The beginning, in more ways than one

Marc Sollinger: The first thing I wanted to talk to you about is how you made the decision to create an audio drama. You come to it from a very different place than Dan and me, who are both professional audio people who make radio and sound as our day jobs.

Lauren Shippen: Yes, I definitely do not have a background in sound. When I moved out to LA, I was shooting a short film up in Angeles National Forest. We started filming every day at 6am, so I had to be there by 5am, so that means I had to get up at 3am to go and drive into the mountains. And I found that the one thing I could bear to listen to that early in the morning was Welcome to Night Vale. It’s something that people had recommended to me and I just hadn’t gotten around to it, because I tended to listen to music and non-fiction radio.

Then my college roommate Katie, who’s gotten me into lots of podcasts, sent me Cabin Pressure, the BBC Radio4 comedy. It was recorded in front of a live audience, with a lot of sound effects, 35 plus minute episodes, the whole thing is very involved. So I was listening to these two audio comedies back and forth in the car, thinking… gosh, these are both telling a story in audio format but in completely different ways. It would be cool to find the middle ground of this and see if I could maybe do something with one or two people, something I could produce entirely by myself, and make my own thing without spending exorbitant amounts of money.

On the dreaded and important writing process

MS: I’d love to talk to you a little about your writing process. Our process is: we come up with the idea together, then I’ll write an outline, he’ll edit it, and we’ll really change and revise it. I’m imagining it’s a completely different process for you since you’re the sole creator/head nasty woman in charge?

LS: Yes, that is my official title. Head nasty woman in charge. It is very different. And there are three points of checks and balances that occur. But they all happen after I write the scripts. I’ll write a script, and I wish I was a person that planned things out and outlined —

MS: Wait, you don’t outline your seasons in advance?

LS: I outline the seasons in advance a little. But I don’t outline episodes, and I outline seasons in the most bare-bones way. I have a chalkboard in my apartment and I’ll write out the episode numbers and figure out which characters are in which episodes. Sometimes that’s it, and I’m just working off that. And then it might be “a big thing happens here” or “they need to talk about this specific thing” here. There’s not a lot of detail on those outlines. And sometimes I’ll wake up at midnight to write a line I want to put in, or something I want them to talk about. But there isn’t a lot of structure within the episodes before I sit down and write them. And then I just… sit down and write them.

Image: The Bright Sessions

The many ways to approach your creative work

MS: Another thing I wanted to talk about is the idea of how you approach this as someone who’s an actor first. Dan and I, as I’ve mentioned before, are both audio producers; I work in public radio, Dan’s a sound engineer. So in our original conversations for our production company (Dead Signals), it was very focused on being sound-first. When I’m writing scripts, I always try and think of the interesting sound in this scene: what’s the weird, cool, thing so it can be really sound-design focused and sound-rich. I’m wondering how your background as an actor changes how you approach the writing, how you approach the production, how you approach the direction.

LS: Well, I had never really written anything before and released it out into the wild?

MS: Really? This is your first… anything?

LS: Episode One is the first script that I’ve ever written. I wrote some short stories and started some novels when I was a teenager, but I haven’t written any fiction since I was 18. So, I think one of the reasons I was really drawn to the audio format was that I didn’t have to think about visuals at all. I’m not a visual person, and when you’re writing a film script, you have to keep those things in mind. The great thing about our podcast is that it’s just dialogue, and what does an actor know if not dialogue? So finding each character’s voice was something I think my acting background gave me an advantage towards.

It turns out, some podcast listeners are surprisingly homophobic

MS: I’m really grateful for our fans — to have the amount of fans we have, and to have the amount of downloads that we have. It makes me feel like I’m putting something out there that’s good and liked. It’s a genuine fear of mine to not put good stories out into the world,though that speaks more to my own personal neuroses than anything else. But if you want to talk about how much bad reviews just crushes you —

LS: Destroys you.

MS: I have the thinnest skin when it comes to that.

