director's desk

Director's Desk

The Cluttered Creative Process

About a year ago, 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?

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!).

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, 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!