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On Sci-Fi Talk, I'm spotlighting a groundbreaking audio drama, "Generation Crossing." This piece, inspired by Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Elder Race" and Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds," takes you on an 800-year space journey through a series of evocative monologues, with the ship's AI as the only constant character. Our guests today are the creative minds behind "Generation Crossing"—writer Mark Salinger and composer Dan Powell. We'll discuss their journey from their college days at Syracuse University to forming Dead Signals, a creative partnership that has yielded unique audio experiences like "Archive 81." Mark and Dan will share insights into their creative process, balancing narrative and music, and the thematic exploration of human society on a multigenerational spaceship. Tune in as we delve into how "Generation Crossing" invites listeners to think about culture, mythology, and the constraints of our environments, all while enjoying Dan's rich, original electronic music. Whether you're a dedicated sci-fi fan or new to the genre, this is an episode you won't want to miss. So, grab your headphones and prepare to be transported. Let's get started! Subscribe To Sci-Fi Talk Plus with a one year free trial
Series Description: This journey through the book of Romans focuses on the central role of Jesus Christ in our lives. Romans emphasizes that our justification, sanctification, and glorification are found in Him alone. Despite the differences and disagreements, Romans calls us to anchor ourselves in the person and work of Christ, who is our salvation and redemption. As we study Romans together, we'll be drawn closer to Jesus, understanding more deeply how He unifies us through His love and grace.
Series Description: This journey through the book of Romans focuses on the central role of Jesus Christ in our lives. Romans emphasizes that our justification, sanctification, and glorification are found in Him alone. Despite the differences and disagreements, Romans calls us to anchor ourselves in the person and work of Christ, who is our salvation and redemption. As we study Romans together, we'll be drawn closer to Jesus, understanding more deeply how He unifies us through His love and grace.
Series Description: This journey through the book of Romans focuses on the central role of Jesus Christ in our lives. Romans emphasizes that our justification, sanctification, and glorification are found in Him alone. Despite the differences and disagreements, Romans calls us to anchor ourselves in the person and work of Christ, who is our salvation and redemption. As we study Romans together, we'll be drawn closer to Jesus, understanding more deeply how He unifies us through His love and grace.
In this message we learn 4 biblical principles to build up and release all the potential that God has for the bright future of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Series description: In this message series we're looking ahead to the next generation of church leaders. Their future is bright with unique gifts and perspectives from God, ready to be used in the Kingdom of God.We'll learn how we are called to understand, care for, love, and encourage them on their spiritual and life journeys. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Glorifying God with our whole life begins with worship. It's from this foundation that flows a life which glorifies God. Series Description: Just like we get to know new friends by sharing about ourselves, God reveals Himself to us through Scripture and the Holy Spirit. In this series, we're diving into the question, "Who are you, God?" and similarly important, "Who are we in light of who You are?" Understanding God deeply allows us to understand ourselves fully. Join us as learn more about the fullness of God and in turn, more of who we are created to be.
In this message we learn some life changing truths about God's infinite wisdom and what it means for our lives. We all have decisions, trials, and goals in life and it's God's wisdom that leads us through towards His perfect purposes. Series Description: Just like we get to know new friends by sharing about ourselves, God reveals Himself to us through Scripture and the Holy Spirit. In this series, we're diving into the question, "Who are you, God?" and similarly important, "Who are we in light of who You are?" Understanding God deeply allows us to understand ourselves fully. Join us as learn more about the fullness of God and in turn, more of who we are created to be.
In this message we learn life changing truths about two of God's attributes, His omniscience and omnipresence. Through the lens of Psalm 139, well learn who God is and who we are in light of Him. Series Description: Just like we get to know new friends by sharing about ourselves, God reveals Himself to us through Scripture and the Holy Spirit. In this series, we're diving into the question, "Who are you, God?" and similarly important, "Who are we in light of who You are?" Understanding God deeply allows us to understand ourselves fully. Join us as learn more about the fullness of God and in turn, more of who we are created to be.
In this message series we'll discover the power of God in us as we study the book of Acts. Acts is the continuation of the story of Jesus after the resurrection. But there's a twist: this time, Jesus gives his followers his resurrection power to bring his unstoppable kingdom to earth. Join us on the journey of discovering God's unstoppable kingdom in our lives. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Jerah Milligan is a Washington D.C.-born actor, comedian, director and writer. His short film MAHOGANY DRIVE recently screened at the Slamdance Film Festival. Previously, Jerah co-created and starred in Netflix's ASTRONOMY CLUB, produced by Kenya Baris and Dan Powell. Recently, Jerah directed the sketch segments of Yvonne Orji's latest HBO Special: A WHOLE ME. Other directing credits include Showtime's DESUS & MERO. In front of the camera, Jerah can next be seen in the short JAMAAL, directed by Yvonne Orji for Powderkeg. His acting credits also include Netflix's “Black Mirror,” “Broad City,” “Blue Bloods,” “Chicago P.D.,” “The Detour,” and Apple TV+'s “Helpsters”. He's also been featured in sketches for Above Average, Funny or Die, College Humor and Girl Code. Jerah is a co-host of the podcast, Black Men Can't Jump, in Hollywood.Mentioned in the episode:The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big TechTakeawaysNavigating predominantly white comedy spaces can be challenging for black comedians.The entertainment industry is filled with struggles and personal failures, but it's important to keep pushing forward.Supporting and celebrating others' success is crucial, even when facing personal challenges.Nepotism is a prevalent issue in Hollywood that can hinder opportunities for aspiring artists. The entertainment industry can be challenging, and success often requires perseverance and resilience.Backdoor maneuvering and taking unconventional paths can sometimes be necessary to achieve success.Diversity and representation in the industry are important, and there is a need for more opportunities for underrepresented voices.The relationship between artists and their representatives can be complex, and it is important to find a balance between advocating for oneself and trusting the expertise of the rep.Celebrating wins, no matter how small, is important for maintaining motivation and perspective in a competitive industry. Code-switching is a necessary skill in the entertainment industry, especially when pitching to predominantly white audiences.Speaking up about mistreatment and holding people accountable is essential for creating positive change in the industry.Career challenges and setbacks are common, but they can provide valuable learning experiences.Perfecting the pitch and being thoroughly prepared can greatly increase the chances of success.Trusting in your own voice and embracing your unique quirks can set you apart and lead to success. Episode Credits:Produced and hosted by Charla LauristonTheme song and Segment Jingles composed and produced by Brendan ByrnesCanva Artwork by Daiana Cordo Join hundreds of ambitious writers and creatives learning how to take their career to the next level with The Werking Writer newsletter. WHERE TO FIND THE WERKING WRITER thewerkingwriter.comInstagramLinkedInYoutube
In this Easter message Pastor Dan gives us 3 open invitations that will change our lives because of the power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ! Series Description: The time leading up to Easter is an especially important time for us to pause and consider what the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus mean for our lives today. In this series we're exploring the continuous invitation we have to deeper friendship with our Creator. Our journey culminates on Easter as we celebrate the new life we have with God! We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
There is JOY in confession because it bring us into right relationship with God! 1 John 1:4-10, Genesis 3:8-9, Psalm 51, Luke 7:47-50 Series Description: The time leading up to Easter is an especially important time for us to pause and consider what the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus mean for our lives today. In this series we're exploring the continuous invitation we have to deeper friendship with our Creator. Our journey culminates on Easter as we celebrate the new life we have with God! We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Jesus doesn't always to the "right" thing. At least it's not the right thing according to his peers. Instead, he does the best, most loving thing when he offers his life renewing presence to those he interacts with. In this message we learn the way of love by following the example of Jesus. Series Description: It's not uncommon to let the values of our culture define what it means to be a successful follower of Jesus. But busying ourselves with the work of God and endless striving for goodness doesn't mean fulfillment. So how does Jesus define success? What if we shifted our mindset from following the world's idea of success to Jesus' teachings of how we are meant to come alive with him? Jesus invites us to thrive by abiding with him and simply enjoying the presence of God throughout our lives. It's from his presence that all good things flow. This series is based on the book Emotionally Healthy Discipleship by Peter Scazzaro. --- We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
A person who practices being before doing operates from a place of emotional and spiritual fullness, deeply aware of themselves, others, and God. As a result, their being with God is sufficient to sustain their doing for God. Ephesians 3:17-19, Luke 5:15-16, Matthew 14:13, Luke 10:38-42 Series Description: It's not uncommon to let the values of our culture define what it means to be a successful follower of Jesus. But busying ourselves with the work of God and endless striving for goodness doesn't mean fulfillment. So how does Jesus define success? What if we shifted our mindset from following the world's idea of success to Jesus' teachings of how we are meant to come alive with him. Jesus invites us to thrive by abiding with him and simply enjoying the presence of God throughout our lives. It's from his presence that all good things flow. This series is based on the book Emotionally Healthy Discipleship by Peter Scazzaro. --- We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Jesus prays that we as a Church would have unity with Him and each other. But how can we do that in such a divisive culture? Listen in as we discover what the Bible has to say about unity. John 17:20-23 Philippians 1:27-2:11
God has made his joy available to us! He experiences joy over us and even gifts his joy to us because he is the God who is with us. About this series: Christmas Light is a message series celebrating Jesus' perfect light come to be with us. It's a celebration of the hope, peace, joy, and love we're experiencing today and the anticipation for what we've yet to experience. Come along on the journey and discover how Jesus' arrival changes everything. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
In this message we discover God's hope for the world through Isaiah 2 and discover the role we have in bringing his goodness to earth. About this series: Christmas Light is a message series celebrating Jesus' perfect light come to be with us. It's a celebration of the hope, peace, joy, and love we're experiencing today and the anticipation for what we've yet to experience. Come along on the journey and discover how Jesus' arrival changes everything. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Isaiah 2:1-5 Luke 1:76-79 Revelation 22 John 1:4-5
How much you grow and where you go in life will be determined by who you choose to know. In this message we learn about friendships and how they impact our everyday lives. This Series is called David: Going after the heart of God. What is it that defines a person as someone who pursues the heart of God? In this message series we'll explore the life of David, uncovering how to chase after God, both in our moments of weakness and failure, as well as our strengths and victories. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! ---
In this message we'll learn three life changing truths though the story of David and Goliath. Prepare yourself to recognize the miracle God has for you. Trust in God's armor, not the world's. It's God's battle and his victory AND he has an crucial role for you. This Series is called David: Going after the heart of God. What is it that defines a person as someone who pursues the heart of God? In this message series we'll explore the life of David, uncovering how to chase after God, both in our moments of weakness and failure, as well as our strengths and victories. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! --- David and Goliath. 1st Samuel 17. God's faithfulness in our lives. Building daily faith in God.
In this message we learn how our story of hope has it's source in God's beautiful story. Then we discuss two ways we can encourage other's with with God's hope. Series description: "The only thing that matters is faith expressed through love." Those are the words of St. Paul as he described how our Christian communities are called to reflect God's light to the world. In this message series we'll discover authentic ways to live as a beautiful community of Jesus followers, shining the light of God in every relationship. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! lifevineyard.org
The Kingdom of God is the main message of Jesus. If it's important to Jesus, then it's important to us. In this message we explore the main message of Jesus. In this message series we'll take a look at what makes us Life Vineyard Church. What do we believe? What's important to us? What is the mission God has called us to as a church? Join us as we jump into what we're all about here at Life! We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you!
Despite picking up a serious leg injury at a recent world tournament, Dan Powell was at the IBSA World Games to cheer on his team GB judo squad members. He told RNIB Connect Radio's Allan Russell why the sport is great for blind and partially sighted people. #RNIBConnect Image Shows IBSA Logo
In this message we're invited to release the shame we have around prayer to Jesus. And we discover how we can be holistic and relational people of prayer. This message series explores the book of James. In these scriptures we find an invitation to live a life of authentic faith in Jesus. Being a Christian isn't just about knowing and believing the right things. A life of following Jesus is shown through our actions. God gives us the grace, wisdom, and power to live life for him. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
In this message we explore the "hidden to us" but powerful meaning of what James meant when he compared faith to looking in a mirror and forgetting what we look like. James 1:19-27 This message series explores the book of James. In these scriptures we find an invitation to live a life of authentic faith in Jesus. Being a Christian isn't just about knowing and believing the right things. A life of following Jesus is shown through our actions. God gives us the grace, wisdom, and power to live life for him. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Send us a Text Message.It is a new season. The Dolby Brothers try once again to get a record deal with Dolby Records and play some new demos. The fabulous Dan Powell pays a visit to the studio to talk about his music.It is all about the beats....Support the Show.
Jesus has a gift for you! Join us as we explore the spiritual gifts and WHY we've been given them. Empowered is a message series exploring the power we have with the Holy Spirit in our lives! We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Dat de Fed de rente opnieuw met een kwart procent heeft verhoogd, zal voor weinig mensen een verrassing zijn geweest. En toch werd het gisteren een spannende avond, zegt econoom Edin Mujagic. 'Alle ingrediënten voor een saaie avond waren er, maar wat er daarna kwam zorgde toch voor enig vuurwerk.' De voorzitter van de Fed Jerome Powell is volgens Mujagic een 'meester communicator', maar gisteren stond hij voor een schier onmogelijke opgave. 'Hij moest iets zeggen over de toestand bij Amerikaanse banken, want daar speelt nogal wat. Maar alles wat hij daarover had kunnen zeggen was fout geweest, dus hij zei het enige wat mogelijk was, namelijk dat de banken gezond en weerbarstig zijn.'Een opvallende uitspraak, omdat uit de actualiteiten niet bepaald blijkt dat alle banken er bijzonder goed voor staan. Zo werd vannacht nog bekend dat een kleinere Amerikaanse bank in de problemen is gekomen, de Pacific Western Bank. Toch taste Powell hiermee niet zijn eigen geloofwaardigheid aan, aldus Mujagic. 'Het enige alternatief was voor hem om te zeggen dat hij zich ook grote zorgen maakt, maar dan heb je echt grote chaos op de markten. Dit was een onmogelijke opgave en niemand had het beter kunnen doen dan deze man.' See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
There was a man who had such great faith it AMAZED Jesus! In the message we'll explore how we can have that same faith through the power of the Holy Spirit. Empowered is a message series exploring the power we have with the Holy Spirit in our lives. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Today myself and Karl have the upmost pleasure of being in the company of Dan Powell, Dan is a Paralympian in judo and today he chats about what it takes to become an elite athlete with a disability. Check him out on insta - @danpowell.pt@wayne_lakin@united_s_c@kgreenbjj@leicestershootfighters
The Impossible is a new series about the miracles Jesus did and is still doing today. We'll discover what his miracles mean for us today and how a miracle in your life is nearer than you think. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you!
