Radio Zed: The Process

So about a year ago I got introduced to Thrilling Adventure Hour and I was hooked. It was funny, it was smart, it was a nostalgic homage to the old radio plays that my father used to play on long road trips. It was a old- way of storytelling on a completely new media, and I started thinking about writing a story-telling podcast because I loved the idea, and, to be brutally honest, it seemed like a less-expensive, less time-consuming (HA!) venture than doing a web-series while still being creative and fun.

By Halloween I knew it was going to be about zombies, which may or may not have had something to do with The Walking Dead‘s newest season premiering.

By December Jonathan London had green lit it to go on Geekscape.net. You know, if I ever wrote it, recorded it, edited it, etc. January was spent ‘researching’ if researching were to read ‘me on the internet doing f*ck-all.’ I’ve borrowed a chart of the creative process to illustrate:

It’s clearly very scientific.

In early February, I got a producer who made things like deadlines and budgets and asked if I had a cast? A website? Artwork? Or a, you know, script?

Being a writer, I immediately started work on the most important part: the website. GoDaddy wanted money for a .com (ha!) so we’re now a proud family of the .net family. (.net is the .best!).

The site went live in 4/18 and is just amazing, thanks entirely to my website designer. All I did was send wildly random ideas at 2 a.m. that she managed to distill into coherent design concepts, and even more amazing, managed to make them look good.

Next, clearly, was the artwork. Four hours in photoshop convinced me that I needed to find someone with actual, you  know, design sense, and that’s where my phenomenal poster and logo designer came in. I mean, have you seen these posters?

So now February is half gone and after some gentle urging from my producer, episode one got written. Bam! Well, more like, bam-stare-at-the-computer-while-half-watching-The-Good-Wife. But characters started to happen, and stories started to come clear and, I realized, each episode would have music (which resulted in another eight hours of not having to write because I was researching music. For the show. Couldn’t write until I knew the song! It would define the whole episode!).

I always knew there’d be a Survivor. Long conversations with the significant other and my producer convinced me that the Survivor was a woman, that is was five years after the Fall, and that while zombie-like things existed, the show wasn’t about the sad, slow, suffering of the people who were still alive (because so many other shows are doing that so well) but rather the frustrating, funny, fatuous (because alliteration) ways people would still be people, even after the end of the world.

A Survivor who finds an abandoned compound with a still-broadcasting radio tower, and the myriad personalities that she ends up interacting with. Overshadowed by the mysterious cult that abandoned the compound–why? Wow. That actually sounds like it was written by someone who knows what they’re doing.

So, episode one got written (I’d like to say that I never, ever procrastinated that much again, but episode two got written a day before we recorded it and I am currently writing this instead of episode four–what? I’m letting my mind rest!) and then we started casting. 162 open-call auditions later, we cast Mouzam Makkar as the Survivor (and, if you haven’t listened to her yet, she has got the most amazing voice) and Craig Anton as Right Reverend Timmons (who’s just amazing all around). Ironically, neither Mouzam nor Craig were part of the 162 auditions–both were friends I had worked with before, who were kind and gracious enough to offer their phenomenal talent.

So, episodes written. Artwork done. Website done. Found a sound designer (who’s also amazing, again, if you haven’t listened to episode one, I’m just going to keep shamelessly plugging it until you do), and had about a dozen people over for a day-long recording session. In my garage.

Which was all very exciting, great-things-start-in-garages except I live under a small plane flight path. Stay tuned for that blooper reel, it’s hi-larious.

So remember, way back in the beginning of this article, where I said podcasts would be easier than a web series? Yeah. To quote a friend “If you don’t show it, you gotta hella tell it.” The whole world is sound. Layered, realistic-sounding world building. Footsteps, door creaks, room tone. I got a whole new vocabulary.

Five days in the editing suite (also my garage), we had a rough cut of episode 1…

Now part of that was my own learning curve (does that sound like a button push? does that? does that? does that, if we drop the pitch and EQ it? What’s reverb? Oh, god, turn off the reverb…) and part of that was the whole recording in a garage thing, and part of that is just the nature of the beast (to be fair, episode two, which is actually slightly longer, only took a day and half, so we’re either getting better or getting too tired to care).

So, episode one and two written, recorded and editing, website up, posters done…now we needed some funding. Not a huge amount, but some. Do you have any idea how much food a group of actors can consume? Craft services is expensive! So, time for Kickstarter. Easy, right? Just copy and paste from my treatment, throw up a picture, do some rewards, and send it out to friends and family for the clearly glowing feedback I was going to get.

The first response, from my graphic designer sister-in-law, boiled down to ‘tl;dr’ and then she gave me advice. Awesome advice. Great advice. Totally took the Kickstarter to a whole new level advice. Took a month to implement whilst considerably adding to my stress level advice. But–I got rid of the paragraphs of world building and had a graphic novelist friend to panels instead.

And I decided to shoot a series of small vignettes, showing the Fall and short little stories about people trying to survive. We just wrapped on those, so stay tuned! We should be releasing them this week.

One of the things you do when in pre-production is storyboard the scripts, so that each shot is clear. Mark la Cour, who did the storyboards for us, did such a fantastic job that I had to share them.

Just as we were getting all the final touches done–episode one final cut finished, a Soundcloud RSS feed, published on Stitcher, all our Social Media ducks in a row, etc., Geekscape told us that we would be sharing their booth at WonderCon (which was AMAZING) and San Diego Comic Con (so make sure to find us there!).

So that’s where we are. Episode one is out, epsiode two comes out on May 9th. We’re recording episode three and four later this month–look for a new episode every three weeks–and if the Kickstarter is successful we’ll have a a whole season of Radio Zed to do over the summer, as well as another short (premiering at Geekscape’s ComiCon booth!).

So, take a listen. Leave a comment. What do you think–is the Zombie thing dead? Or will it never die? Have a burning question about Radio Zed? Ask away!