My interview with the creators of The Amelia Project
What are the 3 best things about working on audio dramas?
PHILIP:
1) I love the fact that fiction podcasting is still such fresh territory! There are no rules, everyone is learning on the fly, finding an approach that works best for them!
The Amelia Project was a finalist at the Austin Film Festival Fiction Podcast Script Competition, so we were invited to the festival, which was an amazing experience.
In addition to eating lots of free BBQ and drinking way too much Texan craft beer, we got to meet some leading AD creators, such as Lauren Shippen, Mac Rogers, KC Wayland and the Limetown boys. It was really striking how each of them had a totally different, often diametrically opposed way of doing things!
I love how everyone is still figuring out how to go about it, and that podcast drama hasn’t solidified into an established thing yet. There’s a real sense of adventure and entrepreneurship about it. People are coming at this from all sorts of different backgrounds. From theatre, from comics, from radio, from film. People are taking risks. It’s an exciting time to be podcasting! It’s the wild west!
2) Second thing I love, is that the audio drama community is just the loveliest, most supportive, constructive, and giving bunch of people you’ll ever find.
When we started The Amelia Project, we had no idea how many people were making audio dramas. Then I stumbled across a Facebook group in which people from all over the world were having passionate discussions about microphones and script writing software! It’s very common for creators to plug each other’s shows.
Because fiction podcasting is still so new, there’s a sense that we all have to support each other and promote not just our own shows, but audio drama as a medium.
3) Lastly, I like the geographical flexibility. We get everyone into a studio for recording, but pre and postproduction, which are by far the longest parts of the process, can be done from anywhere. Our team is currently split between Norway, Austria, France, Britain and the US. Being able to work with talented people from so many different places is wonderful!
OYSTEIN: 1) It gives you freedom in casting. You don’t have to worry about looks at all, only vocal quality. You get to rediscover actors that you already love, and find something new about them that’s only in their voice.
2) It’s relatively cheap. You can get more content in front of a potentially much bigger audience than when you’re making theatre.
3) It plays with the imagination of the audience in a wonderful way. Your listeners are co-creators of the work, making all the images, which is completely different to theatre and film, and even a lot of novels, which often describe people and places. The audio drama audience is an active, creative audience.
What is your favorite thing about being a podcaster according to you?
PHILIP:
Making something that can be accessed from anywhere in the world is a pretty amazing feeling.
OYSTEIN:
Philip and I have a background in theatre. Theatre is geographically specific and completely ephemeral.
Only the people who are there on that night get to see it and then it doesn’t exist anymore. It’s nice to make something that isn’t ephemeral for a change.
How did you stumble into the world of podcasting?
PHILIP:
Oystein and I studied theatre directing at Rose Bruford College in London and immediately hit it off. We set up our own company called Imploding Fictions.
Oystein and I now both live in different countries (he lives in Norway, I live in France) but we wanted to find a way we could continue collaborating.
In order to work on theatre projects we both have to be in the same place for long periods of time, but working on a podcast we can be anywhere!
So that’s actually how we got interested in podcasting. After that I started educating myself in audio drama and fell in love with the medium…
OYSTEIN:
I directed some radio plays for a company called Bunbury Banter after college. But I can remember as a kid recording cassette tapes with my friends from primary school, which were a combo of us doing comedy and playing music and stuff. But I kind of forgot about it for many years, and now I’ve sort of circled back.
PHILIP:
Oh yes! I completely forgot, but I did that too! I spent hours making tapes… I did the Famous Five stories and roped my sisters in to play all the female parts…
I’ve actually roped my sister into The Amelia Project too! She plays Alvina. So it’s kind of full circle for me too!
OYSTEIN:
The Amelia Project is a lot darker than the stuff we made as kids though!
PHILIP:
Speak for yourself! My Famous Five adaptations were veeeeeeery dark!
What was the first podcast you listened to?
PHILIP:
The first podcast was Kermode and Mayo’s film review (Hello to Jason Isaacs!)
My gateway drug to fiction podcasts was Welcome to Night Vale.
Right now I’m listening to Wooden Overcoats, Uncanny County and Munchen Minnesota. All great shows!
OYSTEIN:
Yup, Welcome to Night Vale was my first fiction podcast too. That show has inspired so many people…
In Norway, the state channel NRK (the equivalent of the BBC in Britain) has a near complete monopoly on the production of radio theatre, so their style of story and format has become synonymous with audio drama here.
They do very traditional radio plays, alongside modern series that are basically TV crime shows, just without the image.
Hearing Welcome to Night Vale blew the format completely open for me. It made me realise there was a whole new world out there I was keen to explore…
What is your writing process?
PHILIP:
Everything Oystein and I do starts with long chats! We’re just good friends and enjoy hanging out, but somehow every conversation we have eventually turns into spitballing plots for potential plays, films or TV shows.
We met up in December 2016 and spent a day drinking tea and walking around North London.
That’s when we settled on the premise: A top secret agency that makes its clients disappear, by faking their deaths, and lets them reappear with a completely new identity!
We decided each episode would be like a vetting process, in which a potential Amelia client has to make a convincing case for their need to disappear. We also came up with a long list of characters who need The Amelia Project’s help.
So to sum up: the process consists of thinking, plotting, arguing and brainstorming out loud whilst drinking lots of tea.