Dan Powell worked his way up the corporate ladder as a CPA with a Fortune 500 company. But he walked away from that career ladder to become a pastor, while still retaining his CPA certification. In this edition of Better Roads Randall and Dan discuss what happened that caused Dan to take such a huge step. How did his wife and family receive that decision? Do his skills and experience as a CPA help him as a pastor? Does he ever long to return to working with numbers? Join Randall in learning more about Dan Powell, the CPA turned pastor, on Better Roads.
In this message we'll learn about how God wants us to handle conflict. What could life look like if we gave away God's love even in the midst of conflict? Series description: It can be difficult to find fulfilment in life. The world around us is divided and broken; we feel it at every turn. Now more than ever we long for beauty and goodness to fulfill us. In this message series we'll discover how we find that beauty, in its purest form, in a good and kind God. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Conflict. 1 Corinthians 13 James 1 Galatians 2
In this message we explore a type of prayer that opens us the nearness of God's life renewing presence. Contemplative prayer is the unhurried opening of oneself to God through silence, scripture, and self examination. Series description: It can be difficult to find fulfilment in life. The world around us is divided and broken; we feel it at every turn. Now more than ever we long for beauty and goodness to fulfill us. In this message series we'll discover how we find that beauty, in its purest form, in a good and kind God. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you!
In this opening message of the series we'll take a look at what life looks like without love and the hope we have of living life with the wholeness brought by God's love. Series description: It seems difficult to find fulfilment in life. The world around us is divided and broken; we feel it at every turn. Now more than ever we long for beauty and goodness to fulfill us. In this message series we'll discover how we find that beauty, in its purest form, in a good and kind God. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Matthew 22 Luke 18 The greatest commandments Faith without love The pharisee and the tax collector
This message is all about being thankful. We'll take a look at a story that Jesus told about a lost son and discover five ways we can be thankful TODAY! Luke 15. The lost son. The lost coin. The lost sheep. The prodigal son. Life Vineyard Church
We all have areas of our life in need of refreshment. What would it look like if we let Jesus do the refreshing for us? Ezekiel 47 River of Life. John 4 Woman at the well. You've probably heard someone close to you say, "Family is everything!" Well at Life we are a family of believers in our local community AND our church is part of the Vineyard family of over 2,0000 churches worldwide. Being a part of a church family is everything to us both locally and globally. In this message series we'll take a look at our identity of what makes us Life Vineyard Church. What do we believe? What's important to us? What is the mission God has called us to as a church? Join us as we rediscover our DNA at Life Vineyard Church. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
In this message we look at three insights to the character and personal role of the Holy Spirit or your life. In short: -We experience God's loving presence through the Holy Spirit -We experience transformation through the Holy Spirit -We are able to do the things of Jesus through the Holy Spirit Message series description: You've probably heard someone close to you say, "Family is everything!" Well at Life we are a family of believers in our local community AND our church is part of the Vineyard family of over 2,0000 churches worldwide. Being a part of a church family is everything to us both locally and globally. In this message series we'll take a look at our identity of what makes us Life Vineyard Church. What do we believe? What's important to us? What is the mission God has called us to as a church? Join us as we rediscover our DNA at Life Vineyard Church. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
Today we're bringing you an episode from the recently launched New York Times podcast, Hard Fork. Hosted by veteran tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton, Hard Fork is a rigorous and fun exploration of Silicon Valley's already-emerging future — and its evolving imprint on the rest of the world.In this episode, Kevin and Casey discuss Elon Musk's on-again-off-again – and recently on-again – interest in Twitter, as the billionaire signals once again that he's buying the social media platform. What might be behind the change of heart? And what will the deal mean for employees and users? Casey and Kevin swap theories and predictions — and also step into the metaverse with the New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill.Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land. Edited by Paula Szuchman and Hanna Ingber. Fact-checking by Caitlin Love. Original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop and Marion Lozano. Engineered by Corey Schreppel. Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Shannon Busta, Julia Simon, Larissa Anderson, Pui-Wing Tam, Kate LoPresti, Nell Gallogly, Mahima Chablani and Jeffrey Miranda.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
Dan Powell from VACCA talks about the Rainbow Yarning Workshops
The Rainbow Yarning Workshops are aimed at strengthening connections within the LGBTIQA+ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. Dan Powell from the Victorian Aboriginal Child Care Agency (VACCA) joins us to discuss the workshops. Jack and Michael chat with them about how the workshops came about, the impact it could have on attendees and potential future initiatives. Find out more about the workshops at the VACCA website. Check out our other JOY Podcasts for more on HIV, COVID-19 and queer health & wellbeing. If there's something you'd like us to explore on the show, send through ideas or questions at wellwellwell@joy.org.au
You've probably heard someone close to you say, "Family is everything!" Well at Life we are a family of believers in our local community AND our church is part of the Vineyard family of over 2,0000 churches worldwide. Being a part of a church family is everything to us both locally and globally. In this message series we'll take a look at our identity of what makes us Life Vineyard Church. What do we believe? What's important to us? What is the mission God has called us to as a church? Join us as we rediscover our DNA at Life Vineyard Church. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
You've probably heard someone close to you say, "Family is everything!" Well at Life we are a family of believers in our local community AND our church is part of the Vineyard family of over 2,0000 churches worldwide. Being a part of a church family is everything to us, both locally and globally. In this message series we'll take a look at our identity of what makes us Life Vineyard Church. What do we believe? What's important to us? What is the mission God is calling us to as a church? Join us as we rediscover our DNA at Life Vineyard Church. We meet every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet IL You are welcome and wanted at Life Vineyard Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifevineyard.org
When you've got a question or need advice where do you go? "OK Google, what are some tips for toddler tantrums?" "Hey Siri, where can I find ice cream at 3am?" Even for life's deeper subjects, advice and opinions deluge our lives and screens. Most of that advice is just simply inadequate. The good news is that there's divine wisdom that rises above it all. Wisdom that has stood the test of time from generation to generation. In this series we'll discover God's wisdom that guides us on our life journey. The best part is when we follow this wisdom we have life as it's meant to be, life to the fullest! Join us every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org Matthew 5 Salt and light Vineyard Church
Welcome back to the first FOF'cast of the new 2022/23 Premier League season, as we are joined by Scott Tanfield, Mike Gregg and Dan Powell to discuss the pre-season mini tournament in Portugal, our Transfer troubles, Villarreal friendly, Wilson's injury, Liverpool game, Tim Ream and Liverpool predictions. Thanks once again for listening, make sure you subscribe to catch any future shows.
When you've got a question or need advice where do you go? "OK Google, what are some tips for toddler tantrums?" "Hey Siri, where can I find ice cream at 3am?" Even for life's deeper subjects, advice and opinions deluge our lives and screens. Most of that advice is just simply inadequate. The good news is that there's divine wisdom that rises above it all. Wisdom that has stood the test of time from generation to generation. In this series we'll discover God's wisdom that guides us on our life journey. The best part is when we follow this wisdom we have life as it's meant to be, life to the fullest! Join us every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org Wisdom for influence. Matthew 7. Firm foundation of Jesus. Matthew 7:24-27 “Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock. 25 Though the rain comes in torrents and the floodwaters rise and the winds beat against that house, it won't collapse because it is built on bedrock. 26 But anyone who hears my teaching and doesn't obey it is foolish, like a person who builds a house on sand. 27 When the rains and floods come and the winds beat against that house, it will collapse with a mighty crash.”
When you've got a question or need advice where do you go? "OK Google, what are some tips for toddler tantrums?" "Hey Siri, where can I find ice cream at 3am?" Even for life's deeper subjects, advice and opinions deluge our lives and screens. Most of that advice is just simply inadequate. The good news is that there's divine wisdom that rises above it all. Wisdom that has stood the test of time from generation to generation. In this series we'll discover God's wisdom that guides us on our life journey. The best part is when we follow this wisdom we have life as it's meant to be, life to the fullest! Join us every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org James 3 Proverbs Wisdom
When you've got a question or need advice where do you go? "OK Google, what are some tips for toddler tantrums?" "Hey Siri, where can I find ice cream at 3am?" Even for life's deeper subjects, advice and opinions deluge our lives and screens. Most of that advice is just simply inadequate. The good news is that there's divine wisdom that rises above it all. Wisdom that has stood the test of time from generation to generation. In this series we'll discover God's wisdom that guides us on our life journey. The best part is when we follow this wisdom we have life as it's meant to be, life to the fullest! Join us every Sunday at 10am in Mahomet. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org
When you find yourself struggling with questions, insecurity, doubt, what do you do? Maybe, like us, you tend to take your doubt, tuck it away and pretend that everything is fine. That can be crippling. This time, let's face our doubt, head on. Join us in person or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org The problem of Evil. Big Questions.
When you find yourself struggling with questions, insecurity, doubt, what do you do? Maybe, like us, you tend to take your doubt, tuck it away and pretend that everything is fine. That can be crippling. This time, let's face our doubt, head on. Join us in person or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org
Mike tells some hilarious jokes that don’t end hilariously and a fascinating interview with comedy great Dan Powell, executive producer of Inside Amy Schumer. This episode was produced by Rob Schulte Brought to you By: The Sonar Network
On Ester Sunday we celebrate God's power over sin, death, and brokenness. And we receive His new life through His resurrection!
What's the strongest emotion you've felt recently? In the Palms we find emotions of every kind. From frustration to peace, despair to joy, love to hopelessness; they're all expressed in the Psalms. The Psalms offer us a picture of the human heart before God. They are an invitation to enter God's presence honestly, with all our joys and concerns. There is a place for everyone in the Psalms. We come to God and discover a constant embrace to share the deepest things of ourselves with Him. Join us in person or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org Praise and Worship in the Psalms. Psalm 145. Psalm 34. Psalm 98. Psalm 143.
In this series we'll be taking a look at Paul's letter to the Ephesians. This letter is a message about God's glorious plan to unite us in Christ and flood us with every spiritual blessing. God has made a way for us in Christ to belong to his family, the church. In the church we have a significant role of being God's dwelling place, empowered with gifts and united in the Spirit. The Spirit also equips us to live joyful lives that honor him and dismantle the powers of evil. The good news of God's glorious plan makes a new family of God possible, transformed through grace and filled with love! Join us in person or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you!
In this series we'll be taking a look at Paul's letter to the Ephesians. This letter is a message about God's glorious plan to unite us in Christ and flood us with every spiritual blessing. God has made a way for us in Christ to belong to his family, the church. In the church we have a significant role of being God's dwelling place, empowered with gifts and united in the Spirit. The Spirit also equips us to live joyful lives that honor him and dismantle the powers of evil. The good news of God's glorious plan makes a new family of God possible, transformed through grace and filled with love! Join us in person or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org Ephesians 4:17-5
Welcome to Episode 46 of The Darlington Podcast! In this episode, Carson Raymond, director of major gifts, chats with Dan Powell ('08), whose podcast "Archive 81" recently became the #1 trending show on Netflix in its screen adaptation. Powell shares about his Darlington experience as the child of longtime faculty member David Powell and his winding career journey in the audio and sound industry. Carson Raymond has served as director of major gifts since 2019 and spends much of his time on the road visiting with alumni, listening to their stories, and sharing news about what's going on at Darlington today. He is often featured as the host of Darlington Connects episodes of The Darlington Podcast. Carson's previous roles at Darlington, from 2010-2012, included teaching Upper School Spanish, coaching soccer, and working with the residential program. Dan Powell is a New York City-based audio engineer, sound designer and composer. He currently works at The New York Times audio team as a Senior Sound Designer & Composer, where he helps lead original scoring and sound design efforts for its growing collection of newsroom podcasts, including The Daily. He is also the co-creator of "Archive 81", a fiction podcast that has been adapted into a Netflix original series. Dan graduated from Darlington in 2008 and attended Syracuse University, where he graduated with a B.A. in English. https://darlingtonschool.org/Today/Details/5858066 (Click here for complete show notes >>)
In this series we'll be taking a look at Paul's letter to the Ephesians. This letter is a message about God's glorious plan to unite us in Christ and flood us with every spiritual blessing. God has made a way for us in Christ to belong to his family, the church. In the church we have a significant role of being God's dwelling place, empowered with gifts and united in the Spirit. The Spirit also equips us to live joyful lives that honor him and dismantle the powers of evil. The good news of God's glorious plan makes a new family of God possible, transformed through grace and filled with love! Join us in person or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org Ephesians 3
Today we're taking a break from our regularly scheduled programing to bring you this special message. We'll take a look at the life of Jonah and the three things we can learn so we don't miss God's open doors for our lives. www.Lifemahomet.org
In this series we'll be taking a look at Paul's letter to the Ephesians. This letter is a message about God's glorious plan to unite us in Christ and flood us with every spiritual blessing. God has made a way for us in Christ to belong to his family, the church. In the church we have a significant role of being God's dwelling place, empowered with gifts and united in the Spirit. The Spirit also equips us to live joyful lives that honor him and dismantle the powers of evil. The good news of God's glorious plan makes a new family of God possible, transformed through grace and filled with love! Join us in person or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Lifemahomet.org Ephesians 2:1-10
On this episode of FOF'cast, we are joined by Scott Tanfield, Gerry Pimm, Mike Gregg plus Podcast debutant Dan Powell as we discuss the 1-1 draw with Luton Town, Friends of Fulham MOTM, Our recent form in the last 4, What's needed in January, Jay Stansfield, the Sheffield United game, and Sheffield United predictions. Thanks once again for listening, please don't forget to Subscribe to catch any future shows!
