When you have to tell a story through what people are saying, it can be difficult to get the characters to do the beats on an outline. You put the characters in the room and they need to move the story forward. What people find challenging when they go to write a movie or play is that they know what they want to happen, but the tricky part is getting the characters to do it and to tell the story without seeming like robots. Eli had some concepts and things he wanted to explore, but his experience was prose and novel writing, which follow different rules to move the story forward. He needed a more specific set of skills to move the story where you could only hear people talking. Giving character through voice and through speech is what I brought to the table. What I discovered is that we were dealing with a different format than film, which should have been apparent to me up front. We had an early pilot that made it clear we needed to think hard about the format and listen to some other podcasts and radio plays. We realized there are fundamental things that need to be addressed. You can’t see faces or props, so who is speaking, where are they, and what are they holding in their hands—all of those need to make a distinct sound. It could be a voice or the way that they
speak; there’s a harmonica, there’s the aquarium in the office—they are selected for story purposes but they also need to make a sound so they can be registered in a scene. When denied the physical storytelling of making a movie, I had to go back to the drawing board and think about how information was being delivered aside from the actual dialogue. Shelf Unbound/Podster: What have you enjoyed about working in this format? Micah: To me the best part is that there is no production limit—it’s basically your imagination. When you are writing for film you need to be conscious of what you are asking them to create when you write it. If you write an airplane, someone is going to need to make that. There are limitations in how many parts you write for a podcast but the rest is just up to you and what you want to have happening. In that way it’s been really liberating and fun. And then the theatrical focus on telling the story through words doesn’t happen as much in movies. It’s been a refreshing focus on what is expressed through what people are saying. Dialogue is the start of the show.