Friday, February 15, 2019

The Origins of the Saving Forest Farm Story

February 15, 2019


I was a few months into my first semester at the Mississippi University for Women (MUW) in the Fall of 2004, and I was assigned a radio project for my Technology in Mass Communication class taught by the great Van Roberts.  We were introduced to the art of a radio serial program and listened to several recordings from the 1940's and 1950's.  These programs reminded me of television shows such as The Young and the Restless and The Twilight Zone.  I would have to say that these programs were well done and really provided enough content to give the listener a vivid picture as if they were actually there witnessing the events.  The unique quality for these programs was that the speaker had to be identified before he/she started talking and when he/she stopped talking to allow the listener to know who was speaking because a lot of the times the same voice actors played several characters.  Well, our first assignment in this class was to complete a radio program of no longer than 10 minutes and use old school sound effects.  This particular class was very liberal when it came to content and really nothing was off limits.  After talking to several of my classmates and hearing what they planned on doing, I focused on a much more cleaner subject matter and taking inspiration from the Jerry Seinfeld philosophy of keeping it clean and simple.

 This was challenging for me at first because I thought about how could I create something that is clean and somewhat entertaining for a class of young college students.  I had to ignore that because I knew that my audience would not be interested in the content, and I just focused on executing the project requirements.  Well, I began to think about what was going on in my life at the time.  This was the first time that I lived three hours away from family and friends.  I was finally on my journey of pursuing one of my big life goals, which was to earn a college degree and work a job that actually had interest to me.  As I focused on this aspect of my life, I began to think about other personal things going on in my life.  Even though I was experiencing some homesickness, I was also experiencing some changes within my family.  My cousin who had been experiencing some serious heart complications passed away, five days later grandmother died from cancer, parents divorced a month later, and my father passed away two months after that.  With all of these things happening, I was in an emotional and mental drought and needed some inspiration for me to keep on pursuing this college opportunity.  This was so much for me to describe and process, and I did not want to put all of that out there.  The best thing for me was to make it simple and use fictional characters to reflect courage, confidence, struggle, and resilience.  Every time I closed my eyes, I keep seeing farm or forest animals like foxes, goats, and pigs mostly.  I begin to write down simple scenes and some dialogue because a radio format works similar to a play or movie script.

As I wrote out the scenes, I had to keep in mind what sound effects to use when describing the scenes.  I pulled back a stapler to make the sound of a swinging gate, crumpled paper for foot steps, a water bottle for swishing sounds, and hummed for the sound of the fighter flies.  Every time a character would begin or stop speaking, they had to make their animal sound, for example, a Pig would say "Oink" three times before and after speaking.  Some of the character names were different in this version than the book version.  For example, Farrell Fox was originally Nigel Fox and Glenda Goose was Mother Theresa Goose. I later changed the names for the book to match the sound and spelling of the actual animal name. Saving Forest Farm was not originally the name of the radio project. I used Let There Be Rain as the title until I changed my mind before publishing the story last year.  The script was written and now I had to recruit classmates to be the voice actors for my characters.  This was not as hard as I had originally thought because they needed voice actors for their projects so we traded recording time and roles.

I can still hear the voices of each character performed by my classmates and friends.  Christopher Tindall was Nigel Fox, Dales Jones Gramatica Goat, Robert Fowler as Roger Rat, and Chris Holley as Marley Mockingbird to name a few.  We recorded in a sound proof studio.  The voice actors were in a conference style room with microphones, and I sat in a recording studio sound booth that had a thick glass window over looking the voice actors.  If I needed to talk to them, I had to use an intercom.  Please keep in mind that this was 2004 and smart phones really were not around until 2006.  Even though CDs and MP3s were common, the project was recorded on cassette tapes, which Wal-Mart still sold at the time.  I had do a lot of rewinding and re-recording over audio which can take a lot longer than today's methods.  We had to record two copies of the cassette and turn in one to the professor and keep one for ourselves.

Cassette Tape used for the Let There Be Rain radio project.

The day came and I sat and listened to several profane projects from my classmates and only a few people responded kindly to my project because we had to listen to every project as a class.  Mostly, the females were the ones that responded positively to my project.  I got an A on the project and loaned an extra copy of the tape to a Kindergarten teacher to play for her class.  She said that her class loved it and wanted me and the voice actors to come to the class and do the story in person.  We were unable to do that.  LOL

When I first started dating my now wife in 2006, she was curious about the stack of cassette tapes in my room with other radio commercials and projects.  She listened to Let There Be Rain and was impressed, and I was so bashful that I just thought that she was saying that because it was early in our relationship.  The years passed and in the Fall of 2017 I was going through some storage containers and found the cassette tape and thought about maybe turning the story into a Children's story that my own children might like.  I could not find a cassette player anywhere other than Amazon and had to listen to the tape to re-write the story because I had lost the actual script.  I ordered a $10 cassette tape player on Amazon and transcribed the entire story and was re-introduced to rewinding and fast forwarding.  It was quite breathtaking.  LOL


Cassette Tape Player used to transcribe the Let There Be Rain project.

After several attempts re-formatting, name changing, and additional characters such as Suri Squirrel and Bastion Bear, I had a great feeling that this could actually happen.  I reached out to some friends to draw the characters and scenes because I am not blessed with drawing.  Unfortunately, I was not able to get them to draw for me.  After some research, I partnered with Archway Publishing, and we hired an illustrator.  I had to write very detailed descriptions of the characters and scenes.  Everything that you see in the illustrations was written out to the letter by me.  The illustrator did an awesome job understanding what I wanted and I only had to have three sketch changes.  I still do not know the name of the illustrator, but I really want that person or team to work on future Forest Farm stories.


The final published story of Saving Forest Farm.

In conclusion, this was simply a fun project with personal meaning.  I might have had a rough start to my journey with some drought, suffering, but I had to be brave, persistent, and look in the right direction to see the rain coming.  This story may have seemed simple at the time but it has helped me develop into the person that I am today.  If I had given up, I would not have made some wonderful friends, meet my beautiful wife, had my wonderful children, earned my college degrees, work in my current profession.  There will always be struggles and times of drought but the work to get to the rain is so worth it.

May you be as blessed as I have and thank you for your support!


Sincerely,


Jack Purser