Radio script techniques

Below the fold are nerdy notes may be applicable to other sorts of research and document construction. Also, they will remind me what to do next time.

I am working with six transcripts of around 5,000 words each; from each of these I need to extract four or five discontinuous paragraphs — though usually I pull out seven or eight to start with — and then combine and reorder the resulting 25-30 quotes, before whittling them down to 20.

What I do is to use OOo’s bookmark facility (Screenshot) as a way of marking the quotes in the run-through. This means using the whole chunk of quotation as a bookmark, and then giving it a short, but descriptive name. The names show up in the Navigator panel to one side: one of the nicer things about OOo is that you can examine the bookmarks of all open documents in that panel. Once all the quotes have been bookmarked like this, I run two home made macros. One simply highlights the bookmarked text by applying a character style that gives it a bright green background; the other transfers all the quotations to Ecco as sub-items of their bookmark names.

At some stage in the programme, I will have a clear shape and a list of the themes and segments. These can then be applied in Ecco so that each chunk of text is there identified both by speaker and by topic. There they can be arranged in a grid, with speakers down the side, and topics on the top. There’s a particular use for that in radio: I want to use contracting accents and voices, and this way I can see very easily how the pattern of voices changes as the programme goes on. Since there’s almost always repetition between speakers, I have a degree of freedom in deciding who gets to make which points.

I could probably do this with some kind of spreadsheet setup in OOo, but I can’t see the advantage of learning how to. Nor would it be nearly as flexible as Ecco is.

Once all the quotes have been placed like this, it’s really very much easier to push them round until the argument is as clear and dramatic as possible. These are all things that an experienced radio producer can do without thinking. But I find the technology very helpful. I’m sure it could all be done in MS Office too, using some variation of outlining. But I don’t think this would be quite as slick and easy as using the OOo navigator, though that is one of the least advertised and least understood bits of the software.