Radio Play Sneak Peak

We're so excited about premiering our first radio play! We'll be performing it live this Sunday 12/7/14 in the Marshall J. Gardner Center in the Miller Beach Arts & Creative District.

Here is a "Butterbird Christmas" Sneak Peak to wet your whistle. Our lead, Maggie, meets her terror of a 1st grade teacher, Miss Sespal.

(production services provided by Almost Fairytales )

Our founder, Dr. Meg G. DeMakas, was interviewed recently on PBS's "Eye on the Arts" program. She discussed "Butterbird Christmas at length with the host, John Cain. View their entire interview here.

You can RSVP for our Sunday premiere via Facebook at this link.

Save the Date!!!

Butterbird Christmas Debuts on 12/7/14 at the Marshall J. Gardner Center

Butterbird Christmas Debuts on 12/7/14 at the Marshall J. Gardner Center

We are soooo stoked about our debut performance and hope that you will bring in the holidays with the Family Folklore Players! We will perform our original radio play, Butterbird Christmas, at 4:00pm at the Marshall J. Garner Center for the Arts in the Miller Beach Arts & Creative District of Gary, Indiana. Doors open at 3:30 PM, tickets are $8 for adults and $4 for children, a variety of baked sale goods will be available, and the Calumet Ridge Jazz Ensemble will be accompanying the project. 

Butterbird Christmas, is a hilarious romp for the whole family. Inspired by the era of classic broadcasting, the cast and crew banded together to create a timeless piece about growing up in Chicagoland.

Butterbird Christmas, is a hilarious romp for the whole family. Inspired by the era of classic broadcasting, the cast and crew banded together to create a timeless piece about growing up in Chicagoland.

Some very important characteristics differentiate Butterbird Christmas from many other radio plays out on the market today:

1.      It is an all-volunteer run production.

2.      Proceeds go to a multitude of projects dedicated to promoting literacy & arts education in Northwest Indiana.

3.      It is an intergenerational, multicultural radio play written about Da Region by a homegrown writer  

The Family Folklore Foundation’s mission is to offer educational opportunities to intergenerational community members using literacy and problem-solving strategies to make the world a better place. Over the course of the project, our players enjoyed communicating and communing with the wide range of volunteers and supporters. We have had the privilege of sharing in many special holiday moments with the cast and crew, and especially liked knowing all the goodwill this project will spread across the community. There is even a documentary being produced about the making of “Butterbird Christmas” that will be available in the spring.

Sound Editing

Post-production, what is it? How does it work? Post-production is the stage in which a project becomes polished. Post-production can be composed of video, audio and graphics editing. An example of post-production is color correction.

For “Butterbird Christmas,” we had to call on the audio skill set of Jessica Renslow. Jessie (as she’s usually referred to) has been working in Hollywood for eight years primarily in the world of ADR, also known as dubbing, mixing, or re-recording. What is ADR? It’s a sound term usually associated when dialogue from one language is replaced by another. Usually radio plays are performed with an ensemble of actors in unison. Each actor gets his/her own microphone and it is done in a slick studio, but our budget just didn’t allow this. So, we worked with what we had.

We recorded everyone individually. Then Jessie went in and sorted them together like a giant jigsaw puzzle! Next she created sound effects. This is called foley. She also used some royalty free ones from archive.org, which is a GREAT resource, especially for any production working on a tight budget. Finally she laid in music also harvested from open access sites. The next step will be to mix the project. Good news is the rough cut is done!