Christmas is all about getting presents, right? Well maybe not, hopefully your mom taught you better than that. But when we fully understand Christmas, it really is about gifts! It's about the gifts we receive from Jesus. In this series we'll unwrap the gifts we've been given from Jesus and as we do, we'll begin to discover the Light who brings hope to our world! We're celebrating Christmas all December, and we would love for you to join us every Sunday at 10am and Christmas Eve at 4pm. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Matthew 2:1-8 Romans 3 Romans 5 Romans 8 Hosea 11
Christmas is all about getting presents, right? Well maybe not, hopefully your mom taught you better than that. But when we fully understand Christmas, it really is about gifts! It's about the gifts we receive from Jesus. In this series we'll unwrap the gifts we've been given from Jesus and as we do, we'll begin to discover the Light who brings hope to our world! We're celebrating Christmas all December, and we would love for you to join us every Sunday at 10am and Christmas Eve at 4pm. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! Isaiah 9 The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.
Do you remember your first encounter with Jesus? Do you remember your last encounter with him? Everyday Jesus offers us an encounter with himself. In this series we'll be encouraged as we look at stories of people just like us who had an encounter with Jesus and experienced his hope, healing, transformation and grace! Join us in person in Mahomet IL or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! John 11 Lazarus
Do you remember your first encounter with Jesus? Do you remember your last encounter with him? Everyday Jesus offers us an encounter with himself. In this series we'll be encouraged as we look at stories of people just like us who had an encounter with Jesus and experienced his hope, healing, transformation and grace! Join us in person in Mahomet IL or online on Facebook every Sunday at 10am. You are welcome and wanted at Life Community Church, we can't wait to meet you! John 3 Nikodemus moving from darkness to light and the offer of spiritual renewal. John 3:16
Mike tells some hilarious jokes that don't end hilariously and a fascinating interview with comedy great Dan Powell, executive producer of Inside Amy Schumer. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Contaminated Site Clean-Up Information (CLU-IN): Internet Seminar Video Archives
The Spring 2021 Meeting of the Federal Remediation Technologies Roundtable (FRTR) will be held as two webinar sessions on May 19 and May 26, 2021. This special 30-year anniversary meeting will convene senior leaders from all FRTR member agencies to discuss progress in remediation programs and opportunities for innovative technology applications at complex sites. As always, FRTR meetings are open to the public. FRTR's objectives for this meeting are to: Provide an overview of the grand remediation challenges facing member agencies over the next decade.Discuss specific technology needs across programs.Highlight agency program initiatives to advance technologies that will expedite and improve site cleanup. Session 1: Grand Challenges This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in site remediation programs. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Dan Powell, Chief of the Technology Integration and Information Branch in U.S. EPA's Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation. Session 2: Advancing New Technologies This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in research and application of new and innovative site characterization and remediation technologies at complex sites. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Kent Glover of the U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center. Dr. Glover is the Air Force Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Remediation Systems and the FRTR Steering Committee Chair. The following agencies will be represented at this meeting: U.S. Air Force-Civil Engineer Center (AFCEC)U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA)U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)U.S. Navy-Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC)U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (U.S. NRC)National Institutes of Health-National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) To view this archive online or download the slides associated with this seminar, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/FRTR-Grand2_052621/
Contaminated Site Clean-Up Information (CLU-IN): Internet Seminar Audio Archives
The Spring 2021 Meeting of the Federal Remediation Technologies Roundtable (FRTR) will be held as two webinar sessions on May 19 and May 26, 2021. This special 30-year anniversary meeting will convene senior leaders from all FRTR member agencies to discuss progress in remediation programs and opportunities for innovative technology applications at complex sites. As always, FRTR meetings are open to the public. FRTR's objectives for this meeting are to: Provide an overview of the grand remediation challenges facing member agencies over the next decade.Discuss specific technology needs across programs.Highlight agency program initiatives to advance technologies that will expedite and improve site cleanup. Session 1: Grand Challenges This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in site remediation programs. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Dan Powell, Chief of the Technology Integration and Information Branch in U.S. EPA's Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation. Session 2: Advancing New Technologies This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in research and application of new and innovative site characterization and remediation technologies at complex sites. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Kent Glover of the U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center. Dr. Glover is the Air Force Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Remediation Systems and the FRTR Steering Committee Chair. The following agencies will be represented at this meeting: U.S. Air Force-Civil Engineer Center (AFCEC)U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA)U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)U.S. Navy-Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC)U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (U.S. NRC)National Institutes of Health-National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) To view this archive online or download the slides associated with this seminar, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/FRTR-Grand2_052621/
Contaminated Site Clean-Up Information (CLU-IN): Internet Seminar Audio Archives
The Spring 2021 Meeting of the Federal Remediation Technologies Roundtable (FRTR) will be held as two webinar sessions on May 19 and May 26, 2021. This special 30-year anniversary meeting will convene senior leaders from all FRTR member agencies to discuss progress in remediation programs and opportunities for innovative technology applications at complex sites. As always, FRTR meetings are open to the public. FRTR's objectives for this meeting are to: Provide an overview of the grand remediation challenges facing member agencies over the next decade.Discuss specific technology needs across programs.Highlight agency program initiatives to advance technologies that will expedite and improve site cleanup. Session 1: Grand Challenges This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in site remediation programs. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Dan Powell, Chief of the Technology Integration and Information Branch in U.S. EPA's Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation. Session 2: Advancing New Technologies This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in research and application of new and innovative site characterization and remediation technologies at complex sites. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Kent Glover of the U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center. Dr. Glover is the Air Force Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Remediation Systems and the FRTR Steering Committee Chair. The following agencies will be represented at this meeting: U.S. Air Force-Civil Engineer Center (AFCEC)U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA)U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)U.S. Navy-Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC)U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (U.S. NRC)National Institutes of Health-National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) To view this archive online or download the slides associated with this seminar, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/FRTR-Grand1_051921/
Contaminated Site Clean-Up Information (CLU-IN): Internet Seminar Video Archives
The Spring 2021 Meeting of the Federal Remediation Technologies Roundtable (FRTR) will be held as two webinar sessions on May 19 and May 26, 2021. This special 30-year anniversary meeting will convene senior leaders from all FRTR member agencies to discuss progress in remediation programs and opportunities for innovative technology applications at complex sites. As always, FRTR meetings are open to the public. FRTR's objectives for this meeting are to: Provide an overview of the grand remediation challenges facing member agencies over the next decade.Discuss specific technology needs across programs.Highlight agency program initiatives to advance technologies that will expedite and improve site cleanup. Session 1: Grand Challenges This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in site remediation programs. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Dan Powell, Chief of the Technology Integration and Information Branch in U.S. EPA's Office of Superfund Remediation and Technology Innovation. Session 2: Advancing New Technologies This session will consist of a virtual panel discussion by senior-level leaders from the FRTR member agencies involved in research and application of new and innovative site characterization and remediation technologies at complex sites. The panel discussion will be facilitated by Kent Glover of the U.S. Air Force Civil Engineer Center. Dr. Glover is the Air Force Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Remediation Systems and the FRTR Steering Committee Chair. The following agencies will be represented at this meeting: U.S. Air Force-Civil Engineer Center (AFCEC)U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE)U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA)U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)U.S. Navy-Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command (NAVFAC)U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (U.S. NRC)National Institutes of Health-National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS)Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) To view this archive online or download the slides associated with this seminar, please visit http://www.clu-in.org/conf/tio/FRTR-Grand1_051921/
Episode 2 - Josh wants to make a film! Cool! Him and every single other person in LA. How the hell is he going to get money, talent and crew? Josh pitches the film to production companies like Alex Bach and Dan Powell of Irony Point, and sets the groundwork for crewing up and casting. Can we get Aya Cash (The Boys) and Chris Redd (SNL) for roles in 'Scare Me'? Will Alex Borstein (Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) be available? Find out on episode 2 of MAKE COOL SH!T. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/makecoolshit/support
We hear from some of the people affected by the delayed Paralympic Games after Covid restrictions led to Tokyo 2020 being postponed. Can the games really go ahead in 2021? Looking ahead to the 2021 games are Paralympics GB’s Chef de Mission Penny Briscoe, judo stars Chris Skelley and Dan Powell, 2016 gold medal winning runner Libby Clegg and Tim Reddish from the International Paralympic Committee Governing Board. PRESENTER: Peter White PRODUCER: Mike Young
In this twenty eighth episode of the season of the Her Spirit podcast BBC Breakfast presenter Louise Minchin and BBC Triathlon presenter Annie Emmerson talk to double Paralympic champion Libby Clegg MBE.Libby took up athletics aged 9, joining Macclesfield Harriers AC. She originally tried middle distance running and cross country before starting sprinting.Libby is a Scottish Paralympic sprinter who has represented both Scotland and Great Britain at international events. She represented Great Britain in the T12 100m and 200m at the 2008 Summer Paralympics, winning a silver medal in the T12 100m race. She won Gold in Rio at the 2016 Paralympic Games in 100m T11 where she broke the world record and T11 200m, beating the previous Paralympic record in the process, thus making her a double Paralympic champion.She has a deteriorating eye condition known as Stargardt's Macular Dystrophy disease giving her only slight peripheral vision in her left eye and is registered blind. Libby runs with the aid of guide runner Chris Clarke.In October 2018, Clegg announced she was expecting her first child with fiancé Dan Powell in March 2019. In April 2019 Clegg gave birth to a son, Edward, via emergency C-Section.She has had physical injuries and has been affected by mental health issues. Her guide dog, a black retriever/Labrador cross, is named Hatti.In 2020 Libby took part in Dancing on Ice "It's been a learning process". On the track I run with a guide runner and we're attached all the time. It's like learning a different vocabulary to communicate. Myself and my [ice skating] partner Mark Hanretty use touch and verbal communication. I'm not as bad as I thought I was going to be, but it's not as easy as it looks. It's very technical. Libby finished third on Dancing on Ice, which is a phenomenal result.Libby talks openly about the loss of her eye sight, life as a mum and many new obstacles in 2020 that very few women have had to overcome.These podcasts have been made possible through the support of Medichecks www.medichecks.com and Sport England www.sportengland.org. For more information on Her Spirit and "Your Best Year Yet" go to https://herspirit.co.uk and we hope you have found her Your Best Year Yet tips helpful.
The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) is an educational, research, and human rights nonprofit devoted to commemorating the more than 100 million victims of communism around the world and to pursuing the freedom of those still living under totalitarian regimes. In support of VOC’s mission to “educate this generation and future generations about the ideology, history, and legacy of communism," the St. Louis Commission (VOC-STL) is committed to bringing this important human rights initiative to the local community. In recent years St. Louis has seen a growing support of communism and a celebration of communist symbols as a reflection of equality and justice. This increased activity is an insult to the millions of victims of communism, including local residents who fled oppressive communist regimes for a better life in the United States. The local commission is a volunteer based operation, including the leadership team and residents who are concerned about the rising support for this deadly ideology and who envisions a world free from the false hope of Marxism and safe from the tyranny of communism. Kim McGrath serves as Director of VOC-STL. Dan Powell serves as the Strategic Development Chair of VOC-STL. Learn more about the Show-Me Institute: https://showmeinstitute.org/ The Show-Me Institute Podcast is produced by Show-Me Opportunity
The time has come for Mall Rat to finally take the stage and play the most important gig of their lives! Written, Directed and Produced by Kristen DiMercurio. Co-written by Talia Rochmann and Mark Wolf Roberts. Production Consulting by Julia Schifini. Executive Produced by Mischa Stanton. Sound designed by Jeffrey Gardner. Recorded by Jared Paul and James Schoen. Featuring Elliot Gindi as Misroch, Susannah Wilson as Belzagor, Mark Wolf Roberts as Asmoraius, Isa Braun as Xaphan, Christopher Trindade as Trent and Carpasinus, Regina Russel as Trainee, Jordan Cobb as Raven, and Caitlyn Jones as Satan herself. Additional voices and club beats by Dan Powell, screaming by Audrey NAME. Theme music by FM Buller. Show art by Talia Rochmann. A Product of the Whisperforge: Sound & Story, Brought to Life
Dan is a massively inspritational guy and super dangerous on the mats.Dan competed in judo at international level but became homesick after four years living and training in Kent, England. He moved back to Liverpool where he found he needed an outlet for his competitive nature. This led to him taking up Para athletics.In 2017, he was runner-up for both Disabled Sportsman of the Year and Senior Volunteer of the Year at Charnwood Sports Awards.His partner Libby Clegg represented Great Britain in athletics at the Paralympic Games in 2008, 2012 and 2016, winning a total of two gold and two silver medals. His older brother Marc and his father Terry have both represented Great Britain in judo at the Paralympic Games. Marc competed at the 2012 Games in London, while Terry participated at the 1988, 1996 and 2000 editions of the Games.In 2018, he took part in the television programme Ninja Warrior UK, he was the first contestant with a visual impairment to compete in the show. "Ninja Warrior was a hundred times scarier than competing in London 2012. In London 2012 I knew what I was there to do, I knew what I was going into, I had practised loads. The crowd at Ninja Warrior was amazing though, it was just like the Paralympics. It made the hairs stand up on the back of your neck."His vision is affected by cone-rod dystrophy, a visual impairment that runs in his family. He worked as a personal trainer and gym instructor at Loughborough Leisure Centre in England. He has studied a degree in personal training and a diploma in sports massage. He is the founder of Ability Training alongside partner Libby Clegg, which offers disability specific awareness courses for sports and fitness professionals.we are incredibly humbled to welcome dan to the showWant to know as soon as new episodes are released & receive a very short email Click the link.https://zcu.io/1ljV
Tripletail are a little known but highly prized sport fish from northern waters. Despite being relatively abundant, not many anglers are aware of how to find them - which is the biggest challenge on this species. Gladstone angler Dan Powell is a obsessed with understanding tripletail and unravelling the secrets of catching them in Australian Waters. In this episode he reveals what he’s discovered on his personal tripletail journey. https://doclures.com/gladstone-tripletail-dan-powell/
Stoked with the feedback from Episode 1! Really humbled by the response and support from everyone! I never thought it would gain this much traction off the bat so thank you to everyone who listened, liked commented and shared. Thank you so much!This Episode features Dan Powell; A highly regarded fisho who dials in on a goal with tunnel vision and achieves amazing results. We were lucky enough to line our trip (episode 1) with Dans trip at the same location; catching up at our island campsite in the arvos for a few beers and great chat.This episode is a lot more tame than the last one but is super informative, inspirational and still very straight up and raw.Don't forget to get at me on Socials and lemme know what you think!@flowstatefishing @_wadekelly_fishingTight Lines,Wade
Questions Discussed in This Episode:How do you find your first clients?Do you need a website and/or tutorials to attract clients?What are people hiring podcast editors looking for?Should we be making tutorials and content to attract clients?Should you invest time in trying to convince people to start podcasts?Should you only work with shows that are aligned with your goals and values?How much should you charge for your services?Links:Connect with SidneyOpen Convo PodcastPodcast Editor's Club (Facebook Group)If you enjoyed this episode, check out my conversation with Dan Powell, producer and editor of audio dramas Archive 81 and Deep Vault.Have a question or just want to say hi? Send an email to aaron@thepodcastdude.com. I'd love to hear from you.
