Category: Podficts (Page 2 of 2)

MADaM if you please!

April 27, 2017 / Jack / 1 Comment

Edge Studios website made a rather curious pronouncement recently.

” The heyday of radio drama gave way to television drama, but the genre never entirely died. It survived here and there — on radio, records, on-stage and the Internet – till now it has been coming back, in a big way.”

It looks like more and more folk are taking notice that the modern audio drama movement (MADaM if you will) has begun to take off. In this blog post from Edge Studios they name off the following popular shows:

“The Truth” is an early anthology series that debuted in 2012. The acting is naturalistic, but recent storyline is rather surreal.
“Welcome to Night Vale” is another early entry. It features a narrator rather than dialog, in what’s been called a “bizarre storytelling form.”
“Limetown” launched in 2015. It’s about a fictional reporter with (equally fictional?) American Public Radio, but it’s a podcast, not a radio program. Reviews have compared it to The Message, and Limetown has been similarly popular at iTunes.
“LifeAfter” the second series produced by Panoply and GE Podcast Theater, which they launched late in 2016.
“The Message” is kin to “General Electric Theater” in the golden days of television. Will this someday be referred to as the “golden days of podcasting”? If so, what will have changed or emerged by then?
“Alice Isn’t Dead” emerged to haunt 2015. Fantastical, but definitely not a comedy.
“The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air)” features a multi-person cast, and well-known guest stars Tim Robbins and Mandy Patinkin.
“A Night Called Tomorrow,” available only through Howl, a collection of content for $4.99 a month.
“Fruit” is also on Howl, but previews and at least some episodes are available elsewhere.
“Homecoming” is a “psychological thriller” cast with A-list actors. Now you know what voice actors like Oscar Isaac, Catherine Keener, David Schwimmer, David Cross, and Amy Sedaris have been doing lately.
“Serendipity” is called “a preview of audio drama’s future” by the New York Times. It presents audio fiction gathered worldwide.

Some of these shows you’re recognize as podficts, and some of these are behind pay walls. Go read the original article and remind them, that we’ve been here watching the slow boom of our beloved medium for a while now.

Welcome to the MADaM!

Episode 499- Continuing to Survive

January 10, 2017 / Jack / 0 Comments

Jack and David complete the special promotional episode of “SURVIVORS!” from Big Finish and finish with episode #2 of Paul Sating and Fatecrafters “Subject: Found!” podfict! It’s Audio Drama Time!

Snobbish Sonic

January 10, 2017 / Jack / 4 Comments

Someone said to me recently that they felt that audio drama folks weren’t as snobby as podnovel folks.

That was a strange comment to make. Looking back, I do notice that Audio Drama has been seen as the ugly step-child of the podcast community somewhat. Through the years there’s even been some suggestions that audio dramatists could “graduate” to audio novelists if they were good writers. It made me wonder if there were similar ideas between stage playwrights and novelists. Or television writers and movie scriptwriter writers.

Is there a kind of hierarchy of writing and production?

When I think of it I have witnessed some strange behavior through the years. Now, I’m the first one to admit I’m a literary snob of some sort. I enjoy story beyond and above everything else. Good story, for me, is key to any writing in any genre.

I have heard some various forms of audio snobbery though from various quarters:

American audio drama is more valued than Canadian
British audio drama is more respected than American
New audio drama is accepted as better than Old Time Radio
Podficts is more edgy than audio drama
Heavy narration is worse than no narration
Lots of special effects (the “Every Blade of Grass” folks) is seen as modern compared to a limited soundscape
Horror and Comedy is more popular than drama
Podcast is better than radio, and streaming is better than podcasts
Social awareness trumps social commentary

These are the forms that come to mind for me. What snobbery do you see in the art form? Is it justified?

Someone Sonic

January 9, 2017 / Jack / 0 Comments

I’ve been a listener of CBC Radio all my life. I miss the heady days of Peter Gzowski, Vicki Gabereau, Michael Enright and Alan Maitland duo and Lister Sinclair‘s dulcet voice and gentle hand on the wheel.

CBC has gone through a lot of changes, some of them great, some not so. The not so great has been the loss of radio drama which has been stellar through out the years. But maybe some forms of podficts are coming back. Thanks to NPR’s famous Serial, CBC has started a couple more innovative story telling shows. The latest is Someone Knows Something. This documentary first person style series- like Serial- follows a tale all season about a missing person- unsolved cases. The first season it was Adrien McNaughton. Season two it’s the story of the disappearance Sheryl Sheppard.

The episodes are compelling like only crime mysteries can be. That they are true, brings out the very iciness in the veins. Let’s hope that someone does know something and these mysteries can be solved.

New Podfict Starring Oscar Isaac Coming

November 1, 2016 / Jack / 0 Comments

oscar-isaac-a-most-violent-year Oscar Isaac is starring in Homecoming, a new six-episode series that is described as a “psychological thriller that takes place at an experimental facility.” according to this Nerdist article. Isaac’s character is a soldier struggles with finding his place off the battlefield. Podficts are becoming common fair in the podcasting world, and while not technically radio dramas, they take on the trappings through fictional tales in a straight forward documentary or “reality TV” style.

Podficts are the Bee’s Knees

August 30, 2016 / Jack / 0 Comments

Monsters in dark forest. Illustration contains transparency and blending effects, eps 10

Wired Magazine made a point that horror and sci-fi has given a new rise to Podficts– fictional podcasts. The idea that people are doing effectively narrative audio stories (even going as far as audio drama) to tell stories to their listeners. We’ve listed many in the past two years, but the number seems to be growing!

From the article:

DAN POWELL VANISHED in January 2016. Before he did, though, the audio archivist sent his friend Mark a set of tapes, chronicling his attempts to organize a series of audio interviews that had been recorded at a creepy apartment building 20 years earlier. The podcast chronicles each approaching footstep, each rat scurrying by—and each realization that dawns as Dan learns more about the sinister song that affected the lives of the building’s eccentric residents back in the 1990s. If you want to see what he saw, though, you’ll have to imagine it yourself: Dan is the fictional protagonist of Archive 81, a found-footage horror podcast.

The real Dan Powell is also an audio archivist, although he denies any haunted recordings or horror experiences. Instead, he spends his days reviewing different sound effects for Soundsnap, an online commercial sound library. “I listen to thousands of different door slams,” Powell says. “I thought, is there a way to take a work environment of listening to weird sounds, and put a horrific twist on that?”

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