After that we each go back to our respective countries and write. We keep in touch by sending each other about a hundred WhatsApp messages a day…
OYSTEIN:
My personal writing process zips between ease and pain. I write a draft with ease. I think it’s perfect. I let someone else read it, normally Philip. He tells me it doesn’t work. That’s painful… We discuss, I think, I wrack my brain… Then I have a new idea, I write, that feels easy, I think it’s done, I think I’ve done great, I send it to Philip… and the whole thing starts over again.
What was the inspiration for starting your podcast?
PHILIP:
I’m also a magician, so a podcast about disappearing and reappearing kind of makes sense!
Almost everything Oystein and I have done includes some sense of mystery and magic… Also, no matter how serious our ideas start out as, we seem to always get drawn towards the comic…
We wanted to keep things quite simple, hence the idea of a one on one vetting interview. I think in audio it’s good to have a very clear setup. Too many characters and locations get confusing.
So we settled on the interview format and having one recurring character (the Interviewer) and one new client for each episode.
What do you like about audio drama as a medium?
PHILIP:
For me it’s the most intimate medium. It’s just you and your headphones and a voice talking directly in your ear. I’s so incredibly direct and powerful and immersive.
As Oystein said, I also love audio drama’s capacity for conjuring up images. I mentioned Uncanny County, which is currently one of my favourite shows. There’s an episode called Magic Rainbow Kittens. We hear these weird rainbow kittens sing, but obviously, this being audio, it’s left to the listener to actually visualise them. If they were shown in a film or described in prose, they’d become more concrete and less magical. They’d still be rainbow kittens, but not MAGIC rainbow kittens…
Audio makes your brain and imagination work in a different way…
OYSTEIN:
You can access podcasts at home, at work, in the bus, the gym…
They become an important part of people’s day to day lives, not just as a special event every blue moon, which is what it’s like when you’re making independent theatre.
Q
How does getting the script made into an actual audio drama work?
PHILIP:
Good question! Where to start… Well first you need to build your team.
In our case that’s our wonderful composer and sound designer Fredrik Baden, who we met through this project, our graphic designer Anders Pedersen, who we’ve worked with on every project we’ve ever done, and Open House Theatre, an English language theatre company in Vienna.
Alan Burgon, creative director of Open House plays the Interviewer. We recorded three of our episodes in Vienna with the help of Open House’s wonderful technician Gabriel Geber.
Postproduction was a steep learning curve. Oystein had done some video editing before, but for me it was all new territory.
Oystein and I do the dialogue edits and add in some basic sound effects, then Freddy polishes it all up and designs the sound. He’s awesome!
OYSTEIN:
Financially we’ve been using a surplus from a theatre project we did. That money has now run out, so once the show is out there after December 1st, we hope some people will like it enough to support it!
We’ve set up a Patreon and we’ve made lots of exciting material that only patrons will have access to… extra audio and visual content expanding the world and delving deeper into characters’ lives.
It’s relatively cheap to make an audio drama, compared to theatre or film, but it’s far from free.
How do you go about getting others involved? Particularly if they’re far away?
PHILIP:
It’s a mix of people we know and have worked with before, people we’ve seen or listened to in other shows, and people we met through the audio drama community.
Julia Morizawa from The Bright Sessions is someone we really wanted to work with. We sent her a letter by post, typewritten on vintage paper and with a “top secret” stamp on it, as though it was coming directly from The Amelia agency! We were a bit nervous it would raise suspicion at US customs… But Julia received it and agreed to be in our show!
Could you tell us a bit about the process to turn a script into a finished audio drama. Which part do you enjoy the most?
PHILIP:
Drink tea, have an idea, drink more tea, write a first draft, delete it in disgust, switch to coffee, work through the night on another draft, keep rewriting, polishing, fine-tuning, send out audition scripts, hire a studio, book plane tickets, check bank balance, freak out, get everyone together for pizza and a read through, set levels, say “action”, record the scene three times plus a final “wild take” in which the actors can do whatever they like, listen to the actors go crazy, learn to edit, listen to the same bits of audio over and over and over until your ears bleed, export as wav files and send to sound designer, wake up the next day to find an email from sound designer saying the room track has a digital render problem so you have to start from scratch, more editing, ear bleeding and exporting, wait a week for the sound designer to apply his magic, listen to his first draft, worship the sound designer for making it sound so great, watch Libsyn tutorials, upload to Libsyn, paste the URL to your RSS feed to iTunes, Stitcher, GooglePlay etc, unleash a barrage of texts, emails and tweets to everyone you’ve ever met asking them to listen…
And that’s where we are now! Episode one goes out on Friday 1st December, and we hope you’ll give it a whirl!
In terms of the most enjoyable part… Well getting everyone together in the studio for the first time and hearing it come alive was a blast. And it’s always a real treat to get new artwork from Anders. Having coffee with Lauren Shippen in Austin was cool too!
The thing I’m now most looking forward to, is our launch party next weekend! We’re putting on an evening’s worth of comedy, music and poetry and doing a live reading of episode one!
We’re also going to try and raise a bit of cash to be able to keep doing this. We currently have outlines for more than twenty episodes… It’ll be a fun night!
OYSTEIN:
Yeah, it’s gonna be awesome! I know most people reading this won’t be in or around Oslo, Norway on December 2nd, but if you are… come along!
The Amelia Project Launch Party is part of our ten year anniversary as a company. To celebrate, we’re giving this evening of entertainment to our audience as a gift.
It’s free entry and takes place at Cafeteatret. Doors open at five o’clock and then it’s chockablock with entertainment from there on in.
We’ll do a reading of episode 1, like Philip mentioned, but there’ll also be other unique Amelia Project stuff that you can only see live on that night. I can’t wait!
For more info:
