Recording Club mystery series uses one of entertainment’s earliest forms.
By JD Martin
A hush falls over the students of Grand Canyon University’s Recording Club. Inside the campus recording studio, the club members are wrapping up an episode of their original mystery radio play,“Crimson Ink”.
The club’s voice actors lean into their microphones, waiting for their cues. After they exchange some of their lines, the club’s president, David Loewen, chimes in with notes.
“Can you try to make that a little bouncier? Do you care about him? Come on, we don’t care about this guy.” The actors absorb his notes and return to recording.
Though the final piece contains no visual elements, the club members have brought “Crimson Ink”’s vivid setting and dynamic characters to life using theater of the imagination.
Devising the Idea
Radio plays dominated entertainment in the era before visual broadcasting. According to Western Canada Theatre, radio dramas originated in the 1920s and rose to peak popularity in the 1940s. During this time, many households relied on radios for live news and entertainment.
However, according to Theatrecrafts, radio drama lost much of its listenership with the advent of television. The art form has since struggled to maintain relevance.
This didn’t deter David Loewen, a writer with a history of crafting stories in unconventional ways.
“It started in elementary school,” said Loewen. “I initially wanted to be, like, an author. I wanted to write novels. And I found that I didn’t quite like that that much, and I started writing scripts. It really sparked my love for scriptwriting and storytelling in this medium.”
Loewen pursued his love for writing as a communications major at GCU. He also took classes such as screenwriting and playwriting to expand his creative writing skills. After working with GCU’s College of Arts and Media to produce streamable play adaptations including “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Little Women”, Loewen was inspired to write an original radio play script himself. After many months of writing, he had his story. Now, he needed to find a team to bring it to life.
“I wanted to write something that was made for radio, that worked the strengths of radio,” he said. “And so, I called back to the classic times where radio was at its peak, where we had those classic film noir shows. And I thought why not make a film noir radio show as a love letter to those times?”
Finding the Cast
Loewen carried out his project through GCU’s Recording Club, a student organization providing opportunities in podcast recording and voiceover work. After auditioning students involved in and interested in the club, Loewen assembled a team of budding voice actors to work on the series.
Junior Kenzie Heuther landed the leading role of Rosie Garland. The audio-only aspect of the project intrigued the actress who had already gained acting experience on GCU’s Ethington Theatre stage.
“I was absolutely stoked. My goal for this year was to try to grow and be cross-disciplinary because a lot of my focus has been on stage acting and a little bit of film acting. With voice acting, I knew that “Crimson Ink”, whether I got into it or not, would be enough to really broaden my horizons and my abilities as an actress,” she said.
With the cast assembled, Loewen sent actors into the booth to record.
Directing the Process
Loewen and his team recorded “Crimson Ink” in GCU’ s recording studio, a space mainly used by the school’s worship arts program. To capture the actors’ performances, a group of student technicians operated the studio’s equipment. Ashley Yablonsky, an actor in the show, also worked as the production’s Foley artist, a crew member who creates sound effects on cue to make scenes more immersive.
“If there’s a bar scene or someone’s opening up a box, I’m physically going out and finding those props outside of the booth, and then I’m coming back and manipulating them to be the sounds that appear in the script,” she said.
Yablonsky enjoyed finding unorthodox ways to create the sounds in Loewen’s script.
“You can get away with so much and use the silliest, most normal everyday objects for complicated sounds,” she said.
While actors recorded their lines, Yablonsky stood at a nearby table and shook plastic clips to make the sounds of clinking ice cubes, hit trays with mallets to produce knocks on doors and slid rulers against sheets of metal to indicate unlocking peepholes.
With the technical aspect of the project in good hands, Loewen turned his focus to his actors. Because of the audio-only nature of the play, he wanted his actors to go over-the-top with their characterization to enhance the listeners’ experience.
“When you lose the visual aspect of a story, you lose a small piece of its grandiose. Getting that back means upping some of the other aspects,” he said.
Getting into character came naturally to Kenzie Heuther, who, as a forensic science major and true-crime superfan, shared the same inquisitiveness and analytical thinking as her character. She also said Loewen helped the cast by discussing details about each scene with the cast before recording began.
“Going through those details and given circumstances before coming in and having those conversations with David about how he wants these scenes to go, what the context and what the delivery looks like. I think that really helped me,” she said.
After the voice recording process concluded, “Crimson Ink”went into a post-production stage, in which club members made final edits and added additional sound effects and music.
Looking Towards the Future
“Crimson Ink”stands as a student-written, student-performed and student-produced project. Loewen views the series as a testament to GCU students’ initiative and passion.
“I want to bring the students of GCU together to prove that if you want to do a project, you can just do it. We have the resources and the talent on this campus, so just do the things you want to do,” he said.
“Crimson Ink” is Loewen’s last storytelling project at GCU. He hopes to leave members of the recording club inspired and excited about the possibilities of producing student work.
Loewen’s project shows that even while using one of broadcast’s oldest forms, members of GCU’s Recording Club have the imagination and drive needed to produce original and exciting work.
“It’s going to be up to the incoming students and the incoming leadership of the recording club to decide if they really want to pursue what they want. And that could lead to a lot of different things,” he said.
Listen to the first episode of Crimson Ink here.