Editor's note: radio drama rivals all other media as a source of innovation and adventurous story-telling technique. Fred Greenhalgh worked on a particularly adventurous example for the Afternoon Play slot at 1415 today. The video shows the recording of one scene on location in New York - SB

John Dryden's three-part serial Severed Threads is all about the random connections between people who have never met each other and how chance events can ripple across cultures and change the lives of people we have never met. It's a mixture of the concept of six degrees of separation and the 'butterfly effect' transposed to globalism in modern India, America, and the U.K.

So it seems natural that I would be brought into the production by my own series of somewhat random connections - knowing a college flatmate of John, who introduced me to him just at the time that my own work in field recorded radio drama could be most improved by working with him.

John records his actors in the real world, in changing, uncontrollable environments like bars, city streets, churches, and apartment complexes. Not only does he record in the real world, but he travels - in the case of Severed Threads to three countries - to get the sound he's after.

In this case, his destination was New York City. What better place to tell a story of lives connected by seemingly unrelated events?

Recording in the Real World

In America we don't have the benefit of an intact cultural memory of radio drama. It seems TV effectively assassinated the public consciousness of the form in the 1960s and today, the aspiring dramatist has to tell the life story of the medium to anyone who wants to listen.

Being that most people raise an eyebrow when they see me with headphones on and recorder in tow, it was freeing to work with a director like John who has the same passion for location recording - of capturing the unique sound of the outside world rather than the artificial deadness of the studio.

Actors march through rooms, pull up next to one another at a crowded lunch table, sit at a bar to yak about sports or watch their family fall apart in the middle of dinner. When it's time for someone to die, well, forget the foley - someone's going to wind up on the ground!

Of course, verisimilitude is stretched - a bedroom serves as the lobby for the church, a basement entryway as a gunshop - but the overall effect is a raw, energized sound. Actors get a chance to stand up, move around, interact. The world is the studio.

Losing Control

Of course, this bold artistic choice brings its challenges to the director. Such as how to remove the Big-ness of the Big Apple so that is sounds like a sleepier town in America's heartland.

Recording on location requires nerves of steel - keeping your cool when cars drive by, airplanes take off overhead, dogs bark incessantly or a foghorn goes off. Or, as in the case of our trip to suburban New Jersey, when an army of gardeners with high decibel equipment shows up in the middle of the session. Juggling an uncontrollable, noisy world with the needs of a large cast and production crew seems a way to drive yourself insane.

And maybe it does. But for John Dryden - who kept a good attitude and smiled through the most stressful parts of recording - maybe it's also the knowledge that all the trouble is worth it.

A Man Walks into a Studio...

The scene in the video above is is a good example. Jim, the American story's protagonist who finds his life as a church leader and businessman crumbling around him, walks up with a newspaper reporter for a live interview which catches him off guard. Combine that raw, energetic performance with a sound environment and you get this finished scene:

The globe-trotting nature and guerrilla recording style makes Severed Threads a very different kind of production. The story has a lot to say about our real world, which itself is chaotic, shifting, noisy and fast-paced. Our nightly news is filled with the kind of story at the heart of Severed Threads - of wrongs that just are, with no special meaning, and more questions than answers.

But, as Dryden's play points out, there's a lot to learn by going beneath the surface of tragedies, and looking for the threads that bind.

Fred Greenhalgh is Sound Recordist for Severed Threads

• Listen to episode one of John Dryden's Severed Threads on BBC Radio 4 at 1415 today.
• John Dryden has written about his free range approach to radio drama - for a production recorded on location in Mumbai - here on the Radio 4 blog before.
• More about Fred Greenhalgh on his web site.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pk6w1

Editor's note. Here is producer John Dryden's final Six Suspects blog post - this time about the process of recording the pivotal party scene - used throughout the adaptation. Fascinating. And after it (scroll down), something marvelous: eight deleted and extended scenes, nearly twenty minutes of audio all together, given to us by John for exclusive publication here on the blog. My recommendation: put your headphones on and listen to them in sequence - it's like a scary ride through the backstreets and penthouses of the story. John's post starts with the party scene itself - SB.

