Paul Cross: Hi, I’m Paul Cross, I want to talk to you today, a little bit about how
to create a short radio feature. This can be used for a three-minute feature, a five-minute
feature. You can even expand this idea to a documentary, the kind of programming I often
create. I want to talk to you about how to design and structure a short radio feature.
Let’s suppose you are given the opportunity to create a five-minute feature, story, interview,
program, music show, whatever, to run on radio. Let’s consider this clock to represent your
five minutes. Here’s your start. How are you going to structure the show? How should
you put it together? What do you want your listener to hear? Let’s not even think necessarily
the kind of content you’re going to do, let’s think about: how should I put the
show together, so that it’s going to flow. Well, I think you need, here, some kind of
beginning of the show: let’s call this a “show open”. I think you need an opening
to the show. If you think of most of what you hear on radio, and think of what you see
on TV, and YouTube, etc., shows have a beginning of some sort. We’ll call that our “open”.
I suppose, when you’re done, you probably want an ending. Let’s call that a close.
We’re starting here at zero, that’s your beginning time, and we’re coming back here,
at the end. Let’s say it’s five minutes. So, where are we going to go within these
five minutes? Well, we’re going to open the show by letting the listener know what
the show is going to be about. Maybe there’s a little bit of music in there. Maybe there’s
a little bit of wild sound, background sound. Maybe you’re doing a feature story here
at Humber about nature and the Arboretum, and maybe you want us to hear the sound of
the Arboretum. Or maybe it’s a story about life at Humber, and maybe you’re saying:
“I’m here in the beautiful Arboretum”, and here’s an airplane going over. So we’ll
have some wild sound of airplane flying over. Then, within the structure of the show, let’s
think of what we need to know. What’s this story really all about? Lets just ask that.
And the first 30-seconds or so of a short feature, maybe you’re establishing, what
is this story really about, and who is involved in it? This isn’t a template, it’s not
a formula, you don’t have to follow this all the time. This is just an idea of how
you can map it out. Maybe there’s an issue in the story. So you want to say, well, “what
are our we doing about this issue?” What are we doing about airplane noise flying over
the Arboretum? What are we doing about the need for good jobs? What are we doing about
the need for supplies or donations for the food bank? What are we doing to help find
a donor for a liver for a child in the hospital? And in the end, once we’ve established,
what’s it all about, who’s involved, what are we doing about it? Maybe we want to talk
a little bit about the future, or what comes next. And then, we’ll have our closing and
our conclusion. So let’s just consider then, what we want within a short radio feature
for radio. We need an “open”, We need to
know “what is it about?”, we need to know: “Who’s involved”, we need to know: “What
are we doing?”, and maybe, something about the future. Let’s call that: “What’s
next?”. There’s just an idea: flowing through the show, the content can be whatever
you want it to be. It can be an interview; it can be pieces of interviews with narration
around them. There can be some music in there. There can be some wild sound, there can be
some sound effects if it’s that type of show. But, we start here at zero. Five minutes
later, we’ve heard our complete story. After we’ve done that, we’re going to have to
write an intro so somebody can use the show on the air, and I’ll talk about that next
time.