The program all about TV. Our guests: Dan Powell and Christine Nangle, executive producers of The Break With Michelle Wolf, coming to Netflix May 27, and American Veterans Center senior vice president Tim Holbert, director of the annual Memorial Day Parade in Washington, D.C., which will be simulcast live Monday on TV stations coast-to-coast and YouTube (via smart TV sets and TV-connected devices).
On this week's show, Aaron is joined by renowned clix-casters Edward Shelton and Daniel Powell. The trio discuss the recent Majestix Open Series event results and the upcoming release of Avengers: Infinity before diving in to the facebook questions.
Persistence is a virtue which is required in all aspects of live. To say that Dan had to persist through his 2017 IMAC season is an understatement. He shared with me all his setbacks during the 2017 IMAC season along with tips to fly a model with scale precision. I left this interview feeling inspired and enthusiastic about my 2018 season.
This week, things are going to get spooky at Radio Drama Revival as we delve into the world of horror audio fiction. David talks to Marc Sollinger and Dan Powell, the evil minds behind Archive 81 and The Deep Vault. They discuss the horror fiction that makes them tick, how to construct audio fiction that’ll make your skin crawl, and what it’s like to collaborate with one of your closest friends. We’ll also take a listen to the first episode of their show Archive 81, which is about a young man with a new job, recordings from an uncanny apartment building, and the dangers of listening.
The team has assembled, and it's time to take the fight to ODAR. Step 1: get Victor Lambert out of an ODAR prison facility, with a passcode from the desk of Director Chet Whickman himself. To pull this stunt off, they'll need help from an unlikely source. Created by Daniel Manning & Mischa Stanton. Written by Daniel Manning, directed & produced by Mischa Stanton. Featuring Kristen DiMercurio as Sally Grissom, Reyn Beeler as Chet Whickman, Katie Speed as Esther Roberts, Lia Peros as Petra, L. Jeffrey Moore as Lou Gaines, Lauren Shippen as Maggie Elbourne, Preston Max Allen as Bridget Chambers, Hannah Trobaugh as June Barlowe, Lee Satterwhite as Ben Quigley, and Eric Rafael Ibarra as Victor Lambert, as well as Billy Finn, Julian Mundy, and Mischa Stanton, with special thanks to Isabel Atkinson. Fight choreography by Danielle Shemaiah. Production help from Dan Powell. “Clair de Lune” composed by Claude Debussy. Original music by Mischa Stanton and by Eno Freedman-Brodmann. A product of the Whisperforge http://whisperforge.org
LA LA Laughing it up with The Animaniacal Topher Grace who graces us with his grace! Terrifying THC TALES! Regrettable edibles! And his coveted Star Wars cut! TMHT 2? "Insterstellar" audition stories, and more. The amazing Luisa Krause's AVA's possession's 6 degrees of "Taking Woodstock"with Dan Powell and his Inside Amy Schumer Stories. SING! LION! All while tap dancing Shakespeare!
Matt and Andrew talk to Dan Powell (writer, director and Emmy Award winning Executive Producer of Inside Amy Schumer) about the busiest 10 weeks of his life, living through his own "Bridgegate" nightmare, and taking a party bus to the Emmy's. Today's podcast is brought to you by audible.com - get a FREE audiobook download and 30 day free trial at www.audibletrial.com/SIBSB. Over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle or mp3 player.
Neil and I are talking with Marc Sollinger of the Archive 81 podcast. The found-footage podcast follows the arrival of Dan (Powell), an archivist starting a new job reviewing and cataloging recordings made by the Housing Historical Committee of New York State. Dan’s ominous boss urges him to record every waking moment of his time while listening to unnerving, taped interviews carried out by Melody Pendras (voiced Amelia Kidd) with the occupants of an apartment block. http://www.archive81.com https://www.facebook.com/Archive81/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Archive81/ https://twitter.com/Archive81 http://www.deepvaultpodcast.com/ https://twitter.com/thedeepvault Theme music created by Brett Miller http://www.brettmillermusic.net/
Dan Powell is one half of Dead Signals Production, creator of the popular Archive 81 and Deep Vault found sound, radio drama podcasts. In this episode, we talk about his recording process, how he designs sound, and his editing process. He shares some of the hurdles he overcame while producing podcasts and what advice he'd give to anyone interested in making a modern radio drama. Key Takeaways: Don't buy your gear new—if you buy the best gear used, it'll last you forever. The hardest part of any narrative creative medium is the transition between two parts. Make sure you understand what's happening in your environment before you choose a space to record in. What you make should be in conversation with your audience, but don't make something just because it'll get a lot of downloads. Find people who are established in your field, reach out to them, and ask for some direct advice. Think about how the ambience and background noise where you're recording can contribute to the story and the feel of your whole piece. Aaron: Hey Dan, thanks for joining me today. Tell me a little bit about yourself—where you're from and where you are now. Maybe a little bit about what your path to audio and podcasting has looked like over the course of your life. Dan: I was born in Rome, Georgia and I was there until I was about 18. It was a medium/small size town in the middle of the woods. I spent a lot of time by myself alone with my thoughts, which is probably what caused me to gravitate to sci-fi, horror, and secular fiction. I began making radio dramas at the age of eight or nine. I used Window 95 Sound Recorder to make these one-man shows. Sometimes it would be me and sometimes it would be my friends, and we would get in front of a microphone and see what happened. That's really what introduced me to audio editing and creative sound design. From an early age, I was interested in what would happen if you slowed down, sped up, or changed the pitch of your voice. I went to Syracuse University for college and majored in English. I loved reading and still really do, but I realized I was spending all my free time in studios recording my friend's bands (or recording myself), and that working with audio might be a good career path. I'd always been interested in creative writing, but I thought it might be good to develop a more technical skill or trade that I could have on the side while writing. I ended up really enjoying working with audio and I decided to make that my primary creative and career pursuit. After school I moved to New York City. I interned, I did some odd jobs, I worked at an Apple store, and I eventually got my first job in the sound industry at Soundsnap, a commercial sound effects library. I did that full time for about two years and then transitioned to working there part time while making more time for freelance work, sound engineering, and working on my own podcast on the side. That's where I'm at now. Aaron: You met Marc (the other half of Dead Signals) in college? Dan: Yeah, Marc and I met his senior year and my post-senior year. I stayed after I graduated to do a fellowship in audio engineering and sound design. One of the cool things about Syracuse is they have this program where if you get to the end of your four years and you decide you want to do something different than what you studied, you can apply for a fellowship that will let you stay an extra year. You basically get a free year of credits that you can do what you want with. I did that after I finished studying English so I could build up my portfolio and get some more one-on-one mentoring strictly with audio stuff. That's where Marc and I met. Aaron: Then you guys formed Dead Signals Productions. Dan: We formed Dead Signals this time last year. Marc came and visited me in New York and we were talking about ideas we had. The project we worked on together in college was Marc's senior thesis project, a radio play he wrote and produced. I was just acting in it, playing the lead. More recently, starting last year, was when we started collaborating and both giving equal input for the project. Recording Radio Drama Podcasts Aaron: Let's talk about Archive 81 and Deep Vault, the recording process and the tools you use to handle the editing. Marc said you guys recorded Archive 81 in a bedroom. Do you remember which mic you used for that? Dan: It was the Sennheiser MKH 8040. I got this mic because it's a really good all-purpose sound design mic. It's good for all-purpose folio recording, like footsteps, fabric movements, and every day objects you want to record. It's also really good for ambient field recording. We recorded the dialog with this mic and another mic called a Sennheiser MKH30, which is a bi-directional stereo mic. The two of these things together form a really good pair for mid-side stereo recording. What I was really interested in when I bought these mics was, one, it was the best deal I found on eBay, and two, I was interested in doing more ambient field recording. Living in New York City there's so many interesting sounds everywhere. There are neighborhoods, parks, and subways. You can turn a corner and be in an entirely different sonic landscape than you were just in. I wanted something that was good for capturing my environment, but when it came down to produce Archive 81, after doing some tests, we realized that these mics would work just as well for dialog recording. I personally would have liked to use a wider diaphragm AKG microphone, but I still think the mics we used worked well for recording dialog. It's good gear and it's what we had available at the time. Aaron: I know a lot of podcasters who use $60 or $70 USB mics and there's a big difference in quality between those and the MKH. What do they run used, close to $1,000? Dan: Close to $1,000. The mic I'm on right now goes for about $1,200 new, but I'm a big Craigslist and eBay deal-hunter. When I was first getting into audio, one of the best pieces of advice I got was when I was talking to someone five years my senior who's successful and established in the music production scene here in New York. He said: Don't buy your gear new. Even if you buy the best gear used, it'll still last you forever. He told me, “I've made a spreadsheet of every piece of equipment I've purchased from when I first started out. Collectively I've saved about $30,000.” That really stuck with me, so now I only buy used gear. I got the mic I'm talking on now for about half of what it would cost new. Aaron: I'm currently on a Shure BETA 87A, which costs $250 new and I think I paid $120 for it used at Guitar Center and it's an awesome sounding mic for podcasting. Dan: I like the richness of it. In general, I really like dynamic mics for podcasts. I like the rich low end and the proximity effect you can get. I use the mics I use because I want to have a lot of applications for things like sound design and field recording, but I don't want to make it seem like you have to buy a $700 or $1,000 microphone. I've seen people get fantastic results with an SM58, which I use when I do event recording gigs. You can get one of those used on Craigslist for $50 in most cases. In many cases, it's probably more ideal if you're at home instead of a treated acoustic space because dynamic microphones do a better job of isolating the sound source and not picking up your refrigerator, your roommate, or your neighbors yelling at each other. Aaron: I agree. I love the large diaphragm condensers, but you do need a quiet, treated room to make them sound good and not pick up a bunch of sound. Alright; let's talk about sound design. Here's a clip of episode one of Deep Vault, which has some dialog with some reverb on. I wanted to ask you about that, and about the part in the music where the footsteps transition into the beat of the song. First, let's talk about the ambience and reverb you used. As I'm listening to it, there's some kind of ambient sound in that. I'm not sure if it's reverb in the space you recorded it in or if it's reverb you added afterward. There's also an air conditioning kind of “swoosh” background ambience. Can you describe how you achieved those effects? Dan: None of that reverb is natural. It's all added in post. I exclusively use impulse response reverb, which is basically the ability to capture the sonic snapshot of a real, indoor space by going in and blasting a sign wave or white noise in it and then recording the echo that comes afterwards, then notching out the original sign wave in post. This gives a ghost emanation of what a space actually sounds like. There's two reverbs fading out and in. There's the outdoor reverb, which I have a light touch on. It's meant to evoke the sense that the space is outdoors and then there's the echo-y underground reverb of the vault they're about to go into. If you listen prior to them entering the vault, you can hear how it evolves from one space to another. I think very visually when I'm working on it. I've said this a lot in various interviews, but because I'm working with Marc on the scripts from the beginning, I don't really think of this as post production. I'm always thinking about space and sonics as I'm reading the first draft of a show. I usually visually map out or make a flow chart of what the space looks like and how things need to transition from one stage to another. That helps me focus better. In the background, we have a desert ambient sound. It's a field recording of a desert that's near an urban area. You have some wind and outdoor air atmosphere, called the air tone, which is the outdoor equivalent of a room tone. If you search Soundsnap for air tone, you'll find a bunch of ambient recordings of outdoor air spaces that don't have crowds, people, or traffic. It's more a general wash like you hear in that clip. There's the air tone and then there's the vault sounds—the ambient sounds of the space they're going into, which is a field recording by a field recordist named Stephan March. I think it's some recordings of some abandoned bomb shelters on the Danish coast. It's some industrial room tones with some distant waves, but they have an underground low-fi industrial roominess to them. Those things blend together to create the atmosphere of the vault. Aaron: I'm embarrassed to say it now, but I was thinking these were effects you could achieve with something like the reverbs that come with ProTools or Logic Pro X. What program do you use to do all this stuff with? Dan: I use ProTools for editing, mixing, and basic sound effect placement. For what's referred to as composite sound effects design—designing a sound effect that needs a lot more depth to it than what you can pull from a library as is—I use Logic. I do that for two reasons. One, I think it's good to have separation between sound effect editing and show editing. I like to be in two different programs when I'm creating the sound of a robot or a door and when I'm editing the show. Having the different software environment helps to streamline that. The other reason is, though I do think ProTools is great, I think it's very flawed for making things creatively from scratch. I would never write a song or demo a song in ProTools because I don't think the user experience is tailored toward composition, whether that's composing a song or compositing a sound effect from scratch. It's great for editing and taking material that's aesthetically already done—like you recording a guitar through an amp—but if you're trying to dial in the tone of a guitar, I prefer to use Logic, something a little more built for making music from scratch. For this scene, I used pretty much all ProTools because I wasn't designing anything beyond simply layering things together and the reverb that goes along with that. I wrote the music in Logic. Dan's Favorite Editing Programs and Plugins Aaron: Are there any stock plugins you use inside of Logic or do you have any favorites? Dan: I use Logic's modular synth plugin, the ES2, a lot because I know it really well. It has a very particular sound but I've been using it for many years, and I can dial in the sound I want pretty quickly with it. I probably should learn some more synth plugins so I don't get set in my ways. Aaron: What about reverb or special effects? I know there's like 50 stock plugins inside Logic. Dan: Space Designer Plugin for Logic Pro X is incredible. It's a great impulse response reverb plugin. I use Waves IR1 for the reverb in this scene, but it could have as easily been achieved with the stock Logic Space Designer plugin, probably easier even, because they have a larger native sample library. Any sound designer you talk to will say that Space Designer is the best free stock plugin of anything. That's a big one. There aren't a lot of other stock Logic plugins I use for sound design in terms of compositing. Although I do really like the basic Chorus and Phaser modulation stuff for voice processing for robot voices. Aaron: You wrote the music for the show. Is the music going to be available somewhere else later? Dan: Marc and I would really like to release an album of the music from our shows. It's something we want to do and there's a few reasons we haven't done it yet. One reason is time. I'm very skittish about making sure everything is mixed properly. I wouldn't want to release the music stand alone unless I was absolutely sure it was put together well. The other reason is that I write most of the music for our shows, but we do have some songs that are done with side collaborators and I would want to make sure it's done legally and copywrite-wise we were in the clear. I want to sign some kind of licensing or formal distribution agreement to make sure