Writing for the Ear to See

We make stories for the ear, but there’s no escaping the highly visual nature of the work we produce...

We make stories for the ear, but there’s no escaping the highly visual nature of the work we produce...

No other medium allows its audience to see as imaginatively, as privately, and as sensitively, as audio. But how do we go about accessing this visual capacity of audio? How do we find those ways of describing a scene, an object, a person, in a way that brings our audience the full Technicolor experience. Focusing on script, this session looks at we might think about our visual language. In the crispest, most economical ways, how do we use narration to allow our audience to see what they’re hearing?


Featuring

Sophie Townsend

Sophie Townsend (@sophietown) (she/her) is a senior producer and editor at ABC Audio Studio. She also works internationally as an audio features maker and writer. Her podcast for the BBC, Goodbye To All This, made with Falling Tree Productions, was one of the New York Times's best podcasts for 2020. In 2015 she won the HearSay International Audio competition with her piece “Mr Fix-it.” Her works “Stories and Driving” and “The Updates” were featured at Third Coast in 2015, and she was a speaker at Third Coast in 2019. Through her personal stories for radio, she explores relationships, loss and family, and her work has been played on the BBC's Short Cuts, Radiotopia's The Heart and the CBC's Love Me.