When we were talking about all the media that the story of Silver Antlers could fit, I mentioned a radio play. A radio play is (and I’m being unfairly general here but stick with me) a movie we watch with our eyes closed. Of course there are certain parts of a story that we can only perceive with our eyes—things like body language—but there are ways to compensate for most of those with words and other sounds.

And that hindrance can also be a boon. If we’re only using our ears to take in a story, we’re paying more attention to what it sounds like than if we were also processing visual information. And with more attention on the words, it can be easier to let the writing grow a few flowers.

A novel, a radio play, a stage play, and a film slide from least to most fully realized before consumption by the audience. Let’s compare:

• A novel’s events unfold entirely in the mind of the audience, and while novels frequently contain dialogue, they also contain written descriptions of the scenery and action of a story. A novel can succeed without any dialogue at all–perhaps unfolding entirely in the mind of the protagonist, if you will.
• A radio play is heard, rather than read. A radio play can be little more than a book read aloud—the medium is related closely enough to the novel that its stories can also eschew dialogue, favoring dictation by a narrator—but a general use of the medium involves multiple actors playing different roles, and sound effects and music to imply action and scenery.
• A play is tangible: the audience hears the cast deliver their own lines, like a radio play, but they also watch the cast interact: another layer of information. Narration is unlikely and scenery is often just implied (a restraint caused by all the action being limited to the physical constraints of a stage), but the dialogue tends to be dense and the physical gestures grand to compensate.
• A film also has tangible actors and audible dialogue, but there’s also far more motion in the audience’s point of view than when they are watching a stage, as the film is captured by a camera that can move anywhere, and shots can cut in and out at will. Scenery rarely needs to be implied and backstory is most often presented in dialogue (or subtext, or not at all)–narration tends to be rare.

Given that list, where do we fit, and what kind of text can we get away with? We have a visual component, but it’s largely static–there’s very little information available in the way of body language. The audience can move like a camera but save for scene breaks, the visual information they’re receiving won’t really change. The cast’s lines will be delivered by a voice outside of the viewer’s imagination, but it will still effectively be disembodied, like a radio play.

It’s an equation that I’ve yet to balance. I’m torn between lush, descriptive narration coupled with simple dialogue (which turns out to be about a minute per scene) and more expressive dialogue with no narration (which is quicker). I’m leaning toward the latter, but I don’t think there’s a right answer here.

I haven’t said all I wanted to say about this topic and my thoughts are fairly unorganized, but this is a good view of how these decisions are relating to each other in my mind. I’ve chosen to ignore silent films (and silent plays) for now, as well as graphic novels (and illustrated books), because this spread is already complicated enough, but they’re important points on the (line? graph? form?) we’re plotting. I’ll come back to this after I’ve made some more decisions, and I’d love to know how you feel about the arrangement as well.

Perhaps my most favorite element of the soundtrack for a walkthrough is the freedom of multi-channel audio. Surround sound has been used in movie theaters for decades and many of us even have 5.1 audio in our homes, but a walkthrough’s speaker arrangement is built specifically and exclusively for the scene at hand and can get delightfully complex. There can be a speaker in a character’s mouth that only plays her dialogue. There can be a speaker in a stream that only plays burbling water.

The decisions we make here depend on the decisions we make in our previous step (if there is narration then we probably need speakers overhead in each scene) as well as our scale (in our smallest iteration, the one where the scenes are lit in sequence in a single room, we might have one speaker per scene and one in the center of the space for non-diegetic sound).

These ideas deserve their own post, which you’ll read next week. This week we’re talking about some specifics of the arrangement and layout of our show in my ideal conditions, and we’ll also work out a proper timeline to make this thing real. And of course you’ll see a preview of the next scene. But you won’t hear anything. Yet.