everyone is happy money-wise. The song from episode one was me ripping off Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I'm a big fan of their scoring work. Music & Sound Effect Creation for Podcasts Aaron: Let's talk about how you achieved that effect for the song in the sample clip I played earlier. I'm guessing you had the sound of the footsteps on a ladder. Is that something you recorded yourself or is that something you got out of the sound library? Dan: I used several different libraries for that. There's a mixture of some simulated ladder movement in there, like arms reaching and hands grabbing the rungs of the ladder. There's also some pure metal footsteps in there. When I was originally putting that together, there were six or seven tracks, three of which were cloth movements and body motions and three of which were footsteps. Some were more foregrounded, like when one character named Jeremy is counting his steps. His footsteps are louder because he's drawing attention to the fact that he's counting them. The others are more off to the side to evoke the sense of space and depth, because presumably, they're going down a circular enclosure to a vault. That was a real pain to put together. Aaron: I can't believe you recorded clothes rustling to make this realistic. Dan: I can't speak to film, tv, or video, but part of what makes the footsteps convincing in audio dramas is the footsteps being good, but also having cloth movement and fabric rustling. Aaron: With headphones and soundscapes, you have left and right channels, obviously. What do you do when you're trying to make something seem like it's coming from above or below. Is there any way to achieve that affect? Dan: In episode two of Deep Vault, where two characters crash through the floor of the room their in, they're down there for a bit, and then you hear them crawling up through the crash hole to the other characters that are above them. I think it worked pretty well. I think the sequence of the narrative and that you hear them crash through the floor first and the space change around them helps to establish that. It's just a matter of having more reverb and/or more delay on the voices that are further away than the voices that are close to you. I'm still figuring out what my philosophy on panning things is for the Deep Vault. It's an ensemble cast with four actors talking at once, I have them panned around the clock—some are hard left, some are hard right, and some are close to the center. Usually if characters are interrogating or trying to get information from another character or recording, I'll try to have whatever recording or character they're talking to in the center to give the sense that they're gathered around this new source of information they're trying to learn. As far as making things sound far away or from above or below, it's a matter of adding more reverb to the things that are farther away and hoping the sense of space translates. Aaron: I think it does most of the time, but it's something I'm curious about. I'm thinking about the future with virtual reality and how they're going to handle the different angles of sound. Have you had a chance to try VR yet? Dan: No, but I have some friends who told me I need to do it and I really want to. I have some friends who say Google Cardboard alone is incredible. I'm curious what that technology is like, but also what it's going to mean for sound. I'm curious what sound for VR is going to be like and how it's going to differ from the old guard, but also how it's going to use some of the same techniques to make a realistic experience. Aaron: I used the equivalent to Google Cardboard, not even one of the great ones, and it blew my mind. It's going to be a game-changer. Maybe we'll both have future careers in sound design for VR applications. Dan: I'm just trying to stay ahead with what's new for sound design because I'm afraid of being replaced by robots. It's something I think about regularly. Am I doing something that will still be done by a human in 20 years? I feel ok about it most of the time, but you never know. Aaron: I like to think that you'll still have a job because you're being creative and you're doing things that take a human. I guess we'll see. Let's talk about then music a little more. You did this transition where you have this music playing over the sound of the footsteps, and the footsteps blend into the beat of the music. Did you write the beat first? Were you listening to the pattern of the footsteps or did you go back and match those things up later? Dan: They were matched up later, but my choice of percussion samples definitely made them more easily blendable. With the exception of the kick drum, which is more of a classic, electronic bass-pulse kick drum, everything else is found percussion—everyday objects being tapped on. Things like chairs, bags, or plastic silverware. I like working with low-fi sound percussion samples. I think the fact the percussion track in the song isn't a real snare drum recorded in a studio helps serve as the connective tissue between the footsteps and their percussiveness and the song's percussion, and it's driving the melody forward. The hardest part of any narrative creative medium is the transition between two parts. It glues two things together that work well on their own. Sonically, that could be a good example of choosing the right percussion sample in the context of this being a score rather than a stand alone song. Perhaps if this was just a song released on an EP and it wasn't meant to score anything, it would sound better with a non-found percussion or some other type of sound. Sound Proofing vs. Sound Treatment for Podcasts Aaron: Let's jump into some mistakes or hard times you came across when you started doing Archive 81 and the Deep Vault. What are some of the things you struggled with? Dan: I do have one thing about recording in a bedroom. The bedroom we recorded in sounded really good as far as bedrooms go, but we had only ever tested the sound in the room at night when everyone else in the house was really quiet. When it came to production time, we were recording during the three most blizzardy weeks in January when every person was holed up in their apartment in New York City. Above my friend's bedroom is a family with five teenagers, so we had to pause all the time because there were so many footsteps, running water, and cooking sounds. We didn't plan for all of that. I realized that, even though acoustically the room sounded very good, there was no isolation from what's above and outside. That was definitely an error I made in trying to plan the space. The next time, we paid for a real studio, because as cool as it is to record in a good-sounding bedroom for free, it's worth that money to not have to stop every take for outside noise. When you're pausing takes like that for noise coming from upstairs or outside, you're losing the groove you have with the actors. The actors might move around if you have to wait for 10 minutes between a scene and you might have to reset levels, which makes it harder to set levels in post and mix. That was a real learning experience. Make sure you understand what's happening in your environment before you choose a space to record in. Aaron: That applies to regular podcasting too. Someone asked me the other day, “How do I soundproof my room?” They're actually asking two different questions: “How do I make the sound of my room less noisy?” and, “How do I keep outside noise from coming in?” First, you have to stop noise from computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, and the sound of your voice from bouncing off the walls and being recorded by your mic. Then you have to soundproof the room so that the external sounds aren't picked up by your mic. For me, I have three windows directly in front of me and it's an old house, so the windows aren't soundproof at all. If someone was running a lawn mower outside of my window, everyone would hear it. Soundproofing is making sure noises from outside don't come in. Sound treatment is making sure there aren't noises inside your room causing problems in your audio. Know Your Limits Aaron: Any other mistakes or things that stood out throughout this process? Dan: There are so many. The question is what's a useful mistake to talk about, and what's one I perpetually torture myself about at night? I'll talk about casting. With Archive 81, we didn't have a system for how we went about casting it. We put the character notices out on Craigslist one at a time and auditioned and chose people piecemeal. It worked out for the most part, but there were some characters where we were in a real bind because we didn't have enough people in time, so we had to choose the best option. I would have liked to have more options. I pretty much did all the casting for the first season and I didn't go about it systematically, so for the Deep Vault, I wanted to make sure I did it more systematically. I spent a whole weekend auditioning people and planned in advance the characters they were auditioning for and allot time slots throughout the day so I could do it all at once. That was good and it was organized, but I packed too many people in one weekend, so by Sunday afternoon it was too much. I'm pretty introverted by nature and I think I chose my line of work in the technical side of audio production because a lot of times, it's just you and the machine. You do need other skills and to be able to talk to people professionally, but you also spend a lot of time alone, which I'm fine with. I definitely love socialising, like on this interview, but I'll be glad to go back to my little audio hole. That Sunday after three eight-hour days of auditioning and reading lines in character for these people, I was totally depleted. I think I've learned I need to be more systematic about it, but that I also need to spread it out over a few weekends in advance as opposed to trying to do it all in one weekend. Aaron: I'm a productivity nerd when it comes to planning out my days and making sure I have stuff to do. There's a lot I want to accomplish, but when you first get into that, you tend to overestimate what you can accomplish. You think you can do meaningful work for 12 or 14 hours and you don't realize that you can take on too much and say yes to too many things. Half way through, you've given it all you have for six hours and you're worn out and you feel guilty because you didn't do all the things you said you were going to do. It's good to plan and try that stuff so that you know next time not to plan 12 hours of work for both Saturday and Sunday. Maybe you can do that, but you don't know until you try. Start by planning and make notes about how it goes and you'll have a better understanding about yourself and your stamina for the next time. Dan: That speaks to the more general philosophy that doing it is the only way you'll know what your own patterns are, what works for you, and what doesn't work for you. Be open to some trial and error for your own personal workflow. It's easy to look up to certain human accomplishments and think, “This great musician practiced for 12 hours a day, so I must have to do that to be the Rachmaninoff of podcasting,” but at the same time, there are successful and accomplished people who have more human and normal working hour regimens. Trent Reznor is one of those people and it's obvious from his output that he's someone who never stops working. That works for him, but some people need more time to unwind and not get burnt out on things. Dan's Advice for Aspiring Podcasters Aaron: What kind of advice or tips would you give to someone who's interested in doing something like Archive 81 or Deep Vault—a found sound or radio drama podcast? I've noticed in the last year or two they're skyrocketing in terms of popularity. I think there's a lot of people who might be turning the idea over in their mind. What would you say to those people? Dan: The first thing is the writing and acting has to be really good. Have people you can trust give you feedback and critique who you can run things by. If the source material and story doesn't work, then everything that follows isn't going to work either. If you've never done a podcast before, be prepared for many ours of sedentary work. Doing this kind of work takes a lot time and it's a lot of time you have to spend alone in front of a computer. I lost count of the number of times this summer my friends said, “Hey, we're going to the beach. Want to come?” or other things I wanted to do and I had to blow them off because I was editing or doing revisions. Be prepared for that and make sure you're ok with that. If you need a lot of time outside of the house and you really need a social life, maybe this particular kind of podcasting isn't right for you. Interviewing is a very different thing. I don't like to be preachy about exercise, but I do think it's good to exercise if you're doing sedentary creative work because it makes the mind work better and for me, it puts me more at ease. Aaron: I'm with you on that, so two out of two podcasters recommend exercise and good sleep. Dan: Go out there and do it. Work hard and tell the story you want to tell. Don't make anything because you think it'll sell or bring an audience. Marc and I made Archive 81 because we thought it was a cool idea. What you make should be in conversation with your audience, but don't make something just because you think it'll get a lot of downloads. I still feel like I'm learning a lot and trying to figure all this stuff out. Keep an open mind and stay open to learning new things as you go along. I still study sound design with a mentor because there's always new levels I can push myself towards and I don't want to get too comfortable. Sound Design Resources Aaron: Are there any books, websites, or online courses for someone who's a total beginner, or someone like me who is relatively familiar with recording, mixing, and producing music and podcasts but hasn't really gotten into sound design? Dan: Transom.org is a great resource. Although it is geared towards beginners in radio and podcasting, I still find articles on there I can learn from. I think it has a good intro overview to things like sound design. I can't name anything specific, but for a few years now, when I want to learn more about a subject, I find someone I like and relate to who's established in that field and I reach out to them asking for some one-on-one mentoring lessons. That's something I think is worth paying for. Most people will take $50 for a few hours to talk about it. No matter what artistic discipline you're in, it's helpful to find people who are established in your field, reach out to them, and ask for some direct advice. That's what's been the most helpful for me. If there's a sound designer, composer, or radio producer you admire, reach out and see if that's an option. I don't think Ira Glass is capable of doing private lessons with as busy as he is, but I'm sure there are other people who are really good at what they do who are capable. Aaron: There's people at all different levels on this journey. We're talking about audio specifically, but it's true for anything. There are famous people you've heard of and then there's people in the middle who have more experience than you but maybe aren't quite so famous yet. Surrounding yourself with people who share your passion and interests on your skill level is great, but try reaching out and offering to pay for some consulting. Chances are they like talking about that stuff, but it is good to pay people for their time. That makes sure they're invested and they're not feeling like you're taking advantage of their time. Audio engineers have to make money to buy gear! Field Recording Gear and Tips for Podcasters Aaron: Diana asks, “What's your setup for mobile recording?” She's about to start a podcast and will be doing some traveling. I know there are times where you take microphones out into the real world to do field recordings. What's your setup? Is it the same mics and a portable recording device? Dan: A Sennheiser MD421 or a Shure SM58 will work great because most dynamic microphones are good at sound isolation. Another good option to consider would be the Sennheiser ME66 Shotgun Mic, which is a great short shotgun microphone. That's good for both ambient sound and interview recordings in a live setting. It's in the $200 to $300 range and you can find it on eBay, Craigslist, Guitar Center, or Reverb.com for much cheaper. Aaron: What device do you record into? Dan: The Zoom H5 or H6 is a fantastic piece of recording equipment. You can find that new for $300 or used for way less. It's a solid improvement over the H4N in many ways. There's less handling noise, it's less noisy, and the majority of people looking into podcasting would do great with one of those. Aaron: I think this is a situation a lot of people will get in. When you're out and about and recording, you have to think about the noise in the room and the ambient noise, and if there's a possibility of a lot of noise where you are. Coffee shops and crowded restaurants aren't going to be great for getting clean audio. You'll also want to set input gain levels correctly, so you can be sure the levels coming into the microphone doesn't hit zero and clip. You want to keep the highest peaks coming in around -12 DB. What's your thought on that? What do you aim for? Dan: I aim for -12 to -6 at absolute highest for both studio and in the field. I always stuck by that as universal truth of audio, but when I was doing some sound design training this summer with the person I was mentoring under, for sound effects recording, he was advising me to capture things at as high of a signal level as possible without clipping. Being able to focus and isolate the sound source that way really is much