Evan Green Evan Green

Friends of the Wall

January 2024. A reflective piece about producing ‘Friends of the Wall’, my first audio feature.

It’s 11am. I clamber up the stairs out of Westminster Tube Station, mic in-hand. Catch my breath. Big Ben towers above, my neck creaks, and the cold bites on this crisp, blue-skied January morning. As I wander slowly across Westminster Bridge, it gradually comes into focus. It is a wall of red, sitting directly opposite the Houses of Parliament - with nothing but the Thames in-between. Nearly a quarter of a million red hearts, each heart representing a life lost to Covid-19. Many have dedications written on them.

Here, in the heart of Westminster, lives the National Covid Memorial Wall, a grassroots memorial created in 2021 by Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK. And alive it is. A tight-knit group of volunteers known as the Friends of the Wall have assembled here pretty much every Friday for the last few years, to paint and repaint the hearts - fuelled by coffee and cake. One of the Friends of the Wall is from Stoke-on-Trent. It’s a three-hundred-mile roundtrip on the train for her to get here on Fridays, be they bitter cold or sweltering hot.

I’d reached out to the Friends a couple of weeks earlier. I was in awe of the memorial and I was keen to make a short audio feature on it - they were equally up for it, too. I wouldn’t and couldn’t have made it if they hadn’t been. I wanted the people at the centre of the wall to be at the centre of this feature. That was always crystal clear in my mind. That’s why the feature is called, simply, Friends of the Wall. “Come along on a Friday… Just walk along the wall until you find us, we’re pretty hard to miss!”

And so I did. Each with a unique story - bound together by a common loss and driven by a hearty recipe of love and anger in equal parts - the Friends of the Wall are determined to ensure the hearts on this wall don’t fade. A living testament to the galvanising power of grief. Interviewing them was a privilege and an honour. I know it won’t be able to, but I want this short feature to do the wall justice, in some sort of small way. To capture something of the heart of it. Or at the very least, to simply bare witness to it.

This is how the feature shaped up in Audition, post-Descript. Tracks for music, news clips, wild track, interviews, and sound design.

While I’ve produced podcast series and radio shows, this was my first time producing an audio feature. It was a solo project and a self-led process. It inevitably involved a lot of learning through doing and a lot of learning through making mistakes.

Things I feel went well:

  • Having a person-centred, trauma-informed approach to interviewing

  • Reflecting regularly between recording days and adjusting my approach accordingly

  • Plotting key dates and information on a subject matter timeline during research

  • Following a detailed production timetable for different phases of the project

Things to try next time:

  • Using Descript more extensively before transitioning into Audition

  • Creating multiple versions of the same piece, playing around with structure

  • Spending more time experimenting with different ways of recording wild track

  • Finding mics that are especially well-suited to the recording environment

Resources I found helpful:

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