Patreon Drop!... Audio Drama School 1: What is This Thing?

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1:50Hello, everyone. It is Joe. How's everyone doing? I wanted to do one more preview of some of our Patreon content before we get started here with the season, but also just wanted to make a general announcement, let everyone know how the season's going to go. What we're going to be doing is we will be posting our first episode of season five on October 14th. Generally speaking, we'll be publishing episodes twice a month on Tuesdays. So every other week. Sometimes it gets a little messy. Some months have more weeks than other months. So it's not going to be exactly every other weekend, but it'll basically be twice a month on Tuesdays.

2:34And that will be Midnight Burger, then followed by the second season of Welcome to the Horizon. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to have a dab of due time. And thank you so much for joining us on this journey. It's been about five years, going on five years working on Midnight Burger. and it has been a wild experience. And if you've been with us this whole time, thank you very much. And if you're just arriving, welcome. This is Midnight Burger. I'm gonna give you one more preview of some of the things that we're doing on our Patreon. We do a lot of things on our Patreon. And one of the things that we did this past hiatus was there was a lot of requests for people to know about how I make the show and about the process of making audio drama in general.

3:18And so I put together something kind of informally called Audio Drama School, which is just a series of like five lectures of me talking about not just audio drama, but also creativity and writing and how to, you know, think about your life in a more creative way. And this is going to be the first episode of that. It was a little uncomfortable making this because I talk a lot about myself and my own personal process. And I'm not really someone who does things autobiographically. but it was actually kind of therapeutic to do and it was nice to look back and actually pay attention to how I did do things because so much of what I do is kind of instinctual and I don't really write down what my process is.

4:02So this is gonna be the first episode of that. I hope you like it. If you'd like to hear more, of course you can head over to our Patreon, patreon.com slash midnightburger, listen to all five episodes as well as the myriad other things that are on our Patreon. So once again, premiere of season five will be on October 14th. We hope you enjoy the season. All right, here is the first episode of Audio Drama School, What Is This Thing?

4:43On the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, If you trudge through some rice paddies, you can see in the distance some limestone caves. Millions of years ago, these caves were underwater. They were part of a coral reef. But time did its thing, and now they are a row of hills on a strangely shaped island in the South Pacific. Caves are full of holes due to eons of rainfall Tunnels have been carved into the stone And if you're of the adventurous, non-claustrophobic type You can climb into one of these caves And see one of the most amazing things on the planet A Painting of a Pig Paintings of pigs are not typically important, but this one is.

5:50It's important because it may be the oldest known piece of art. Over 45 ,000 years old. For whatever reason, all those thousands of years ago, someone covered their hands in red ochre and started making a picture on the wall of a cave. It was a picture of a warty pig.

6:20We'll never be able to know when the very first painting on a cave wall happened. Whatever this first painting was may have been lost to time. But whatever it was, and whoever it was, I have to say that I think about that person all the time. The first artist. The first human, really.

6:54What were they thinking in that moment? What inspired them to start? And after the hours it must have taken to make this image on the wall of the dark cave where they made their home What was that moment like after its completion? That moment where they stepped back and emerged from whatever haze of creation they were in And looked up at the cave wall flickering in the firelight What have I done? They must have thought What is this thing? Did they have any idea they had just discovered one of the most definitive things about our species? Of all of humankind's discoveries, surely the discovery of our own symbolic mind is the most important one more important than the wheel, more important than fire.

8:00All of a sudden, they could see their own mind looking back at them in this ghostly depiction of an Indonesian warty pig.

8:14Of course, they couldn't have known what they'd done at the time. Can any of us truly know how important our creations are at the moment they're created? I bring this up because I do the same thing. I'm often there, sitting at my desk. It's four in the morning. Stepping back from the cave wall. Wondering what I'm doing. What is this thing I'm doing?

8:53Maybe that's the only way to start You start off doing a thing Not knowing what it is And you keep doing it In the hopes that One day Someday Hopefully You'll know what it is

9:17So for those of you who don't know uh i'm joe hi i created midnight burger i've talked a little bit in the past about who i am and how i got here and all that stuff but just to uh sum up a little bit i guess uh i i started writing when i was eight years old and I did it because my life was a little weird and it helped me to be completely in control of a world that I create. That helped me to make things more normal. There was always something that was completely in my control and that's the role that it played in my life. And I never really had any aspirations of doing this for a living. doing this when I grew up or anything.

10:16It was just something that I did. Something that I did to make things more normal. But one has to do something with one's life. And as I was going through high school, I realized that I had to go to college for something. And I had always been doing plays at school because those were fun. So I said, okay, I'll go to school for acting. So I went to drama school. And as soon as I went off to drama school and I started studying acting, I suddenly realized that I didn't really find studying acting all that interesting. Studying acting is interesting for a lot of people. I was just not one of those people.

