Honestly, I was quite excited about the group shenanigans as I thought it would be a nice way to lean into the fact that I have a passion for acting and playwriting. On top of that, a group task would be an interesting way to mimic the process of creating a radio production through the different roles we would undertake. As someone who’s listened to the radio a lot when they were younger and someone who’s quite interested in the whole dynamic of the radio as it is the mainstream way of digesting audio-only media, the revised task had a completely different angle than the one previous and lost the unique aspect that a group task has. Firstly, now each person in our class has to be their own voice actor, sound engineer and director, completely removing the group part of the task. This also makes it harder is fully explore a certain role in radio production, and this is all before we actually get onto the content of the task itself. Instead of making a radio piece with an unrestricted topic that included voice, sound and noise, instead, we now have two create a five minute part of an exquisite corpse about dreams.
Dreams as a topic, for myself, isn’t really a restriction but also is a quality that, for me, doesn’t breed creativity. If one made a piece about normal dreams they have, who would care? It’s almost like a weird application of empathy, who would listen to a story about a dream when their own dreams are more exciting and detailed than the ones they listen to from other people? It begs the question of why someone would listen to something so fantastical when it isn’t a story they want or need to hear? There are also many pitfalls with making a sound piece about dreams because it is very easy to make a piece that is, again, uninteresting. I feel as well the best angle with making a script for this piece would be to make a story that has a meaning or message to tell; however, even then, telling a serious message is almost nonsensical to do in the framework of a dream, mostly based on the fact that dreams are silly so why would anyone take you seriously?
My main takeaway with the dream topic of this task is that it is hard to make something interesting or meaningful in the framework of a dream and a lot of the things we want to talk about are better said through a different story and not one that primarily is based around a dream.