more beneficial when you're trying to make a sound effect at non-dialog level. Aaron: Did you have limiters on in that situation? Dan: I usually keep the limiters on, but I try not to hit them. I record on my rooftop a lot. Sometimes I get up at 6am and record the morning rush as it starts to unfold and I usually need the limiters to catch a truck horn or a plane that flies overhead. If you're in a noisy environment, that's another good case for using a dynamic microphone because it does isolate the sound source pretty well. When I was in school, I did a student radio project for a radio podcast production class where I was riding the campus buses and I was on one of those buses on a Friday night when it was filled with drunk kids going from one frat house to another. You can imagine how quiet that was. I was using a dynamic mic and it worked pretty well when I was cutting the interviews together. It had that loud, crazy ambience in the background, but if I held it pretty close to the speaker, I could still isolate them in a way that worked for the final product. Think about how the ambience and background noise where you're recording can contribute to the story and the feel of your whole piece. Dan: With all the woes that came with recording Archive 81 in a bedroom with loud upstairs neighbors, I do think the fact that it felt like an apartment helped the actors get the vibe. I'm not sure how much of that translated sonically, because it's hard for me to be objective about it at this point, but I do think that background worked for that piece. In theory, I would like to do more location recording for audio dramas. If something takes place on a busy street corner, I'd like to get out there with a more formal production sound rig and record it, but Marc and I work at a pretty intense pace and it's not always easy to coordinate that. Many times it makes the most sense to do it in the studio and create the atmosphere after the fact, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't. Aaron: Do what your gut says and plan for it. Last week, Marc said one of the hardest thing for him is the time constraints. I definitely feel that too. My podcast isn't anything complicated but it still takes a few hours to produce. When you have a full-time job, other projects, and people you want to hang out with, you really have to focus on what you want to say yes to and what you have to say no to. _Huge thanks to Dan and Marc for taking time out of their busy schedules to talk with me. If you've enjoyed these interviews, head over to their Patreon page and support these guys. Links: Dead Signals Productions Archive 81 Deep Vault Podcast: https://podcastingwithaaron.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/aaronpodcasting Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/aarondowd Blog: https://www.aarondowd.com Recommended Gear: https://kit.co/PodcastingwithAaron
Dan Powell is one half of Dead Signals Production, creator of the popular Archive 81 and Deep Vault found sound, radio drama podcasts.In this episode, we talk about his recording process, how he designs sound, and his editing process. He shares some of the hurdles he overcame while producing podcasts and what advice he’d give to anyone interested in making a modern radio drama.Key Takeaways:Don’t buy your gear new—if you buy the best gear used, it’ll last you forever.The hardest part of any narrative creative medium is the transition between two parts.Make sure you understand what’s happening in your environment before you choose a space to record in.What you make should be in conversation with your audience, but don’t make something just because it’ll get a lot of downloads.Find people who are established in your field, reach out to them, and ask for some direct advice.Think about how the ambience and background noise where you’re recording can contribute to the story and the feel of your whole piece.Aaron: Hey Dan, thanks for joining me today. Tell me a little bit about yourself—where you’re from and where you are now. Maybe a little bit about what your path to audio and podcasting has looked like over the course of your life.Dan: I was born in Rome, Georgia and I was there until I was about 18. It was a medium/small size town in the middle of the woods. I spent a lot of time by myself alone with my thoughts, which is probably what caused me to gravitate to sci-fi, horror, and secular fiction. I began making radio dramas at the age of eight or nine. I used Window 95 Sound Recorder to make these one-man shows.Sometimes it would be me and sometimes it would be my friends, and we would get in front of a microphone and see what happened. That’s really what introduced me to audio editing and creative sound design. From an early age, I was interested in what would happen if you slowed down, sped up, or changed the pitch of your voice.I went to Syracuse University for college and majored in English. I loved reading and still really do, but I realized I was spending all my free time in studios recording my friend’s bands (or recording myself), and that working with audio might be a good career path. I’d always been interested in creative writing, but I thought it might be good to develop a more technical skill or trade that I could have on the side while writing.I ended up really enjoying working with audio and I decided to make that my primary creative and career pursuit. After school I moved to New York City. I interned, I did some odd jobs, I worked at an Apple store, and I eventually got my first job in the sound industry at Soundsnap, a commercial sound effects library. I did that full time for about two years and then transitioned to working there part time while making more time for freelance work, sound engineering, and working on my own podcast on the side. That’s where I’m at now.Aaron: You met Marc (the other half of Dead Signals) in college?Dan: Yeah, Marc and I met his senior year and my post-senior year. I stayed after I graduated to do a fellowship in audio engineering and sound design. One of the cool things about Syracuse is they have this program where if you get to the end of your four years and you decide you want to do something different than what you studied, you can apply for a fellowship that will let you stay an extra year. You basically get a free year of credits that you can do what you want with. I did that after I finished studying English so I could build up my portfolio and get some more one-on-one mentoring strictly with audio stuff. That’s where Marc and I met.Aaron: Then you guys formed Dead Signals Productions.Dan: We formed Dead Signals this time last year. Marc came and visited me in New York and we were talking about ideas we had. The project we worked on together in college was Marc’s senior thesis project, a radio play he wrote and produced. I was just acting in it, playing the lead. More recently, starting last year, was when we started collaborating and both giving equal input for the project.Recording Radio Drama PodcastsAaron: Let’s talk about Archive 81 and Deep Vault, the recording process and the tools you use to handle the editing. Marc said you guys recorded Archive 81 in a bedroom. Do you remember which mic you used for that?Dan: It was the Sennheiser MKH 8040. I got this mic because it’s a really good all-purpose sound design mic. It’s good for all-purpose folio recording, like footsteps, fabric movements, and every day objects you want to record. It’s also really good for ambient field recording. We recorded the dialog with this mic and another mic called a Sennheiser MKH30, which is a bi-directional stereo mic. The two of these things together form a really good pair for mid-side stereo recording.What I was really interested in when I bought these mics was, one, it was the best deal I found on eBay, and two, I was interested in doing more ambient field recording. Living in New York City there’s so many interesting sounds everywhere. There are neighborhoods, parks, and subways. You can turn a corner and be in an entirely different sonic landscape than you were just in.I wanted something that was good for capturing my environment, but when it came down to produce Archive 81, after doing some tests, we realized that these mics would work just as well for dialog recording. I personally would have liked to use a wider diaphragm AKG microphone, but I still think the mics we used worked well for recording dialog. It’s good gear and it’s what we had available at the time.Aaron: I know a lot of podcasters who use $60 or $70 USB mics and there’s a big difference in quality between those and the MKH. What do they run used, close to $1,000?Dan: Close to $1,000. The mic I’m on right now goes for about $1,200 new, but I’m a big Craigslist and eBay deal-hunter. When I was first getting into audio, one of the best pieces of advice I got was when I was talking to someone five years my senior who’s successful and established in the music production scene here in New York. He said:Don’t buy your gear new. Even if you buy the best gear used, it’ll still last you forever.He told me, “I’ve made a spreadsheet of every piece of equipment I’ve purchased from when I first started out. Collectively I’ve saved about $30,000.” That really stuck with me, so now I only buy used gear. I got the mic I’m talking on now for about half of what it would cost new.Aaron: I’m currently on a Shure BETA 87A, which costs $250 new and I think I paid $120 for it used at Guitar Center and it’s an awesome sounding mic for podcasting.Dan: I like the richness of it. In general, I really like dynamic mics for podcasts. I like the rich low end and the proximity effect you can get. I use the mics I use because I want to have a lot of applications for things like sound design and field recording, but I don’t want to make it seem like you have to buy a $700 or $1,000 microphone. I’ve seen people get fantastic results with an SM58, which I use when I do event recording gigs. You can get one of those used on Craigslist for $50 in most cases. In many cases, it’s probably more ideal if you’re at home instead of a treated acoustic space because dynamic microphones do a better job of isolating the sound source and not picking up your refrigerator, your roommate, or your neighbors yelling at each other.Aaron: I agree. I love the large diaphragm condensers, but you do need a quiet, treated room to make them sound good and not pick up a bunch of sound. Alright; let’s talk about sound design. Here’s a clip of episode one of Deep Vault, which has some dialog with some reverb on. I wanted to ask you about that, and about the part in the music where the footsteps transition into the beat of the song.First, let’s talk about the ambience and reverb you used. As I’m listening to it, there’s some kind of ambient sound in that. I’m not sure if it’s reverb in the space you recorded it in or if it’s reverb you added afterward. There’s also an air conditioning kind of “swoosh” background ambience. Can you describe how you achieved those effects?Dan: None of that reverb is natural. It’s all added in post. I exclusively use impulse response reverb, which is basically the ability to capture the sonic snapshot of a real, indoor space by going in and blasting a sign wave or white noise in it and then recording the echo that comes afterwards, then notching out the original sign wave in post. This gives a ghost emanation of what a space actually sounds like.There’s two reverbs fading out and in. There’s the outdoor reverb, which I have a light touch on. It’s meant to evoke the sense that the space is outdoors and then there’s the echo-y underground reverb of the vault they’re about to go into. If you listen prior to them entering the vault, you can hear how it evolves from one space to another. I think very visually when I’m working on it. I’ve said this a lot in various interviews, but because I’m working with Marc on the scripts from the beginning, I don’t really think of this as post production.I’m always thinking about space and sonics as I’m reading the first draft of a show.I usually visually map out or make a flow chart of what the space looks like and how things need to transition from one stage to another. That helps me focus better. In the background, we have a desert ambient sound. It’s a field recording of a desert that’s near an urban area. You have some wind and outdoor air atmosphere, called the air tone, which is the outdoor equivalent of a room tone. If you search Soundsnap for air tone, you’ll find a bunch of ambient recordings of outdoor air spaces that don’t have crowds, people, or traffic.It’s more a general wash like you hear in that clip. There’s the air tone and then there’s the vault sounds—the ambient sounds of the space they’re going into, which is a field recording by a field recordist named Stephan March. I think it’s some recordings of some abandoned bomb shelters on the Danish coast. It’s some industrial room tones with some distant waves, but they have an underground low-fi industrial roominess to them. Those things blend together to create the atmosphere of the vault.Aaron: I’m embarrassed to say it now, but I was thinking these were effects you could achieve with something like the reverbs that come with ProTools or Logic Pro X. What program do you use to do all this stuff with?Dan: I use ProTools for editing, mixing, and basic sound effect placement. For what’s referred to as composite sound effects design—designing a sound effect that needs a lot more depth to it than what you can pull from a library as is—I use Logic. I do that for two reasons. One, I think it’s good to have separation between sound effect editing and show editing. I like to be in two different programs when I’m creating the sound of a robot or a door and when I’m editing the show. Having the different software environment helps to streamline that.The other reason is, though I do think ProTools is great, I think it’s very flawed for making things creatively from scratch. I would never write a song or demo a song in ProTools because I don’t think the user experience is tailored toward composition, whether that’s composing a song or compositing a sound effect from scratch.It’s great for editing and taking material that’s aesthetically already done—like you recording a guitar through an amp—but if you’re trying to dial in the tone of a guitar, I prefer to use Logic, something a little more built for making music from scratch. For this scene, I used pretty much all ProTools because I wasn’t designing anything beyond simply layering things together and the reverb that goes along with that. I wrote the music in Logic.Dan’s Favorite Editing Programs and PluginsAaron: Are there any stock plugins you use inside of Logic or do you have any favorites?Dan: I use Logic’s modular synth plugin, the ES2, a lot because I know it really well. It has a very particular sound but I’ve been using it for many years, and I can dial in the sound I want pretty quickly with it. I probably should learn some more synth plugins so I don’t get set in my ways.Aaron: What about reverb or special effects? I know there’s like 50 stock plugins inside Logic.Dan: Space Designer Plugin for Logic Pro X is incredible. It’s a great impulse response reverb plugin. I use Waves IR1 for the reverb in this scene, but it could have as easily been achieved with the stock Logic Space Designer plugin, probably easier even, because they have a larger native sample library. Any sound designer you talk to will say that Space Designer is the best free stock plugin of anything. That’s a big one. There aren’t a lot of other stock Logic plugins I use for sound design in terms of compositing. Although I do really like the basic Chorus and Phaser modulation stuff for voice processing for robot voices.Aaron: You wrote the music for the show. Is the music going to be available somewhere else later?Dan: Marc and I would really like to release an album of the music from our shows. It’s something we want to do and there’s a few reasons we haven’t done it yet. One reason is time. I’m very skittish about making sure everything is mixed properly. I wouldn’t want to release the music stand alone unless I was absolutely sure it was put together well. The other reason is that I write most of the music for our shows, but we do have some songs that are done with side collaborators and I would want to make sure it’s done legally and copywrite-wise we were in the clear. I want to sign some kind of licensing or formal distribution agreement to make sure everyone is happy money-wise. The song from episode one was me ripping off Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. I’m a big fan of their scoring work.Music & Sound Effect Creation for PodcastsAaron: Let’s talk about how you achieved that effect for the song in the sample clip I played earlier. I’m guessing you had the sound of the footsteps on a ladder. Is that something you recorded yourself or is that something you got out of the sound library?Dan: I used several different libraries for that. There’s a mixture of some simulated ladder movement in there, like arms reaching and hands grabbing the rungs of the ladder. There’s also some pure metal footsteps in there. When I was originally putting that together, there were six or seven tracks, three of which were cloth movements and body motions and three of which were footsteps.Some were more foregrounded, like when one character named Jeremy is counting his steps. His footsteps are louder because he’s drawing attention to the fact that he’s counting them. The others are more off to the side to evoke the sense of space and depth, because presumably, they’re going down a circular enclosure to a vault. That was a real pain to put together.Aaron: I can’t believe you recorded clothes rustling to make this realistic.Dan: I can’t speak to film, tv, or video, but part of what