LS: I am right there with you! We have, I think, five or six one star ratings, and maybe four actual one-star reviews. Some of them, it’s obvious that the person didn’t get the concept of the podcast, or whatever. One of them I got iTunes to remove because it said the podcast was fun until there was a homosexual relationship. And I was like: “I don’t need that hate speech in my iTunes reviews!”

MS: Same thing with The Deep Vault! The reviewer called Carson and Jeremy sissies.

LS: Oh no, seriously?

MS: I was like, “you’re just saying that because you’re homophobic as hell.” Also, for your podcast, why are they listening to this really subtle, empathetic podcast drama if they’re like: “you know what? I really hate gay people. That’s my whole aesthetic.”

LS: And this is all to say that, even if it is hurtful and tough when you see criticism, I don’t want that to prevent people from being critical. I’ve seen a couple things where people have felt that they couldn’t be critical of online creators because the person knows the creator will see it, and the person want to be supportive of the creator.I totally respect that. As long as you’re being respectful about your criticism, I am here for it. I might take it personally and it might hurt my feelings… but ultimately I’m going to be glad that you expressed yourself as long as it was in a productive and constructive way. So please don’t worry about hurting my feelings, Internet. I can take it.

Image: Archive 81

Money makes the podcast world go round

MS: Can you talk about the process behind the financials? Doing ads, how you pay your actors, all that stuff. How do you create something that is enjoyed by over 30,000 people?

LS: My goals with the podcast, in terms of getting any kind of money, were two-fold. It was first to pay myself back for the grand or two that I spent setting the whole thing up. Getting better mics for the second season, all the hosting, there were lots of expenses right at the start. And then making it sustainable. Having a fund that could pay the $50–100 we spend every month on editing software and podcast hosting and website hosting, all these various subscription services. Once we passed that, it was like, OK, let’s figure out if we can pay the actors as well, because they’re all doing incredible work. I thought about Kickstarter and Indiegogo, but I’d heard about Patreon because there was a fan artist I liked who had one. It’s been way more successful than I ever thought it would be. We’re now making enough each episode through Patreon to pay the actors and then some.

Then last spring, towards the end of our second season, we started getting pretty popular. And we started getting a lot more people saying: “I want the episodes to be longer, I want there to be more episodes, how long is the hiatus going to be?” That’s when it sort of occurred to me that I’ve been working about ten hours a day on top of the job that I do to pay rent, on top of having an acting career… and I’ve been doing that for no money.

I think there’s a disconnect between consumers and free internet artist/creators.

The final result that the listener gets is a 20 minute episode of two people talking in a room with very few sound effects. It’s not that complex. Thankfully now I have Mischa Stanton who does all the post-production and all the sound effects. But Mischa also needs to be paid as well, because they have a highly trained skill that needs to be valued. The thing that takes up so much time, and I’m sure you can related to this, is the press releases and the social media, the interacting with fans, the SAG paperwork, and this, that, and the other thing. By the end of the day I may get an hour to write.

So when we were approached by an ad service over the summer, during our hiatus, my initial response was… “I’m going to talk to this person because I’m curious how this would go, but I’m probably going to say no because I don’t want want to do that to our listeners.” Then as we talked about the format would be, the more I thought about it, the more I was like: “OK, this actually would solve our problem that we’ve heard from a couple listeners, where they get frustrated that we drop right into the action, there’s no prelude to the dialogue.” Also I could pay everybody more, which would not be a bad thing. It would enable us to open a merch store, and start thinking about doing a live show. And to do these things I know the fans want, it seemed like a fair trade-off. I’m so glad I decided to sell out and do ads, because it’s been great so far.

MS: Right now, personally, I am cool with any podcast doing ads. And I feel much more sympathetic to people who do ads, since I’ve created my own podcast and done ads myself. I’ve seen the amount of money that doesn’t even go into paying people, that goes into maintaining stuff. Dan and I, for the first season of Archive 81, we paid for it [actors, hosting, etc.] out of pocket. But making a podcast like Archive 81 isn’t something we could do on a continuing basis if we did not have ads. Period. The economics of all of it means that it’s very difficult to make an audio drama without either biting into your own savings, or not paying people what they’re worth.

