This week has been both extremely stressful and extremely exciting. Things started off a bit confusing for me, admittedly, as I was under the impression that the radio show assignment would be individual work. Because of this, I slotted myself into a group pretty last minute. After this, a few days went by and we hadn’t really communicated about the assignment yet. Thankfully, on Wednesday we were able to get in touch and made some incredible story writing progress.

In hindsight, I’m extremely grateful that this is a group project instead of solo. My group (me, Bird, Daniel, and Naomi) has developed some incredible ideas that would take me way longer to develop on my own. In fact, Bird was the one who initially presented the idea for our show. So, what is the idea?

Without giving away too much, our segment on the radio show will be a sci-fi thriller/mystery story that we’ve titled “Coroner’s Tale.” Bird brought this idea to the group, suggesting that the story take place out of the coroner’s office on a massive spaceship (like something you’d see in Star Trek) where the coroner, his assistant, and a few various ship personnel find something mysterious happening with the body under examination. Right away, we all had a million and one ideas for the direction of the story and ways to have sound effects and ominous music create environment and suspense. Ultimately, the following points are the most I’m willing to go into detail about the story at this point:

• There has just been a battle between this specific ship and an incredibly violent alien species, resulting in many dead.
• The ship personnel are quite unfamiliar with the alien species and what they are capable of.
• The people of the ship fought hard, lost many, but ultimately prevailed in the encounter, assuming to have killed off all of the aliens present in the attack.
• In the coroner’s office, a discovery is made that causes a sequence of frightening and dangerous events.
• The entire event is captured on a recording device in the coroner’s room, with the voices of individuals venturing out into the halls picked up through walkie-talkie communication to those still in the office. This gives the story a “found audio” type of feel, adding to the realism factor (regardless of the fact that it is a sci-fi tale).

The rest of the story has been fully fleshed out, with Bird taking to a Google doc to write the script. Over the course of the next two weeks, we will all refine the script to have it as perfect as possible and begin recording. We’ve also already started to search around for sound effects to help amplify the environment we’re attempting to create. Tonight, I plan to make a bumper, a commercial, and a graphic for the show to keep progress rolling, and the rest of the team has been putting in all sorts of great work.