The party sequence in week two - where Vicky Rai is murdered - presented a number of challenges as the sequence of events is repeated each day but each time from a different suspects point of view. The party itself was recorded in a number of different ways - Vicky's speech for instance was recorded with 'live' party crowds who he could bounce off and who could react to him. We recorded him close and from within the crowd so that we could cut between perspectives. We also recorded a lot of lines clean of the party so that they could be dropped in over the many party wildtracks we recorded.

This was mostly the case with the dialogue lines from the various suspects. We recorded a lot of crowd reactions to the different events of the party - 'anchor points' we called them. These were events that had to happen in every episode - the fireworks, the power cutting out, the gun going off, the lights coming back on, the discovery of Vicky's body. As the audience are pretty sure by now that someone is going to murder Vicky at the party (they are told as much by Arun Advani at the end of episode four), the fireworks are a kind of tease - anticipating the actual gun shot that will come later.

How the guests at the party were to react when the lights came back on and discovered Vicky lying on the ground was something we didn't decide on until late in the day. In fact we recorded the guests reacting in a number of different ways but opted eventually for the idea that they would think he was playing a joke on them. This allowed for a gradual realization that he was dead. It seemed right that they would think it was a joke at first - Vicky being the prankster type.

In terms of editing, we first of all created a master party sequence which had all the 'anchor points' but none of the perspectives of the different suspects. It was a sequence with Vicky in 'full frame' from his speech to the discovery of his death. This took quite some time to make, because it was constructed from so many different elements and we wanted it to seem like someone had turned up to a party in Delhi with a tape recorder or video camera and just recorded everything that happened there - like it was found material.

Once the master sequence was completed we used it at the end of episodes 6-10 in various configurations, dropping in the lines from the various suspects over the top. That's the sequence you can hear at the top of this blog post.

John Dryden is producer of Six Suspects

Deleted and extended scenes from Six Suspects, recorded live in Mumbai for the BBC Radio 4 adaptation:

Steve Bowbrick is editor of the Radio 4 blog

• The last three episodes of Six Suspects are still available to listen to on the Radio 4 web site. A BBC audio CD is planned.
• Read John Dryden's two posts about recording the series in India.
• The picture, Boy Playing with Ferry - Mumbai, India, is by Gregory Younger. Used under licence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pk6w1

John Dryden's second post about recording Six Suspects for Radio 4 - SB.

The party sequence in week two - where Vicky Rai is murdered - presented a number of challenges as the sequence of events is repeated each day but each time from a different suspects point of view. The party itself was recorded in a number of different ways - Vicky's speech for instance was recorded with 'live' party crowds who he could bounce off and who could react to him. We recorded him close and from within the crowd so that we could cut between perspectives. We also recorded a lot of lines clean of the party so that they could be dropped in over the many party wildtracks we recorded. This was mostly the case with the dialogue lines from the various suspects.

We recorded a lot of crowd reactions to the different events of the party - 'anchor points' we called them. These were events that had to happen in every episode - the fireworks, the power cutting out, the gun going off, the lights coming back on, the discovery of Vicky's body. As the audience are pretty sure by now that someone is going to murder Vicky at the party (they are told as much by Arun Advani at the end of episode four), the fireworks are a kind of tease - anticipating the actual gun shot that will come later.

How the guests at the party were to react when the lights came back on and discovered Vicky lying on the ground was something we didn't decide on until late in the day. In fact we recorded the guests reacting in a number of different ways but opted eventually for the idea that they would think he was playing a joke on them. This allowed for a gradual realization that he was dead. It seemed right that they would think it was a joke at first - Vicky being the prankster type.

In terms of editing, we first of all created a master party sequence which had all the "anchor points" but none of the perspectives of the different suspects. It was a sequence with Vicky in "full frame" from his speech to the discovery of his death. This took quite some time to make, because it was constructed from so many different elements and we wanted it to seem like someone had turned up to a party in Delhi with a tape recorder or video camera and just recorded everything that happened there - like it was found material.

Once the master sequence was completed we used it at the end of episodes 6-10 in various configurations, dropping in the lines from the various suspects over the top (Exclusive sound samples from the recording will be available here tomorrow).

