Audiocraft Awards Night 2016

We celebrated our first Audiocraft Awards Night in September – a partnered project with ABC Radio National. We wanted to encourage emerging Australian radio producers to get out there and start making!

The Awards night itself was great – it was so lovely to hang out with audio fans, listen to the winning pieces, and have a little party.

The winners took home cash prizes, Hindenburg Software packages, and were broadcast on RN’s Pocketdocs. But the first place was perhaps the luckiest, they took home the Audiocraft cushion (look carefully below), which was hand-crafted by one of the Audiocraft team mums. Mums are the best.

You can hear the Top 6 on the Audiocraft podcast.

Audiocraft March 5, 2016

Producers from all over Australia descended on 107 projects for our first Audiocraft conference on March 5th 2016 and it was an incredible! I knew that audio folk were great, but seriously- I don’t think I appreciated just how amazing it would feel to have so many of these awesome individuals in the one place at the one time. Our community of Aussie makers is thriving and it was so great to hear about all the podcast and radio projects people are working on. The room was buzzing with creative energy and good vibes. So good.

Audiocraft-171

Our stellar line up of presenters got the conversations going and my head is still buzzing with all the ideas. Bec Fary and Jon Thjia had us independent podcast dreaming, and Timothy Nicastri and Miyuki Jokiranta took us deep into the wonders of sound design with new skills to boot. Joel Werner and Tiger Webb had everyone talking about sound stories with decomposing pigs, and Sophie Townsend and Jaye Kranz cracked open the mystical box of narrative radio. Our kicker panel on collaborative storytelling with Maddy Macfarlane, Kween G, Gavin Ivey and Giordana Caputo covered all the things we need to think about when working with other peoples stories and how to keep our radio making integrity in check. Then Sherre Delys wrapped the day up with her lyrical wonders reflecting back all the positivity and good times of the day. Stay tuned for the podcast of all the sessions.

It’s going to take a while to come down from this one. And we’re already plotting ideas for 2017….! In the mean time, we can’t wait to hear the entries for our first Audiocraft’s Short Feature Making Challenge

Audiocraft 2016 is coming!

I’m super excited to be working on a new project Audiocraft, a conference for Australian radiomakers and podcasters that’s happening on March 5th.

Audiocraft will be a day for producers to come together and talk, listen and learn about making great stories with sound. We have a stellar line up of presenters who’ll be leading workshops and panel discussions on narrative techniques, podcasting, sound design and collaborative storytelling.

It’s about building a stronger community of content makers and talking about all the nerdy stuff, and I can’t wait!

Audiocraft is an idea that’s been brewing for a while. When I went to the Third Coast International Audio Festival in 2014 I was blown away by being in a room of 500 radio folk who shared the same passion for telling stories with sound. I also realised that we don’t have anything like it in Australia, so something had to be done.

Over the last months I’ve been working with a group of absolute legends to make it happen. Here’s a few us being geeks and paying tribute to our trail blazing heroes at Third Coast.

The response to Audiocraft so far has been amazing. We sold out of our tickets 2 months before the conference date and so many people have come forward to offer their support. I think there’s a real desire for people to come together in this way. It’s an exciting time to be making audio, but it can also be a lonely gig, and there are a lot of big questions about the future of podcasting and radio broadcast that haven’t really been answered. So hopefully we can talk through some of these issues, build some great networks, and inspire creative collaborations!

Radiogaga Panel – EWF

I had heaps of fun chatting with fellow audio nerds Jaye Kranz, Tiger Webb and Heidi Pett on the Radio Gaga panel at Melbourne’s Emerging Writers Festival. We shared ideas about radio’s ‘New Journalism’ phase and how the role of the narrator might be shifting from a traditionally objective standpoint to a more subjective voice.

There are mixed feelings about this trend which is often seen as a shift to a more American style of radio. But I think it’s a great opportunity for producers to be a little less stodgy, or authoritative, and perhaps be more transparent about their role as storytellers within their work. We often make radio about things we genuinely care about, and as long as we don’t start stepping all over the story unnecessarily, an active voice might inject an authenticity into the work that we want to share. It might also help develop different creative audio styles and more distinct producer voices. You can really hear this in independent podcasts like Love and Radio and Strangers.

So if a subjective voice serves the story and moves the narrative forward in an interesting way, then why not utilise it? Perhaps the dilemma is how to not to let a ‘trend’ overtake the question of purpose, and consider what works best for each individual story.

Notes on Blindness

I first heard this story as a radio piece on 360 Documentaries and was blown away by how great it was. Then a friend sent me this New York Times video version which I also love. It combines audio diaries from a man who documented his experience of going blind, with beautifully crafted film images and archival style reenactments. The story behind the making of this piece is here.

I’m a huge fan of audio diaries and the intimate and reflective space they can create, and I think in this case, the audio works really well with images. It’s a sad piece, but the final part is so beautiful that I don’t think I’ll ever listen to the rain the same way again…..

“rain brings out the contours of what’s around you. In that it introduces a continuous blanket of differentiated and specialised sound, uninterrupted, which fills the whole of the audible environment…..If only there could be something equivalent to the falling of rain inside, then the whole of a room would take on shape and dimension”