makes the footsteps convincing in audio dramas is the footsteps being good, but also having cloth movement and fabric rustling.Aaron: With headphones and soundscapes, you have left and right channels, obviously. What do you do when you’re trying to make something seem like it’s coming from above or below. Is there any way to achieve that affect?Dan: In episode two of Deep Vault, where two characters crash through the floor of the room their in, they’re down there for a bit, and then you hear them crawling up through the crash hole to the other characters that are above them. I think it worked pretty well. I think the sequence of the narrative and that you hear them crash through the floor first and the space change around them helps to establish that.It’s just a matter of having more reverb and/or more delay on the voices that are further away than the voices that are close to you. I’m still figuring out what my philosophy on panning things is for the Deep Vault. It’s an ensemble cast with four actors talking at once, I have them panned around the clock—some are hard left, some are hard right, and some are close to the center.Usually if characters are interrogating or trying to get information from another character or recording, I’ll try to have whatever recording or character they’re talking to in the center to give the sense that they’re gathered around this new source of information they’re trying to learn. As far as making things sound far away or from above or below, it’s a matter of adding more reverb to the things that are farther away and hoping the sense of space translates.Aaron: I think it does most of the time, but it’s something I’m curious about. I’m thinking about the future with virtual reality and how they’re going to handle the different angles of sound. Have you had a chance to try VR yet?Dan: No, but I have some friends who told me I need to do it and I really want to. I have some friends who say Google Cardboard alone is incredible. I’m curious what that technology is like, but also what it’s going to mean for sound. I’m curious what sound for VR is going to be like and how it’s going to differ from the old guard, but also how it’s going to use some of the same techniques to make a realistic experience.Aaron: I used the equivalent to Google Cardboard, not even one of the great ones, and it blew my mind. It’s going to be a game-changer. Maybe we’ll both have future careers in sound design for VR applications.Dan: I’m just trying to stay ahead with what’s new for sound design because I’m afraid of being replaced by robots. It’s something I think about regularly. Am I doing something that will still be done by a human in 20 years? I feel ok about it most of the time, but you never know.Aaron: I like to think that you’ll still have a job because you’re being creative and you’re doing things that take a human. I guess we’ll see.Let’s talk about then music a little more. You did this transition where you have this music playing over the sound of the footsteps, and the footsteps blend into the beat of the music. Did you write the beat first? Were you listening to the pattern of the footsteps or did you go back and match those things up later?Dan: They were matched up later, but my choice of percussion samples definitely made them more easily blendable. With the exception of the kick drum, which is more of a classic, electronic bass-pulse kick drum, everything else is found percussion—everyday objects being tapped on. Things like chairs, bags, or plastic silverware. I like working with low-fi sound percussion samples. I think the fact the percussion track in the song isn’t a real snare drum recorded in a studio helps serve as the connective tissue between the footsteps and their percussiveness and the song’s percussion, and it’s driving the melody forward.The hardest part of any narrative creative medium is the transition between two parts.It glues two things together that work well on their own. Sonically, that could be a good example of choosing the right percussion sample in the context of this being a score rather than a stand alone song. Perhaps if this was just a song released on an EP and it wasn’t meant to score anything, it would sound better with a non-found percussion or some other type of sound.Sound Proofing vs. Sound Treatment for PodcastsAaron: Let’s jump into some mistakes or hard times you came across when you started doing Archive 81 and the Deep Vault. What are some of the things you struggled with?Dan: I do have one thing about recording in a bedroom. The bedroom we recorded in sounded really good as far as bedrooms go, but we had only ever tested the sound in the room at night when everyone else in the house was really quiet.When it came to production time, we were recording during the three most blizzardy weeks in January when every person was holed up in their apartment in New York City. Above my friend’s bedroom is a family with five teenagers, so we had to pause all the time because there were so many footsteps, running water, and cooking sounds. We didn’t plan for all of that.I realized that, even though acoustically the room sounded very good, there was no isolation from what’s above and outside. That was definitely an error I made in trying to plan the space. The next time, we paid for a real studio, because as cool as it is to record in a good-sounding bedroom for free, it’s worth that money to not have to stop every take for outside noise.When you’re pausing takes like that for noise coming from upstairs or outside, you’re losing the groove you have with the actors. The actors might move around if you have to wait for 10 minutes between a scene and you might have to reset levels, which makes it harder to set levels in post and mix. That was a real learning experience.Make sure you understand what’s happening in your environment before you choose a space to record in.Aaron: That applies to regular podcasting too. Someone asked me the other day, “How do I soundproof my room?”They’re actually asking two different questions: “How do I make the sound of my room less noisy?” and, “How do I keep outside noise from coming in?” First, you have to stop noise from computers, air conditioners, refrigerators, and the sound of your voice from bouncing off the walls and being recorded by your mic. Then you have to soundproof the room so that the external sounds aren’t picked up by your mic. For me, I have three windows directly in front of me and it’s an old house, so the windows aren’t soundproof at all. If someone was running a lawn mower outside of my window, everyone would hear it.Soundproofing is making sure noises from outside don’t come in. Sound treatment is making sure there aren’t noises inside your room causing problems in your audio.Know Your LimitsAaron: Any other mistakes or things that stood out throughout this process?Dan: There are so many. The question is what’s a useful mistake to talk about, and what’s one I perpetually torture myself about at night? I’ll talk about casting. With Archive 81, we didn’t have a system for how we went about casting it. We put the character notices out on Craigslist one at a time and auditioned and chose people piecemeal. It worked out for the most part, but there were some characters where we were in a real bind because we didn’t have enough people in time, so we had to choose the best option. I would have liked to have more options.I pretty much did all the casting for the first season and I didn’t go about it systematically, so for the Deep Vault, I wanted to make sure I did it more systematically. I spent a whole weekend auditioning people and planned in advance the characters they were auditioning for and allot time slots throughout the day so I could do it all at once. That was good and it was organized, but I packed too many people in one weekend, so by Sunday afternoon it was too much.I’m pretty introverted by nature and I think I chose my line of work in the technical side of audio production because a lot of times, it’s just you and the machine. You do need other skills and to be able to talk to people professionally, but you also spend a lot of time alone, which I’m fine with. I definitely love socialising, like on this interview, but I’ll be glad to go back to my little audio hole.That Sunday after three eight-hour days of auditioning and reading lines in character for these people, I was totally depleted. I think I’ve learned I need to be more systematic about it, but that I also need to spread it out over a few weekends in advance as opposed to trying to do it all in one weekend.Aaron: I’m a productivity nerd when it comes to planning out my days and making sure I have stuff to do. There’s a lot I want to accomplish, but when you first get into that, you tend to overestimate what you can accomplish. You think you can do meaningful work for 12 or 14 hours and you don’t realize that you can take on too much and say yes to too many things.Half way through, you’ve given it all you have for six hours and you’re worn out and you feel guilty because you didn’t do all the things you said you were going to do. It’s good to plan and try that stuff so that you know next time not to plan 12 hours of work for both Saturday and Sunday. Maybe you can do that, but you don’t know until you try. Start by planning and make notes about how it goes and you’ll have a better understanding about yourself and your stamina for the next time.Dan: That speaks to the more general philosophy that doing it is the only way you’ll know what your own patterns are, what works for you, and what doesn’t work for you. Be open to some trial and error for your own personal workflow. It’s easy to look up to certain human accomplishments and think, “This great musician practiced for 12 hours a day, so I must have to do that to be the Rachmaninoff of podcasting,” but at the same time, there are successful and accomplished people who have more human and normal working hour regimens. Trent Reznor is one of those people and it’s obvious from his output that he’s someone who never stops working. That works for him, but some people need more time to unwind and not get burnt out on things.Dan’s Advice for Aspiring PodcastersAaron: What kind of advice or tips would you give to someone who’s interested in doing something like Archive 81 or Deep Vault—a found sound or radio drama podcast? I’ve noticed in the last year or two they’re skyrocketing in terms of popularity. I think there’s a lot of people who might be turning the idea over in their mind. What would you say to those people?Dan: The first thing is the writing and acting has to be really good. Have people you can trust give you feedback and critique who you can run things by. If the source material and story doesn’t work, then everything that follows isn’t going to work either. If you’ve never done a podcast before, be prepared for many ours of sedentary work. Doing this kind of work takes a lot time and it’s a lot of time you have to spend alone in front of a computer.I lost count of the number of times this summer my friends said, “Hey, we’re going to the beach. Want to come?” or other things I wanted to do and I had to blow them off because I was editing or doing revisions. Be prepared for that and make sure you’re ok with that.If you need a lot of time outside of the house and you really need a social life, maybe this particular kind of podcasting isn’t right for you. Interviewing is a very different thing. I don’t like to be preachy about exercise, but I do think it’s good to exercise if you’re doing sedentary creative work because it makes the mind work better and for me, it puts me more at ease.Aaron: I’m with you on that, so two out of two podcasters recommend exercise and good sleep.Dan: Go out there and do it. Work hard and tell the story you want to tell. Don’t make anything because you think it’ll sell or bring an audience. Marc and I made Archive 81 because we thought it was a cool idea.What you make should be in conversation with your audience, but don’t make something just because you think it’ll get a lot of downloads.I still feel like I’m learning a lot and trying to figure all this stuff out. Keep an open mind and stay open to learning new things as you go along. I still study sound design with a mentor because there’s always new levels I can push myself towards and I don’t want to get too comfortable.Sound Design ResourcesAaron: Are there any books, websites, or online courses for someone who’s a total beginner, or someone like me who is relatively familiar with recording, mixing, and producing music and podcasts but hasn’t really gotten into sound design?Dan: Transom.org is a great resource. Although it is geared towards beginners in radio and podcasting, I still find articles on there I can learn from. I think it has a good intro overview to things like sound design. I can’t name anything specific, but for a few years now, when I want to learn more about a subject, I find someone I like and relate to who’s established in that field and I reach out to them asking for some one-on-one mentoring lessons. That’s something I think is worth paying for. Most people will take $50 for a few hours to talk about it.No matter what artistic discipline you’re in, it’s helpful to find people who are established in your field, reach out to them, and ask for some direct advice.That’s what’s been the most helpful for me. If there’s a sound designer, composer, or radio producer you admire, reach out and see if that’s an option. I don’t think Ira Glass is capable of doing private lessons with as busy as he is, but I’m sure there are other people who are really good at what they do who are capable.Aaron: There’s people at all different levels on this journey. We’re talking about audio specifically, but it’s true for anything. There are famous people you’ve heard of and then there’s people in the middle who have more experience than you but maybe aren’t quite so famous yet. Surrounding yourself with people who share your passion and interests on your skill level is great, but try reaching out and offering to pay for some consulting.Chances are they like talking about that stuff, but it is good to pay people for their time. That makes sure they’re invested and they’re not feeling like you’re taking advantage of their time. Audio engineers have to make money to buy gear!Field Recording Gear and Tips for PodcastersAaron: Diana asks, “What’s your setup for mobile recording?” She’s about to start a podcast and will be doing some traveling. I know there are times where you take microphones out into the real world to do field recordings. What’s your setup? Is it the same mics and a portable recording device?Dan: A Sennheiser MD421 or a Shure SM58 will work great because most dynamic microphones are good at sound isolation.Another good option to consider would be the Sennheiser ME66 Shotgun Mic, which is a great short shotgun microphone. That’s good for both ambient sound and interview recordings in a live setting. It’s in the $200 to $300 range and you can find it on eBay, Craigslist, Guitar Center, or Reverb.com for much cheaper.Aaron: What device do you record into?Dan: The Zoom H5 or H6 is a fantastic piece of recording equipment. You can find that new for $300 or used for way less. It’s a solid improvement over the H4N in many ways. There’s less handling noise, it’s less noisy, and the majority of people looking into podcasting would do great with one of those.Aaron: I think this is a situation a lot of people will get in. When you’re out and about and recording, you have to think about the noise in the room and the ambient noise, and if there’s a possibility of a lot of noise where you are. Coffee shops and crowded restaurants aren’t going to be great for getting clean audio. You'll also want to set input gain levels correctly, so you can be sure the levels coming into the microphone doesn’t hit zero and clip. You want to keep the highest peaks coming in around -12 DB. What’s your thought on that? What do you aim for?Dan: I aim for -12 to -6 at absolute highest for both studio and in the field. I always stuck by that as universal truth of audio, but when I was doing some sound design training this summer with the person I was mentoring under, for sound effects recording, he was advising me to capture things at as high of a signal level as possible without clipping. Being able to focus and isolate the sound source that way really is much more beneficial when you’re trying to make a sound effect at non-dialog level.Aaron: Did you have limiters on in that situation?Dan: I usually keep the limiters on, but I try not to hit them. I record on my rooftop a lot. Sometimes I get up at 6am and record the morning rush as it starts to unfold and I usually need the limiters to catch a truck horn or a plane that flies overhead. If you’re in a noisy environment, that’s another good case for using a dynamic microphone because it does isolate the sound source pretty well.When I was in school, I did a student radio project for a radio podcast production class where I was riding the campus buses and I was on one of those buses on a Friday night when it was filled with drunk kids going from one frat house to another. You can imagine how quiet that was. I was using a dynamic mic and it worked pretty well when I was cutting the interviews together. It had that loud, crazy ambience in the background, but if I held it pretty close to the speaker, I could still isolate them in a way that worked for the final product.Think about how the ambience and background noise where you’re recording can contribute to the story and the feel of your whole piece.Dan: With all the woes that came with recording Archive 81 in a bedroom with loud upstairs neighbors, I do think the fact that it felt like an apartment helped the actors get the vibe. I’m not sure how much of that translated sonically, because it’s hard for me to be objective about it at this point, but I do think that background worked for that piece. In theory, I would like to do more location recording for audio dramas.If something takes place on a busy street corner, I’d like to get out there with a more formal production sound rig and record it, but Marc and I work at a pretty intense pace and it’s not always easy to coordinate that. Many times it makes the most sense to do it in the studio and create the atmosphere after the fact, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t.Aaron: Do what your gut says and plan for it. Last week, Marc said one of the hardest thing for him is the time constraints. I definitely feel that too. My podcast isn’t anything complicated but it still takes a few hours to produce. When you have a full-time job, other projects, and people you want to hang out with, you really have to focus on what you want to say yes to and what you have to say no to._Huge thanks to Dan and Marc for taking time out of their busy schedules to talk with me. If you’ve enjoyed these interviews, head over to their Patreon page and support these guys.Links:Dead Signals ProductionsArchive 81Deep VaultPodcast: https://podcastingwithaaron.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/aaronpodcastingYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/aarondowdBlog: https://www.aarondowd.comRecommended Gear: https://kit.co/PodcastingwithAaron
