Hi everyone, Ed here from shades of vengeance. And today, I’m going to talk about how I and today I’m going to give you my top three pieces of advice on how to direct an audio drama.

1: Live the universe!

When you are directing an audio drama, you are bringing that universe to life for the people who are listening to it. If you don’t understand the universe, or at least your take on the universe, to a high degree, there are going to be tiny things that slip through.

You shouldn’t let those things go unless you feel that they contribute and build on your view of the universe because people will notice. People will pick up on them and begin to question your commitment to the projects that you’re doing. The key is to always focus on the essence of what it is that you want to portray within the story.

2: Don’t be afraid of the actors improvising!

There have been a number of times during my various audio projects where an actor has done something I didn’t expect. It may be a misread, it may be a different take on a character.

But I always asked myself, referring back to Point 1 – does it fit within the universe? Does it make the story better?

And if it’s a change that makes the story better, you need to be able to say “yes, I like that, it works equally well!” (or nothing at all, in some cases, just let them continue!). 

If it’s a change that calls any of the aspects of the universe into question, you need to fight hard to make sure that the actor does it in the way that you need. Consider carefully what that character might act like. And does this improvisation distorts what the character has been up until now, or does it fit in nicely? That’s also very important.

3: The First and the Second-to-Last Take

In my experience, these are the takes that are the strongest.

That might be because when you first walk into a role, you give your instinctive take, you give the truth as an actor, that insight of your own.

It might also be that after, there’s a little bit of correction, changes to be done, and then you’ll take one more take for a safety at the end.

Don’t be afraid of taking a safety take, but be aware that you may not use it.

One of the things that can be a serious impediment to this is when an actor sabotage themselves in the middle of a line. Try never to let the first take get interrupted, because if it gets interrupted, you will never get that moment again. Make sure that the first take runs to the end and make sure that you get a good take before you then go ahead and say “just once more”, or even just say, “okay, that’ll do”. 

So those are three top tips on how to begin three top tips on directing an audio drama.

Thank you very much for reading, and please let me know if you’d like some more tips about audio – I’d be more than happy to speak some more, or bring in Leo, our Head of Audio, to answer some questions!

Hi everyone, and welcome to the final part of “How to Make Your Characters Real”!

In this part, I’m going to be talking about how you decide the way in which characters act, focusing in some simple techniques to ensure that your character acts in a realistic and consistent manner. 

Let’s assume you have your character and have established their appearance, the hidden information that they have the various other bits and pieces that we’ve been talking about throughout these articles.

You want to put them in a situation you have devised and you’ll therefore be thinking about how would they act. Sometimes, this might be difficult – you may end up not being sure because they have all of this hidden information that other people might not understand. They may even act in a way that doesn’t seem entirely rational.

When you hit a wall, if you cannot extrapolate from what you already have, try thinking about what you would do in that situation. How would you respond to the various factors in play.

Once you have decided that, consider how they are different from you… and therefore, what would they do differently in that situation – would they act in the same way, because the things that differ between you and them are insignificant in this regard? 

Or even would they act in the same way, but for a different motivational reason? Perhaps because they would have personal gain, rather than because that’s the right thing to do. 

After that, if you want to create a chain, which helps the story pretty much right itself, you want to think about how people are going to react to the way that they have acted. So if they are not completely in isolation, or even if they leave a trail – a message behind that someone else can pick up – there’s going to be some level of reaction to what is going on.

Then, you need to consider how people around react to this approach. How people react to actions that they observe is an important part of building this chain of events. Some people will overreact, some people will feel that it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do for various reasons… and the balance of the crowd may not be in the direction that you initially assume.

Think carefully about what I wrote previously about what the average person is like and how your character stands out from them. Will the average person indeed react positively just because your main character has done something? 

Next, depending on the initial action and the reaction, there’s likely to be some level of outcome. This is often something that will prompt another action by the main character. 

If you can work out what the action is, what the reaction is, and then what the outcome is, you can often build an entire event chain off the back of that. This gives you the opportunity to continue your piece of work at pace – you will move forward through your story very easily, in a character-driven way, because a story is inherently a chain of events. 

That’s all I’ve got for this article, but I’d like to thank you very much for reading this sequence, and I hope that you found it helpful. 

I’m going to be moving on to some different topics next week, but I am still more than happy to answer any questions that people have. So please message me or let me know if you’d like me to follow up on any aspect of this in the future.

– Ed

Hi everyone, Ed here, and I’m back with another “How to Make Your Characters Real!”

Today, I’m going to be talking about how characters won’t always share all of the information that they have about themselves from the very beginning.

They might have very detailed reasons for being the way they are, but most people won’t share them for no reason. You have to be in a situation where they’re willing to open up about certain facts about themselves. From a writing standpoint, it also has to be relevant to what they need to tell other characters in the story: it has to be emotionally motivated.

Equally, when a character acts, they won’t always explain why it is that they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s really important, because if you say wy  every single time and you make every character’s motivation totally clear, it will make for an unconvincing story and an unconvincing character. Be careful what you explain about why they do what they do – although as I said in a previous part, make sure that you know what their reasoning is!

