Outro
Hello my survivor friends.
Here we are at the end of Season 2 Episode 16. Glad you could join us. For you time travelers it’s the end of March 2022.
We are running at about 10,000 downloads a month. It leveled off a bit in February. So that means it’s time for you to earn your keep again and go rate and review an episode for us.
Tell your friends!
Help us help you!
Lots to talk about this week. We’re up over 130 folks in our Facebook group. So at least I have some people to talk to! We’ve created a couple fun events for the team.
First one is the “read some audio contest” – Where I gave a short two-sentence story and had people submit their audio renderings.
Our crack editorial team, not me because I hate making decisions, will choose a winner and that winner will get to (or maybe have to) read a story I’ve written into audio to be posted as extra credit on the podcast feed between seasons.
If any of you talented writers or readers want to send something in to fill the vast, yawning, dark, cavernous, empty void that is the between season time, as the Romans would say the interregnum – give me a shout at cyktrussell AT Gmail Dot Com
Also in the Facebook group I was showing off the stickers that I bought from the TeePublic store - links in the show notes.
If that wasn’t enough, we’re kicking off another feature called Fan Art Friday where I’m going to drop some fan art every Friday. I would love any of you to contribute some fan art too. I mean, you folks know the characters and would create art with love.
It is super-interesting, for example, to see how everyone has a different idea of what Bill the dog looks like. Do I have any illustrator creatives out there? Have some fun with it and we’ll post it up to our ~20K social followers and I’ll give you a shout out on the show.
We did it! Or almost did it. 4 more episodes to survive and we’re there! Because we’re only 2 months away from the end of season 2!
Let that be a lesson to you kids – consistency is the secret weapon. We started 16 months ago and we’re 120 thousand words in! This is the Why do you care? Part of the show… with consistently pushing out 2,000 – 3,000 word episode every month it piles up. Just a little at a time consistently will get you there.
I won’t kid you; it does take some work. And some money. Each episode probably takes 5-6 hours or so of my creative time, and that’s just my time. I steal a couple hours from my friendly editorial board Duane, Tim and Dave as well. Then Robert has to do his magic.
Which leads us to another discussion, because as much work this show requires and as much of a labor of love it is, producing a full-on audio drama with actors and sound effects is a next level work.
For this topic I’m going to steal from a post from Gayle on the Facebook group reminding us of a podcast I had forgotten. The podcast in question is called “We’re Alive!” It’s a zombie apocalypse podcast that is a nice piece of audio theatre.
We’re Alive! was started in 2009 by KC Wayland and ran until 2014. In podcasting years that makes it one of the originals, before podcasting was a real thing.
This show is a full-on audio play with character voices and sound effects.
KC Wayland was shopping a script for a Zombie Apocalypse T.V. show. He didn’t get any takers, so he turned it into a serial podcast. They produced 4 seasons of 30-40 episodes at a production rate of 3 episodes a month.
Creating a quality audio theater series is really hard.
You start with the script. Each one of the We’re Alive scripts an episode would be 60 pages long. (By comparison my episodes run about 8 pages long).
Then you bring in the voice actors to a sound stage for 6-8 hours of raw audio. That gets cut up by a first pass editor into usable chunks. Then another editor strings the episodes together. Then another editor puts in the music and the Foley (sound) effects.
I mean, even if you’re doing it in LA where you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a starving actor, it’s a big lift.
I listened through the first four seasons a couple years ago. I found it interesting to see how they adapted the TV scripts to an audio audience. If you pay attention, you’ll hear them doing a lot of exposition. “Look, he’s running towards us!” because they have to paint the visuals without relying too much on 3rd person voice over.
I liked it. I had forgotten about it until Gayle posted. There are two sequel series now. Lockdown and Goldrush. I’m listening to Lockdown now and it’s very similar to the original.
So kudos to KC Wayland for chasing his dream and making We’re Alive! a reality. That’s the beauty of independent publishing. You don’t need permission to create. The internet has cut out the middlemen for those of us who just want to create.
Freedom!
You can join the facebook group by searching for After the Apocalypse or “Old Man Apocalypse”.
You can email me at cyktrussell at Gmail dot com. You can follow me on twitter or Instagram at cyktrussell – but I usually just post pictures of my dog Ollie and any interesting dinners I’ve cooked!
You can find our TeePublic store to buy some of those cool stickers at teepublic all one word forward slash aftertheapocalypse.
We’ve got a Patreon page as well if you’d like to support independent podcasting with a monetary donation.
The most helpful thing is rating us and posting a positive review, or sharing the show with your networks.
All the links to these things are here in the show notes.
Have a great weekend and whatever you do – Keep Surviving!
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