Bus Stop Tales - by Debbie Bennett

So what’s new in the writing world? For me anyway … After circumstances forced me to resign last year from the script-writing, technical and admin teams of the community radio-play project Littlewich Ways, those of us who left decided we had to continue to put our creativity to work (the weekly pub meetings may also have influenced that decision), so we spent a couple of months bouncing around some new ideas and came up with something the same, but different. Rather than an ongoing soap, we are aiming for a series of one-off radio plays of about 15-20 minutes duration – these may or may not feature the same characters and can be listened to in any order. 

Hopefully, the independence of the individual pieces should make casting easier and reduce the need for having to jump through hoops to get dozens of people together at the same time. We’ve all learned so much over the past few years that we can put to good use – include better directions, name-tag characters early on, give clear sound effects, and most importantly keep the cast-list short and versatile. We have actors lined up, a near-guaranteed slot on a new local radio station and an amazingly-talented local musician, who is composing our theme tune, musical interludes and end-credits.

I’ve learned a lot about editing audio and video too. iMovie is so much easier than Premiere Pro – probably because it has less than half the “features” – but it has everything I need. I bought a 5-CD set of sound effects, but again – we’ve learned from the past – and all of us now listen out and record anything that sounds interesting and reusable! It helps that even a cheap mobile phone will take good-quality photographs and record sound, so there is really no excuse!

So I bought a domain name yesterday. I need to set up a landing page – probably via a new blogger account – and the basic info, create a Google account and a YouTube channel and jump through whatever hoops I had to jump through last time to be able to upload longer pieces.

Bus Stop Tales.We have lots of ideas. A few draft scripts are done. I need to get out of the house-moving zone and get my creative head back on. Watch this space and I will keep you posted …