska.
The shows revolve around some drama or science fiction. This year, the plays that students are working on are called, The Shark King God and the Mask of Medusa.
Jackson Barrett, a student involved in making one of the radio shows, said, “It’s one of those shows that kids would listen to, to spook them out. It actually played on the radio a long time ago, so it’s a real show. It’s not so much a mystery as it is a Twilight Zone type story.”
Shows like The Goosebumps and the Twilight Zone were the inspiration Barrett used for creating the group radio show.
Tyler Patterson, another member of Barrett’s group, explained how he felt about the project.
“I thought it was fun, for the few lines that I did and the contributions that I made on the editing part,” said Patterson. “I thought it was a fascinating show.”
Getting the show together took all their time in the class as well as some outside of class.
“You just take a YouTube video, and you put a link into a little mp3 downloader, and you would get the sounds from YouTube,” said Barrett. “We used our resources.”
Matthew Gross, a member of a different radio group describes his show further elaborated on the show.
“It’s like an old radio show mystery from a long time ago, aired in the 40’s,” said Gross. “It’s about a wax museum that are full of people that are actually alive, but not.”
They used the script that was provided all those years ago and added their own twist to it, to make it their own.
Sarah Scherger and her group took on The Shark King God.
“It was a show in the 1920’s and a big curse on a shark. I really like Lilo and Stich, so I tried to fit elements of that into the show,” said Scherger. “I also tried to push more of a 1920’s vibe on it with the sound effects.”
The radio shows are scheduled to air multiple times on weekends on Timber Creek FM.
“For the most part I’m really happy with what comes out of it and a lot of times,” said Raska. “I’m pleasantly surprised at how good they end up being.”
