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Interview with scriptwriter

Writing a radio play  | Interview with scriptwriter |  Format for radio play scripts  |  Learning activities

Miriam Smith is the writer of the script for Bow Down Shadrach. It was her job to turn the novel into a radio play. Miriam attended Westlake Girls' High School in Auckland and Mt Aspiring College in Wanaka. When she left school she completed a Bachelor of Arts in English and film studies and then a Masters degree in screenwriting at SCAPA (School of Creative and Performing Arts) at the University of Auckland. In between her degrees she worked for a year working for the magazines publishing group ACP Media as a writer and editorial assistant.

How did you come to be the writer of the screen play for Bow Down Shadrach?
I enjoyed writing when I was at school and wrote lots of poems and stories. I did a degree in English and film studies at university and became interested in writing for film, so I went on to do a Masters degree in screenwriting. I was approached to write the script for the play because of my script writing experience, although I hadn't written for radio before.

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What was the process that you followed to write the script?
First of all I read the novel a few times. Then I discussed the approach that I wanted to take with Kate Orgias (producer and director). It is really important that when you are working in collaboration with others that you all have the same vision so we needed to make sure that we wanted the same things to be brought out of the story. We decided to stick pretty much to the original action and events in the story and we wanted to bring life to Hannah's imagination.

The next thing that I did was to sit down with the novel and input all of the dialogue and action in the book into my computer. Action and dialogue are important elements of drama so this was what I needed to focus on. Then I needed to start editing. The novel is 100 or so pages long and the radio play had to be 55 minutes. In radio drama one page of script is approximately one minute of air time, so I needed to focus on the main events in the story and edit out irrelevant bits.

Then I focused on each character and what they were saying. I needed to bring them to life by looking carefully at what they were saying, so that they would seem realistic. I thought about the language that I had heard children using when developing dialogue for each character. The words that they were saying needed to be real.

I also needed to make sure that the story was very clear to the audience by finding ways of letting the audience know where we were and what was happening. For example at one stage the children are in a boat then riding on a tractor, which could be confusing for the audience, so I had to write sound cues and dialogue that would explain what was happening.

When I finished a draft I would discuss it with Kate who would give me feedback from a radio production perspective. She helped me with developing more sound cues and ideas for sound effects to tell the story. Each draft was discussed twice and in total there were three drafts of the script.

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What challenges were there for you in writing a radio play script?
Keeping the story clear so that the audience would be able to follow what is happening. Because you don't have visual clues for the audience you need to tell them where they are and who is there. Showing the magic side of the story – we talked about how to use sound to show the dream world of Hannah's imagination.

What do you like about radio plays?
They have a magic about them. I remember listening to radio plays when I was a kid and being really tuned in. It is a kind of old fashioned storytelling. I also really like the broad range of stories that are told through radio plays.

Having heard the performance of the play what do you think works in the play?
I loved hearing New Zealand children actors! The way they talked and interacted sounded so natural, amusing, and delightful to me. In that respect I think the children's dialogue in the script worked really well. I also think that recording on location (such as the farm scenes) worked brilliantly, as it helped make events sound authentic.

What things might you do differently if you were re-writing the script?
I learned that radio plays need lots of space around dialogue and action for the emotion to be felt. As a result a number of scenes had to be reduced or cut as there wasn't enough time for them, and/or they weren't necessary. So if I were to do it again, I would edit it further, so as to give the characters and story more time to play in.

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