Radio Play: Happy Town
Hello, and welcome back to my blog 4x! Today, I will be talking briefly about a recent project we in PLP 10 preformed, a satirical radio play taking place in post-WWII. You may think it’s more WWII related since it’s in the projects driving question (which I will get to in a bit) but, not really.
“A satirical radio play? Taking place in the 1940s? Well, this sounds similar!” Yes, it’s true, the plays storyline takes much inspiration from the movie “Pleasantville”, which aside from one being a show and the other being a radio play, they’re pretty much the same thing. Before I get too off topic, let us get into how exactly this project came to be.
I’m pretty sure that my humanities teacher loves history. I mean, she’s a history teacher so I was kind of expecting her to be, but I digress. We were instructed to take notes while watching a documentary on post-WWII Canadian events, and then think up of ways to incorporate little references to it in our play; alongside considering the driving question:
How do we use a satirical radio play to communicate the shifts in Canadian society following WWII?
I didn’t take any notes, but I do happen to recall a few key events such as Newfoundland joining Canada and stuff. After this, we were all put into groups. People directing the play, people doing sound effects, people who have roles in the play and then people doing advertisements. I was a lucky duck and got to do an advertisements on Tv dinners. You know, those things that people used to buy in the 1950s all the way up until the 2000s when people realized they were horrible for you (who could’ve known, right?). This task was simple enough, at least for me. I whipped up a script and put sound effects in there and that was that, right? Well, I also had to preform this advertisement in front of an audience on YouTube. Wait a minute, you’re streaming this live? On YouTube???? Yes, I didn’t know this all too well but; our class was on livestream in front of a few people on YouTube, like parents and anyone else who cared enough to watch teenagers preform an educational play.
We went through a few test-runs to see if everyone knew what they were doing, and then finally the day had come for us to present, and it went fine. Really, I don’t have a lot to say about the day itself other than that everyone did a great job and it was decently funny at times. But, how would I say that I did? Any improvements I could make?
Yeah, I could improve on actually taking notes when I’m supposed to. Focus is a struggle for me in class, and I know if my parents see this in text they’d kill me, but I usually spend my time listening and drawing, instead of listening and writing notes. Drawing while listening to something else keeps me sharp…!!! And, I would probably fall asleep if I had to listen to a documentary on WWII for an hour while taking notes. You would too, right?!?!?!
I really do like how efficient I was when it came to getting work done. I finished my script quickly, faster than my other group members; and took criticism and suggested revisions and applied them to my work. Obviously my script was pretty much already flawless because I’m 100% perfect and make no mistakes, but seeking advice from peers is okay sometimes.. in case I made a silly mistake…
Well, that’s all for this blog post today. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you later.