Curtain Falls!

We are now done with all three episodes and ready to record the pilot show with in-studio guests. The overall idea is to have an in-studio discussion after airing each episode, in which we will have community members as guest’s to discuss the relevance of the radio drama, what it means to them and what lessons can the community take out from it. 

The project has presented great opportunities to Vicky and I to combine journalism with radio drama and I believe we have chosen an unorthodox yet effective manner of communicating with the community.

Firstly we drew from alternative journalism principles  such as civic and development journalism to helped us to generate relevant content through the workshops we designed and the focus groups session we held with general community members, by general I mean community members that are not part of the Ikhaya team.

With the content that we gathered journalistically we decided to report through a reality grounded fictional radio drama.  The dramas are reality grounded, in the sense that the issues that the radio dramas deal with are actual issues that the community we are reporting to are really facing. The fictional aspect of it comes in, when we create the characters that will deliver the story lines and some of the characters are over the top and stereotypical.

The overall end product sounds good and now our last task is to hand over the project to a third party who will run the project with both the Ikhaya team and Radio Grahamstown.

We will have a presentation where we present the unorthodox method of journalism meets drama. We hope the prospective party will be impressed and take this great initiative forward.