11:02And it wasn't resonating with me. And I wanted something else. But there I was. I was already enrolled in school. And so what was I going to do about it? And I had always written. And at my school in particular, I could, if I wanted to, switch my focus over to playwriting. So I thought, OK, I'll do that. You know, I know theater. I'm in the theater world. I'll start writing for theater. And I found myself really enjoying it. I enjoyed writing dialogue. I enjoyed the performance. I enjoyed the collaborative aspect of it. It was a lot of fun. And so I did that for the remainder of my college life.

11:42And then there I was graduating with a bachelor's degree in playwriting. So I thought, wow, okay. I'm probably going to be ignored for the rest of my life. So why don't I go be ignored somewhere where there's trees? Because I was in Texas at the time. So I moved up to Portland, Oregon. Without really even knowing anything about it, I'd been there once before for a week, and I decided, sure, I'll move here. Now, at the time, Portland didn't really have much of a theater scene. It was one of those towns that, like, should have a good theater scene, but it just didn't, and I don't know why. But there were a few theaters there, and I started to actually do okay as a playwright in Portland.

12:31This is where I met most of the cast of Midnight Burger. I would write plays. They would be in them. And it was one of those times when you feel really creatively free. And you can write something, and then people can do it. And it's a great feeling. And then I started to get more attention for what I was writing. And I got a residency at a place called New Dramatists in New York. And I started getting bigger commissions from bigger theaters. and I started, you know, doing readings at nice theaters around the country. I was like starting to make a living a little bit as a writer, as a playwright, an impoverished living.

13:13But that's okay to do when you were as young as I was. And then somehow that led me into getting a screenwriting fellowship at Walt Disney Studios, which was strange because I had never written a screenplay before, but they had read a play of mine that I had applied. because you apply blindly for things every day when you're a playwright. And I had actually gotten this year-long fellowship. So I went down to LA and I started learning how to be a screenwriter. And I basically had a year to learn how to write screenplay and then launch my screenwriting career because there I was in Los Angeles now.

13:50So I had to do something about it. That led to Disney hiring me as a screenwriter on staff. And I did that for a few years. And, you know, working at Disney was an interesting experience. Writing sort of screenplays in a sort of corporate environment is always going to be weird. And anyway, I did that for a while. And then after that, I went out on my own as a screenwriter and did okay. Nothing I wrote ever got done. But I think you'll find that's the case with 95, 99 % of screenwriters out there. The vast majority of people who make their living as a screenwriter never get anything done. They get paid for it.

14:36And they make a lot of money doing it. But back then, every major studio had at least 300 projects in development. And so you just tried to be one of those projects in development and get paid for writing and rewriting. And it's a living. And people do it all the time. That kind of drove me crazy. because I didn't understand why. Because, you know, in my naivete, I was just like, what? I can't, what? I wrote this whole thing and it's just going to sit there now? And, you know, more often than not, yeah, that is what's going to happen. So I started to get more and more frustrated as a screenwriter.

15:19And I would just, I started complaining about it a lot. And I started just like being really bitter about it. and then at one point I was talking to Finley about it and I was just venting and venting and venting about screenwriting and how I think it sucks and all that stuff and at one point she just said do you like it? and without even hesitating I just said no

15:46and all of a sudden there I was with a big problem on my hands because that's what I did and I didn't know how to do something else

15:57so at a certain point i decided well uh why doesn't that why don't i try some other things whatever those things are why don't i why don't i try some new things and um a friend of mine had an anthology podcast where it was an anthology fiction podcast and uh i said hey can i write something for your show and he said yes and so i wrote like a one-shot, one-person, half-hour-long thing. It was called Live from the Zombie Apocalypse. And it was fun. I had a good time, but then, you know, life moved on.

16:36So when the pandemic hit, I needed to do something. I needed to find a way to activate on all of the solitude and free time that the pandemic was going to bring, right? I wanted to get back to the sort of the beginning of my sort of creative life. And I wanted to get back to that time in my life when I was just writing something and we would do it. I wanted to get back to that feeling that I had. And I thought to myself, well, all those people that I used to make things with, they're all just sitting at home right now. So we all got together and I said, hey, let's do this. And it was called Omega Station.

17:12And it was three episodes, about a half hour long. And And it was my first time really investigating the form of audio drama just to see what happens. And I had a wonderful time. Now, my thinking was when we were done with that, the pandemic would be over. But we remember how that went. So there I was. I had just done something that felt different than anything I'd ever done. And I didn't really know what to do with all that energy. And so I just, I called everybody again and I said, let's just keep going. We'll start with an idea that I can just keep working on and I can keep expanding and we'll just do it until we're sick of it.

18:02Great. And so that was Ben Nightburger. We all started working on it. I was really having a great time. It was really like rediscovering what I loved about writing. I would write something. Finley would have a look at it. We'd send it to the cast. We'd record it. We'd send it out. It was beautiful. And it was so great to just like rediscover that part of myself. And then this thing happened where people started listening to it. And people started talking to each other about it. and people started talking about it online. And it became a thing that was talked about often among, I don't know, the audio drama subreddit or wherever.