Two 25-year-olds give advice

MS: I’d love to talk to you about the things you’d wish you’d have known before you started producing your podcast. Because I personally get, and I bet you get too, a bunch of emails from people asking how to produce an audio drama, if I have any tips or tricks or any advice. So Lauren, do you have any advice?

LS: I get those emails a lot, it’s funny, because I never feel qualified in giving an answer.

MS: Neither do I!

LS: Which sounds dumb, because I have a successful audio drama. But the only piece of advice I feel like I’m 100% confident on is: just do it. Do the thing and follow your heart and hope for the best. I knew absolutely nothing about producing a podcast when I started. I just thought it’d be a fun thing to write and a fun thing for me and my friends to act in, that my mom and my sister and dad would listen to it, and that might be it. A lot of this has been trial and error, and I’ve gotten very lucky in that most of the things have worked.

The thing that has kind of come back to kick me in the face is the fact I decided that I would do, as you guys did in Archive 81, a kind of found footage type thing. And I think that serves a lot of podcasts very well, and the reason it served us very well was that it was a nice way to explain why the sound quality wasn’t amazing. Because I didn’t know anything about sound producing, so I thought people would be fine with this if they feel like it’s just a tape recorder in a therapist’s office. They won’t care that it’s not expertly produced. But, man, it’s hard to work around now! And I think we’re at the point where we’ve done enough episodes that if we kind of dropped it for an episode, as we did last season with the telephone episode, the listeners will go along with it. But think very carefully about the constraints of your format. Because they don’t need to be there, people can believe stuff regardless.

MS: Building off of what you said, you’re right, the barriers to entry are so low for this. When I talk to people and offer advice, I also feel unqualified, but that’s just because of my personal neuroses. On another level, I feel bad being like “oh yes, Dan works for a sound effects library and has engineered stuff for Panoply and Time Magazine, and I am a public radio producer with years of experience. But you can start on your own thing! Don’t worry…”

LS: Here, talk to Lauren, she sits in her pajamas most days and records in her bedroom. She might be more on your level.

MS: [laughs] The barriers to entry are so low, at least compared to TV, film, and YouTube for that matter. It’s something that you can learn how to do. That’s not to say it isn’t a valuable skill, because it’s something Dan and I are literally paid money to do for our day jobs.

LS: I think that there definitely are a lot of people like you who are coming to it from a sound perspective and have that highly valuable skill in their arsenal, but you don’t have to be highly skilled in every aspect of making an audio drama.

MS: Dan and I don’t have as much experience working with actors and directing. It’s something that I think we did a good job with, and I’m really proud of the acting that our actors did. They did an amazing job. But you definitely bring a different skillset, a different toolbox, to the project. One that works for you. And I think that people shouldn’t be intimidated. You can learn how to make audio dramas well.

LS: Yes. And I think you can learn enough to get by as you play to your other strengths, and as you wait to bring other people on. Our first 16 episodes are entirely post-produced by myself. And obviously the sound quality greatly improves once Mischa came onboard. But the thing that we had from the very start was that I was in class and friends with all of these incredible actors. So a lot of the comments that we get will specifically call out the acting, because that’s the strength I have in LA. I’m an actor who knows a lot of other actors, and I am so incredibly grateful they agreed to do this, because it would not be the same without them — they’re so talented. So yeah, figure out what aspect you bring to the table, is it writing, is it acting, is it sound producing, is it form and structure, is it music? What’s going to be the skill that you have, that you’re already at a high-level at, that you can put into an audio drama.

The Bello Collective is a publication + newsletter about podcasts and the audio industry. Our goal is to bring together writers, journalists, and other voices who share a passion for the world of audio storytelling.

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