• Six Suspects is transmitted in the Woman's Hour drama slot at 1045 and 1945 daily until 15 January. Listen to this week's episodes on the Radio 4 web site.
• Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer wrote about John's production of Q&A (the story which became Slumdog Millionaire) here on the blog in February.
• There's some discussion of Six Suspects on the Radio 4 message board.
• Picture by Tom Spender. Used under licence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pk6w1

Editor's note. Have you been listening the current Woman's Hour serial? It's called Six Suspects, an adaptation of a story by Vikas Svarup, author of Q&A, the novel that was filmed as Slumdog Millionaire. One of the most distinctive things about Six Suspects is the amazing sound - it's unusually atmospheric and authentic - utterly absorbing. I asked producer John Dryden to explain how he captured the sound of Mumbai - SB.

What next? I'd worked in India several times before. I'd done the romantic epic (A Suitable Boy), the uplifting modern-day coming-of-age story (Q&A), but what was I going to do with this larger-than-life and slightly fantastical whodunit in which all the characters were at worst evil and a best mildly unlikeable. There is little of the milk of human kindness in the world of Six Suspects. It's all highly entertaining stuff in prose, but how were we going to make it compelling to listen to as drama?

I was looking for a very particular sound with Six Suspects. Set in modern-day India, it examines the lives of the suspects in the murder of a character (Vicky Rai) who is so evil you almost like him. The characters are so extreme the story verges on comedy - but I didn't want this just to be a comedy. There seemed to be so many more levels in the novel. I wanted the performances and production to work against the comedy and create a tension that I hoped the audience would feel and would suck them into the drama. So we worked on an approach in which the comedy and extremities would appear to be happening in the real world. Key to achieving this was the sound design. Sound designer Nick Russell-Pavier, sound recordist Ayush Ahuja and myself worked closely together in the weeks leading up to recording, planning each scene in detail. Being really well prepared allowed us to be more flexible when the recording actually took place.

Every scene was blocked out in detail. There were no actors standing around fixed microphones in this production. What the characters appear to be doing - whether walking up the stairs, running down the street, driving - the actors playing them are actually doing. We recorded it all in real locations with the microphone on a boom tracking the actors in their highly choreographed performances. We didn't record any of the drama in studio except for the voice over of the narrator, the investigative journalist Arun Advani - an element that gives the drama an investigative documentary feel.

We made the drama in India, in two primary locations: one a flat in Mumbai around which were streets we could record in; the other a rural location a few hours outside of Mumbai, which was much quieter and gave us more control. We used a variety of recording techniques - the tracking microphone on a boom - radio microphones in busy locations when we didn't want to draw attention to ourselves and for phone calls - small recorders which we gave the actors for certain fast movement sequences such as when Munna Mobile runs down the street after stealing a phone. We aimed to keep the microphones moving all the time to give an uneasy grainy quality to it all. We also recorded lots and lots of wildtracks, which we could later layer under scenes in post production - again to keep this sense of movement, of things always changing, as the fast-moving story progresses.

We recorded the drama in India over two weeks in May 2009 and I then went to work on several other productions before coming back to the material in August to begin the edit. The post-production took about ten weeks. I edited on Pro-Tools building the sequences as composer Sacha Puttnam began creating themes that I could start playing around with. The themes were inspired by music we recorded in India - raw, imporivised, performances by Indian musician. Gradually the shape and style of the drama began to emerge. At this stage, the script (a brilliantly constructed script by Ayeesha Menon from the novel by Vikas Swarup) was largely put aside as the characters took on a life of their own. For a final mix I worked with Nick Russell-Pavier in the studios at Essential Music. This is pretty much how we put the production together.

John Dryden is producer of Six Suspects

• Six Suspects is transmitted in the Woman's Hour drama slot at 1045 and 1945 daily until 15 January. Listen to this week's episodes on the Radio 4 web site.
• Radio 4 Controller Mark Damazer wrote about John's production of Q&A (the story which became Slumdog Millionaire) here on the blog in February.
• There's some discussion of Six Suspects on the Radio 4 message board.
• Picture by Tawheed Manzoor. Used under licence.