18:57And that was nice too. People are enjoying it. That's always a great feeling. And then we were reaching the end of the first season and an article came out in The Guardian. that said, these are the 20 essential, independently produced podcasts. And we were one of them. Only one of two fiction shows. It was us and the Silk Verses. And that was really surprising. And that's when I said to myself, okay, I'm really enjoying this. I feel very creative again. I feel really free. what if I let it completely ruin my life? What if I, not ruin my life, but what if I let it just take over? Like what if I leaned into it as hard as you can possibly lean into anything?

19:55What would happen? It'd be a shame to not know. And what happened was all of this. Here I am now. and I'm now at this point where I can at least attempt to turn around and tell people what I've learned or at least what I've learned for me because the things that I've learned might not be true for someone else but I can tell you that they're true for me and I can tell you how I go about things and I can tell you what I'm thinking about things take that for what you will Every creative person in the end makes their own rules and has their own metabolism and has their own process. Some people really get a lot out of hearing about other people's processes and hearing other people's thoughts about things.

20:46And so I'm going to attempt to do that with this series of little lectures that I'm going to be sending out to all of you. If you're not a creative person, I hope this is helpful anyway, because it will be about how I do this, if you're curious about how I do this. Even if you're not writing audio drama, hopefully this will be something that will help you think about things creatively.

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22:14Your family will find the perfect vacation in Missouri. Missouri, it's the getaway that gets... All of you. Plan your family fun at visitmo.com. But since this is Midnight Burger, it is an audio drama, we are going to talk about audio drama. and you know i checked out a few of these other things that people have made like you know a one hour seminar on how to make audio drama and all that stuff and i checked all that out they do seem to start with what is audio drama and the thing is you guys know what that is especially this this group in particular i think pretty much knows what an audio drama is i guess the one thing that i'll say differently than other people who talk about these things is that I actually make a separation in my mind between audio drama and audio fiction.

23:09Maybe other people do that. It feels like it's a little bit different. Audio drama, specifically, is about dramatization. It's about the story progressing through character interaction. There is very rarely an omnipotent narrator. There is just people interacting and the sound that surrounds them. That's what I consider audio drama. If you're just narrating a story and you've got some sound in the background, I would call that audio fiction. It's not a dramatization really, if anything. You're not assuming a role. You're just telling a story, which is great. Fenley does that all the time. She's next door in the other studio doing that right now.

23:53something that you'll hear people say is that when you're when you're creating an audio drama you have only four tools you have sound you have dialogue you have silence and you have music

24:11i actually think that you don't have any of those things i think that when you're making audio drama There's only one tool, and that tool is the mind of the audience. The mind of the audience isn't willing. There isn't a story. Everything you do in audio drama, every word you write, every sound you make, all of that is just you trying to encourage the audience to imagine the story for themselves. Some people really hate that. some people some people just despise audio drama as a form right? because audio drama operates differently than other dramatized forms I've never encountered anyone who says yeah you know what I just don't like movies or I just don't like television right?

25:12they will say though I just don't like audio drama which is understandable because audio drama takes work on the audience's part in the end audio drama, all it ever is is an invitation for the audience to imagine something and honestly a lot of audience members just kind of say, what, you mean I have to do it? and truth be told, yes the story takes place in your head. A lot of people don't like that. It's understandable why they don't like that. That's the form. You can only give them so much. It's really about them giving themselves something. About giving them the opportunity to tell the story to themselves.

26:08One of the challenges of talking about audio drama is that there's nothing to talk about. And what I mean by that is there's no standardization. There's no long history of the way things are done and how things are supposed to go. There's no standardized script format. There's no standardized way that you're supposed to talk to people or creatively supposed to communicate with your collaborators. Nothing is set in stone. No one has a doctorate in audio drama. I mean, maybe somebody does. I'd love to talk to them. What's their deal? And so when you're talking about audio drama, there's not a bunch of tried and true techniques.

26:52There's not a lot of precursors, which is weird because it predates television. And yet somehow for me and for other people making it, it feels new. It feels different. It feels like a new thing in the world. And maybe that's because we've taken audio drama the way that it used to be, and we've put it into the realm of podcasting. So it's separated now from the standardization of broadcasting it on the radio. It's now in this very unrefined, unregulated space of podcasting. and because of that you can move in a lot of different directions with it and when you can move in a lot of different directions with it there's no rule book to go by and that's kind of a good thing you know and when Philip Glass, famous composer he'll tell the story of when he was first learning the piano and he was a young man and he had this incredibly strict French piano teacher.

28:09And she would sometimes have him and the other students spend hours and hours getting one tiny fragment of music exactly right, exactly the way that she wants them to play it. They would play it over and over until she was satisfied. And it was maddening for Philip Glass, and it was very difficult for him. and he didn't really realize until much later in life what the point of all that was. The point of all that was to make this dividing line between technique and style. There is technique, the way it's done, and there's style, how you deviate from it. For her, his teacher, you can't have style until you first have the technique.