Equally, characters might come in looking like they have one type of approach, then have ulterior motives that they don’t explain. Sometimes, it is possible to leave tiny little clues that then make that betrayal, that eventually occurs, feel right, even if it’s not obvious from the start.

I’ve talked a lot about building a detailed backstory in the past. I just wanted to quickly cover the risk that a lot of people panic about in my experience – that of building a detailed character which never gets explored properly.

I don’t see this as a massive problem, and I have some reasons behind this. Primarily, you are able to explore these things later: maybe this character deserves their own story? Maybe there are aspects of this character that never come to light, but you really like them… so you can potentially reveal them through another character. A similar but different character can be built on the basis that you’ve worked on (using some of the tips I’ve spoken about earlier in this series).

I was talking at the beginning about consuming media, and then combining aspects. This extends to your own work as well – feel free to combine aspects of your own characters that maybe you never got to use, add things that motivated them, but you never actually managed to portray.

This is the second to last part of my “How to Make Characters Real” set of articles. If there are more topics you’d like me to cover then, please, go ahead and leave a comment – I will be more than happy to cover those!

Next week, I’ll be back with the final part, which is focusing on advice for deciding how a character will act in any given situation.

Thank you very much for reading.

– Ed

Hi everyone, Ed here from Shades of Vengeance again!
I’m back with another entry in my “How to Make your Characters Real” series. I hope that you are finding these useful and interesting. Of course, if there’s any subjects that I’ve not covered that you’d like me to talk about, please just ask, I’ll be more than happy to speak about it.

When you are creating characters, remember that humans are visual creatures. The fact that a beautiful picture of a sunset is more likely to sell a game than brilliant mechanics is something that I’ve struggled with for a long time as a game designer.

When building characters, this is a relatively easy thing – though important – to include.

Try to come up with three or four features which make any character that’s important stand out from the rest of the population. There are some obvious ones. There’s an eyepatch or a wooden leg or another type of prosthetic, depending on what time period your your story is setting. This can be done effectively in Sci-Fi as well – one of Elliot Draigon’s most memorable features is his artificial arm, and I think the same could be said for Barret from Final Fantasy 7!

However, there are other things that could be included which are less obvious. Perhaps the character always stands slightly crooked, because they actually have constant back pain. Perhaps they perhaps they have a nervous tic, where they turn their head to the left quite frequently as if they’re looking around seeing if anyone’s following them.

There are a huge number of possibilities and I suggest you try not to reject anything that you think might suit your characters attitude – sometimes people’s attitude to their their reality is based on their physical state.

Obviously, you can also think about how they dress, how they wear their hair and various other personal details which are choices, rather than forced on them by circumstances or biology.

Don’t be afraid to experiment a little bit and make your characters memorable to the people who are reading. It’s actually surprisingly hard to go overboard on this.

Once you’ve come up with these details for your character, remember that you don’t actually have to show them or talk about them in every single encounter with that character. Make a choice about when you want to talk about it, and when you don’t want to talk about it. And don’t be afraid to leave it until it becomes a relevant detail – I am sure you have been in a situation where you didn’t notice something until embarrassingly late!

That’s pretty much all I’ve got on this subject, so check in again next week for another “How to Make your Characters Real”, where I’ll be talking about how much information to give away!

– Ed

Hi everyone! 

Ed here, and today I’m going to kick off a multi-part set of articles that are based around ideas I have on how to make your characters real.

The first thing I’m going to talk about is inspiration. 

How do you arrive at your character? Also, how do you make sure that when you are working on it you create something that is along the lines of what you envision? 

The first thing is something that I’ve said a lot of times in previous articles and Webinars about inspiration: consume media! Read books to find characters who are vaguely similar to what you’re doing. Watch TV series and movies, find things that people have done that’s close to what you want. Play computer games – some computer games have fantastic stories, with everything that you need to achieve the characters that you’re looking for!

When you do all of this, remember that you don’t need to have something that’s 100% unique or something that’s never been seen before at all. What you need is to find something that’s close to what you want, and then figure out how you make that example the way you would write it, rather than the way someone else has already written it. “How would I do this differently?” is one of the most powerful inspirational tools I have ever found.

If you can begin to ask that question, you’ll very quickly reach the point where you’re never struggling for inspiration… but also are creating something that feels fresh and original, because it’s your take on this kind of character. 

Another thing that you shouldn’t be afraid to do is combine elements of two characters together. A hybrid of two characters can often have an amazing life of its own! If course, bringing in a trait like that can entirely change the way a character behaves, bringing a new dimension to their personality.

I’ve done this a huge number of times. Era: The Consortium ( https://www.era-games.com/product/era-consortium-definitive-edition-rulebook-digital/ ) is a product of a lifetime of loving Sci-Fi – reading, watching and playing. Era: Forbidden, our most recent RPG release, came mostly from playing the three Darksiders games in a row, then watching the Hellboy movie! These things shaped the characters in my in my mind before they ever appeared on the pages.

I’m going to talk a lot more about various character-related subjects over the next several weeks. Much of this will be based on the foundation of the inspiration that I’m talking about now. So go out there, consume your media of choice, and I will see you next week for more about characters!

– Ed