All of the actors' dialog was recorded over a period of about a week, initially intended to be an easy schedule this, like many other aspects of Son of a Wanted Man, quickly turned into a war against technical glitches, rescheduling, lost catering, and trying to organize the many actors into and out of the studio in the right order.

For Techno Geeks: Here's a rundown of the studio, mics, speakers and other recording equipment we used to record Son of a Wanted Man. CLICK HERE

  Unlike some who feel that "radio" acting is the process of creating an entire character (in my opinion caricature) with your voice, I just try to approach it as simple drama but played in a very intimate manner. Voice Over work is like a “big close up” in film; when you can hear a persons tongue move in their mouth or the hiss of breath in their nostrils you find that you are practically inside the performer. Overacting when the microphone is just inches away is very easy.

Getting a good recording relies on proximity to the microphone but often getting a good performance requires using your body in addition to your mouth. I'm always torn about how much to let the actors move when they are on mic. Some movement fits the scene; there were cases when characters were walking where we put the mic on a boom (pole) and followed them around the studio. When Mike is supposed to pull himself out of the pit beneath the steam engine, the mic followed him as he got up off the floor. When he and Drucilla made their way across the wire bridge, I made them stand on the narrow edge of a two-by-four. Anything that involves the body seems to improve the performance; we used many props like saddles and hats, and sometimes George, playing Mike, would just jump up and down between takes.

Although there were no studio executives giving us conflicting goals as is often the case in film, (since we self financed Son of a Wanted Man, Paul and I are essentially "the studio") … I still can't really say that what ended up on tape is "my vision." Every project creates itself. Each has a separate personality and you are never really in control of what it becomes … It's more of a process of shepherding it in the right direction and allowing it to mature in a positive way rather than saying 'I am in control and the result will be like this.' We made the best of many situations and often the adjustments we had to make created something much more interesting than we had originally had in mind. As a writer you realize that once you get some of a scene on paper it will start telling you where it wants to go; as a director you hear the actors rehearse it and you learn what you are going to have to work with, you get them in the studio and try to keep them all headed in the right direction and keep the sudden pressure to perform from getting the better of them.

When you cut it together you can only make the best of what you have but, strangely, much of the time you find something coming together that is distinctly different from what you expected.

In the end, the project is the average of all it’s parts; all of the people, all the decisions, that went into it. You "direct" it by nudging these parts and decisions in the best direction that you can get them to go in and then adjusting to the result later.

It’s not true that trying to force a predetermined result is difficult … it’s impossible.

Once we had the actors down on hard disk, we had to create their world. This meant SOUND EFFECTS and MUSIC.