Merelymatt - Merely Matt

Sun's out

Tories OUT

“Call Me Maybe” with every other beat removed

Five Character Poll (tag game)

Rules: make a poll with five of your all time favourite characters and then tag five people to do the same. See which character is everyone's favourite.

thank you @jazzandpizzazz for the tag! Starting a fresh post for the sake of length but go vote in theirs here!

I tried to pick a variety of blorbos but boy was it difficult to narrow to five

tagging @linguisticparadox @tedkordisanasshole @organchordsandlightning @mygoodrabbit @halfdoublecrochet !

Is audio drama the only medium you've worked in? How does it compare to other mediums?

So I started out as a musician. When I was at university I used to busk with a bass and a loop pedal (an endeavour that got me quite far at one point) and this caught the attention of a couple of people in the filmmaking society, who asked if I wanted to make music for their short films. (One of these people is now my wife)

I worked in film as a sound recordist, sound designer and composer, sometimes all three at once. I really like film as a medium but, in my experience, on a set the sound recordist is often treated as an inconvienience (if the cinematographer says we need to go again, we go again, if the sound recordish says we need to go again, everyone groans) and after I while I found myself getting irritable about it, so I stopped.

I enjoy doing sound design and music for film, but I find it very limiting. To a certain extent you're stuck with what's on screen and you have to work within that, and so much of my job was fixing things rather than being creative ('we forgot to record this door closing, can you put it in?').

What I found liberating about audio drama is that you start with a blank space and you get to fill it with whatever you like, be that music or soundscapes or dialogues or monologues, and indie audio drama is still at the stage where a lot of things are still being worked out, which is exciting. I love talking to people about the idea of audio drama having its own musical vocabulary separate from film music and video game music.

It's not without its limits (money) but I agree with Ella when she says that audio drama is where comics used to be, and I think that's exciting!