I decided to listen to a number of comedy movies radio adverts in order to find any common traits and trends that occur. What I discovered was that each advert is quite different but there's almost always a back and forth conversation between two or more people. Due to this I decided I would create a small conversation between a radio presenter and a voice similar to the one in my movie. I thought that by doing this it would allow the people that listen to the advert to get a good idea of what my short films style is like. This means that I could rely on it being successful in expressing the tones of my film as it shows arguing and a self aware nature where the characters (primarily the narrator) can break the fourth wall.
As you can see this is a draft of what I planned to include in my advert. This was a quick 5 minutes sessions where I scribbled some notes on to a piece of paper. After I'd written it I gave another copy to a friend so we were able to see how it sounds in real life. Whilst reading it I noticed certain parts were flawed such as the part where the presenter asks who the voice is. This felt as if it wasn't a natural response as the way the dialogue was written was very simple meaning it was hard for the actor to give a real performance. Due to this I produced a rewrite to fix the flaws I identified so I could make a better radio advert. Below is the result.
As you can see I decided to change a few things and most notably I added a disclaimer at the end of the advert. This was because after reading the script I few times I realised that the add wasn't giving all the information in an understandable way and without "The Room, rated 15" people listening may have just thought it was a sketch on the radio created as a joke. I also managed to include more comedy within the advert by having the part where the person is stating if they begin hearing voices they believe are narrators they should visit a doctor. I'm happy I thought to include this as it gives the listeners a better understanding on the tone of my film whilst still being informative/fun.
I took this photo whilst my two voice actors were recording the advert on an iPhone 6s on the "Voice Memos" app. I did this to show that I have included a familiar face (David) in my advert so people listening would be able to go into my short film knowing one of the characters a bit meaning they could easier identify with the film and be able to believe the story better as they knew someone in it. The other person, featured on the right side of the photo is Patrick Thomas Ahern. He was one of the people that auditioned to be in my short film in the early stages of production. I decided to include him as the narrator as his voice suited the role better than any of the actors I used in the short film besides the actual narrator. This was because he has a low voice meaning he seemed more believable as someone how would original oppose the release of this film but Patrick had the ability to also become enthusiastic too meaning he could portray the difference of opinions that occur in the advert well after the presenter convinces him the film is worth seeing.
I used Corel to edit the advert together as it allowed me to crop Vampire Weekend's "A-Punk" into dialogueless pieces meaning I was left with just the music. I wanted this to be the case as it's the music I use in the opening shot of my film so I thought including it in the radio advert would be a subtle easter egg for people that watch the short film. I also used this music as without it the advert seemed very unprofessional. I was unable to convert the advert into a mp3 file though so to get around this problem I decided to attach my movies poster to the clip so I could convert it as a video and upload it to YouTube. You are able to listen to the add fully in the next blog post where I also talk about my feelings about how this ancillary task went.
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