Butterbird Christmas Debuts Live at the Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts

On December 7, 2015, we put on our first radio play, Butterbird Christmas.  This inaugural performance was given at the Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts to a standing room only crowd.  (Click here to view the performance on our YouTube channel.)

With scripts in hand, the players read their parts aloud into wireless mics, accompanied by the Calumet Jazz Duo and our foley artists.  The gallery was decorated with 1950’s newspaper advertisements and photographs of mid-century scenes from Northwest Indiana, in particular, the Grandfield family (the inspiration of Butterbird Christmas).

           

The Family Folklore Players took a cue from the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Senior Players and set up their stage to mirror the radio plays that these pros perform regularly at the Chicago Cultural Center. Additionally, Koni Shaughnessy (of 90.9 FM), took us under her wing and explained the whys and hows of creating sound effects, she read our play and made recommendations for sound effects.

Members of Family Folklore Foundation Inc. and the Marshall J. Gardner Center for the Arts worked together on this mutual labor of love.  The sound system was fine tuned, decorations for Christmas and Hanukah decked the hall, Addycake’s baker, Mallory Keller, brought designer cupcakes in the seasonal colors represented in our inter-faith tale, the band set the mood, and the foley artists lined up their sound gear.  

The play began on time at 4 o’clock and the whole cast and crew did a wonderful job!  The audience was friendly and seemed to enjoy the humor and mini tragedies featured in the story. Sue Ross of the Post Tribune reported and photographed the playand the article appeared December 19th.  A great time was had by all and the event was a success. We were able to raise funds to support other arts endeavors for our community and very humbled by the out-pouring of support we received in the planning/ execution of this program. Now, we’re focusing on finishing the post-production on our documentary of the making of this project.

 If you would like to listen to our fully mastered radio play mix click here.

Save the Date!!!

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!