Audio Movies

Who is Responsible for these Audio Movies?

Dirk Maggs is an English Radio Producer, Director and Writer (amongst other work that he does, plays the drums....)

What this web site is all about, is his audio work all in one nice, neat place on the web.

What is an Audio Movie?

Is an audio movie can simply be said to be the audio equivalent of a US $100 Million Dollar blockbuster movie for the ears.

Why? all this Audio Movie Stuff?

Dirk Maggs back in the 1980's had a feeling or a belief that there was more that audio could give the listener and so came up with 2 main principles that together made what has become known as an Audio Movie.

Audio Movie the Main Principles

There are 2 main guiding principles to what an Audio Movie is and how it can be best described.

The Audio Script

An Audio Movie script is the same as a movie script except that all pictures are in sound, before there was such a thing as an Audio Movie, radio scripts were a very different thing.

Dirk Maggs Comments One

"We were trying to do also attempted to obey the rules of good script writing (hopefully) was also the influence of modern screen writing techniques, which I felt could be applied to radio drama just as effectively as the BBC's traditional bias towards "stagey talkiness" and the work of playwrights."

Sound Layers

Sound layers may sound, well just a bit simple, but think about it, how can you get your audience on a street in London in the rain? then in the next moment you have them going into an upmarket shop? well with lots of layers of sound that all build up an audio picture of what is going on and where.

Make no mistake, when this layering of sound is done correctly it works very very well, it's does not need to be in 5:1 Surround or even stereo, if done right it will always work.

Dirk Maggs Comments Two

"We were trying to use the sound techniques of cinema post-production for pure audio story telling - which in the early 90's were multi-channel digital recording and mixing which the BBC had scarcely embraced, with the sort of eq & compression that they felt was far too heavy-handed"

Proto Audio Movie

The very earliest production by Dirk Maggs that shows the first stirrings of being an Audio Movie is the 1987 production of Thunderbirds for Children in Need

Some Current Audio Movie Productions

2008 Dirk Gently Series 2 is by any standard an Audio Movie. Check back as this page or entry is out of date by the time someone reads this, and I am sure Dirk will have done some more Audio type productions.

Onwards

In a 2008 an email to me from Dirk, he stated that he did not like the term Audio Movie and that it was a term that has lost some of its original meaning but there does not yet seem to be a replacement term that would cover it.

David Williams Comments

I think, I must agree (with Dirk's comments above), because for any well-funded audio production, the 2 main principles of an Audio movie are being followed by the producers even if they don't realise it (how well they implement it, is another matter).

To see this for yourself have an ear full or two of audio from the early pre-Audio Movies days and then a current production that is not by Dirk and you can see to some extent that what I have said is true.

I think all audio productions that have the correct funding for the production will be an Audio Movie, and for us listeners, which has got to be great news for our ears.