My guest this week is Marc Sollinger. Marc is one half of Dead Signals, a podcast production company that produces the modern radio drama podcasts Archive 81 and Deep Vault. In this episode, we're going to take a deep dive into what it takes to plan, write, and produce a modern radio drama. This is part one of a two part series: Next week I'll be interviewing Dan Powell, who handles a lot of the editing, sound design, and music for Dead Signals. Key Takeaways: The most important part of the writing process is collaboration. Audio storytelling is a powerful medium. Work with people you trust and ask them for their feedback. The hardest part of creating a modern radio drama is making time for all the work required. If you're into podcasting, create stories that can only be told through sound. Aaron: Marc Sollinger: Thanks for joining me. Tell me what you do at Dead Signals. My understanding from our brief conversation previously is that you work more on the writing side of things? Marc: Both Dan and I write and contribute to the creative process equally, so both of our roles are really creative. We're both the “idea person.” Aaron: You do a lot of the writing and he does a lot of the editing, but you both contribute equally to the writing process, yeah? Marc: Yeah, and we're both audio professionals. He's an engineer and works at a sound effects library, I work in public radio for Innovation Hub. We both work with sound for our day jobs. It's really fun. The Most Important Part of the Writing Process: Collaboration Aaron: I brought you on because you and Dan recently launched a modern radio drama podcast called The Deep Vault. I like the description you guys wrote: “The Deep Vault is a serialized, seven-episode audio drama set in in the almost-post-apocalyptic United States. “The story follows a group of longtime friends as they journey from the uninhabitable surface world into a mysterious underground bunker in search of safety, shelter, and answers to their past. Robotic servants, tooth-filled monsters, and terrible computers collide within the claustrophobic, steel-reinforced walls of The Deep Vault, a modern day homage to the golden age of sci-fi radio drama.” I want to hear about your background and how you got into audio and radio. Before we get into that, I have to say that the Audible ad read at the end of the first episode of The Deep Vault is one of the most genius things I've ever heard. Good job on that, whoever had that idea. Marc: Listen to the second episode, because it gets crazier. With podcasts that are more host-driven and not fiction, it's usually the hosts talking about how much they love Blue Apron or Squarespace. For us, it felt a little weird to break the world and say, “Hey, it's Marc Sollinger and Daniel Powell, and we'd love you to try out Audible or Blue Apron,” so we came up with the idea of a robot that's not a character in the show. It's just a random robot that's gradually gaining sentience and is really pissed off at his masters. It's fun and hopefully people will enjoy listening to it. The main thing is we wanted it to be fun. Aaron: Mission accomplished. So when did you get started with audio? Marc: I fell in love with audio in high school when I was driving around in my car and I heard a This American Life episode. It was one of those proverbial driveway moments, where I stayed in my car for 30 minutes because the story was so good. (Audio storytelling is a powerful medium.) I feel in love with it and I adore the power of audio documentary and public radio. That's my day job now, but I started listening to older radio dramas like Orson Welles' The Mercury Theatre on the Air. That's really good; start with War of the Worlds. If you're looking for other great audio drama podcasts, AV Club has a good list of creepy radio dramas from the 40s, 50s, and 60s you can check out. Aaron: So you were listening to those and you thought, “I have to figure out how to do this for myself?” Marc: Yeah, I noticed when podcasts were getting big in 2007 that there weren't a lot of audio dramas. There were a couple and there were a lot of audio books released as podcasts, but I didn't feel like there were a lot of podcast audio dramas that were at the same level as stuff from the 40s and 50s. For my college thesis, I made a 10-episode audio drama that I released as a podcast. This was before Dan and I started collaborating, but he was featured as the main actor, playing a nebbish anthropologist who crash lands on an alien world and has to discover a bunch of secret stuff. It's called Transmission and it's still something I'm proud of, but I didn't do any promotion. I fell into the trap of thinking, “This is really good, obviously it'll get big,” which is not a good mindset to be in. It's a Patreon reward for our Patreon page now. Aaron: So you dove in and made a 10-episode podcast series. What kind of experience did you have with audio at that point? Marc: I interned for a summer at Chicago Public Radio's Youth Vocalo, and I studied radio, television, and film in college. I did some work for Nick van der Kolk of Love + Radio. I interned for my local NPR station and I learned a lot about sound from the incomparable Douglass Quinn of Syracuse University. I fell in love with audio by listening to This American Life and old radio serials, but I became someone who could do audio through learning from Douglass Quinn. That shows the importance of having a really good mentor. Aaron: When does Dan come into the picture? Marc: We met in college (Douglas Quinn was his mentor too). Quinn kind of forced our heads together and it turns out we really liked each other. After college, we went our separate ways; I worked for the PBS News Hour and then I moved to Boston to work for Innovation Hub and Dan went to Brooklyn to work for a sound effects library. He came to Boston to visit and we talked about projects we had been thinking about. Then I went to New York to visit him and he was talking about wanting to do an audio drama, something where he would be listening alone to a bunch of weird, freaky tapes. It was a really good idea so I said we should do it together. We brainstormed and came up with an outline. I wrote it, he edited it, but it was a very collaborative process. There's a bunch of really dumb ideas that would have gone into it if he hadn't told me to take them out. Work with people you trust and ask them for their feedback. Aaron: You've got to have someone you can trust to curate and edit what you come up with. Marc: It's a matter of trust. If I really like something and Dan isn't sure about it, even if I don't understand why he doesn't like it, I trust him enough to know that there's something wrong, something that needs to be fixed. Archive 81: Writing, Editing, & Casting Aaron: This podcast you're talking about–where Dan listens to freaky tapes–is called Archive 81. The description for this show is, “Three months ago Daniel Powell vanished. These are the tapes he sent me.” How long did it take you to get all these episodes written, recorded, and edited? What was the preparation process like for Archive 81? Marc: For the writing process, I can write about two episodes a week. Aaron: Part-time on nights and weekends? Marc: Yeah, and I've been a hermit. It's a lot of work. After the episodes are written, we have a two or three week period where we heavily revise it. We script everything out and we usually do a table read over Google voice and we pause and re-write when anything sounds weird. Aaron: Once you've got the script for the episode in a good place and you feel good about it, what happens after that? Studio time? Marc: We recorded all 10 episodes at the same time. I'm glad we did that instead of writing an episode and then recording it, writing an episode, and then recording it. That saved us a lot of time and money. For Archive 81, we got our cast together and then one of our friends let us record in her bedroom. For The Deep Vault, we went to an actual studio. With Archive 81, since it's tape-based, it's a lot of two people talking to each other, so the bedroom worked fine for that. With The Deep Vault, it's more action, adventure-y and there were going to be five people in a room at the same time. You need an actual studio if you have five people in there at the same time. Aaron: So you recorded all 10 episodes of Archive 81 in a bedroom. Were all the voice actors friends of yours? Marc: A mix—some friends, some Craigslist, some family. We pay all our actors, which is something we think is really important. We didn't pay them as much as we would have liked to but we did pay them. Aaron: I noticed that the guy that plays Dan's boss has the same last name as Dan. Is that his father or one of his brothers? Marc: His father. It has a bunch of creepier overtones when you realize it's Dan's actual dad, who turns out to be a really really good actor. The Hardest Part of Creating a Modern Radio Drama: Making Time Aaron: Were there any struggles or hurdles you overcame that stick out to you during producing or recording either one of those shows? Marc: The biggest one is how busy Dan and I are. We're both working full-time jobs or more than full-time jobs. We started Archive 81—writing it, promotion for it, and releasing it—and then as soon as we began to release the episodes, we started to develop The Deep Vault, so there would be no pause between shows. Episode 10 of Archive 81 was released at the same time as the teaser for Deep Vault, then episode one of Deep Vault went out the next week. It's just a lot of work, managing time and pulling through it. We're working on Archive 81 season two now while Dan is still finishing edits for the Deep Vault. We're doing promotion, starting an LLC, working with advertisers, and responding to fans on Twitter. It's just a lot for two people to do. For the most part, we're been really lucky and blessed to work with wonderful actors, and Dan is a wonderful partner. The studio we worked in for the Deep Vault was really great. It comes down to time management and knowing when to say yes to stuff and when to say no to stuff. Aaron: Is one of your goals to take Dead Signals and make it a full-time job? Marc: Maybe. I really enjoy my full-time job, but if the audience was there…The trouble is that it's very difficult to do it unless you're Welcome to Night Veil or you have the backing of Panoply or Giblet. It's something we've discussed, but right now we're not at a point where we could do that. What Would You Do If You Had a Million Dollars in the Bank? Aaron: I was talking to my friend Sean the other day, and discuessed a question: “If we had a million dollars in the bank, what would we do?” Let's say you and Dan had a million dollars in the bank. Would you want to spend most of your time on podcasting, or do you think you'd be happy keeping your day job and working on podcasts on nights and weekends? Marc: If money was no object, I think most people would say, “Let's go to Belize and surf!” For me, it's all about weird creative projects. If we had a million dollars, we'd probably work on creating more interesting things. We'd be able to rent out more time at studios. We'd be able to do a weekly thing instead of a bi-weekly thing (I hate bi-weekly). Aaron: Weekly is great, but with all the work you guys have to do for each episode, I understand why you do bi-weekly. I have a hard time keeping up with my podcast and it's not anywhere close to the kind of work that your shows are. Marc: Maybe if we were doing it full-time we could do it weekly. If I had a million dollars it would be nice to work with other writers and sound designers to do more weird stuff. What's Next for Dead Signals Productions? Aaron: I had a related question, which was, “What are your plans for the future?” but it sounds like you're just going to keep pushing forward. You're working on season two of Archive 81. Are there plans for a season two of Deep Vault? Marc: It depends on how it's received. Deep Vault definitely has an ending. It leaves open the possibility for a season two, but we're very happy with leaving it as a mini series. If everyone is crying out for a season two and gives us a million dollars, we'll make season two. We also have other projects in the pipeline that we're thinking about doing after season two of Archive 81. We're probably going to do something new before we do a season three of Archive 81, if we do a season three. We really like doing new things. One of the reasons why we didn't just plan for four seasons of Archive 81, or even do things in the same universe, we want to broaden the possibilities of audio drama and do interesting new things. We want to make stories that can only be told through sound. Q&A: Michal Wdowiak asks: “When recording the actors separately (even remotely) for a dialogue scene, how do you manage to keep the flow of the scene so it sounds like a real conversation? Do you ever record dialog scenes separately (remotely)?” Marc: No, we don't. If it's supposed to be a conversation, they've got to be in the same room. That's one of our big priorities for our actors, they have to be in New York. You can splice stuff in, but I really don't think you get the same performance when two people are not talking to each other. The actor's performances feed off each other and having them in the same room is really important. Virginia Houser asked: “How much effort and planning do you put into creating your own sound effects for your stories, if at all? Is it worth the time to create or add sound effects? If the go-to is using pre-recorded effects from online, what resources do you use to find those sound bites?” Marc: We do a mix between creating our own sound effects and using effects from sound libraries. Dan is a manager at an online sound effects library called Soundsnap, which is helpful. He can get whatever he needs there, but we do prefer making our own sound effects so we can get the exact sound we want. Before we wrap up, I want to say that it's a really interesting time for audio drama and podcasts. I think we're on the cusp of something. Welcome to Night Veil, The Black Tapes, Lime town, The Message, and The Truth were all the first mainstream audio dramas to be released as podcasts, and it's a really good time to start one yourself. If you want to start an audio drama, don't just do it because you want to start a TV show and you don't want to spend a lot of money. If you're really passionate about it, get started now; companies are starting to invest money in these podcasts. It's a lot of work, though, so be prepared to put some time into it if you want to succeed. You can head over to their Patreon page to learn more about Marc and Dan and their podcasts. Stay tuned, next week I'll be talking audio production and sound design with Marc's podcasting partner, Dan Powell. Links: Dead Signals Productions Archive 81 Deep Vault Podcast: https://podcastingwithaaron.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/aaronpodcasting Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/aarondowd Blog: https://www.aarondowd.com Recommended Gear: https://kit.co/podcastingwithaaron
My guest this week is Marc Sollinger. Marc is one half of Dead Signals, a podcast production company that produces the modern radio drama podcasts Archive 81 and Deep Vault.In this episode, we’re going to take a deep dive into what it takes to plan, write, and produce a modern radio drama.This is part one of a two part series: Next week I’ll be interviewing Dan Powell, who handles a lot of the editing, sound design, and music for Dead Signals.Key Takeaways:The most important part of the writing process is collaboration.Audio storytelling is a powerful medium.Work with people you trust and ask them for their feedback.The hardest part of creating a modern radio drama is making time for all the work required.If you’re into podcasting, create stories that can only be told through sound.Aaron: Marc Sollinger: Thanks for joining me. Tell me what you do at Dead Signals. My understanding from our brief conversation previously is that you work more on the writing side of things?Marc: Both Dan and I write and contribute to the creative process equally, so both of our roles are really creative. We’re both the “idea person.”Aaron: You do a lot of the writing and he does a lot of the editing, but you both contribute equally to the writing process, yeah?Marc: Yeah, and we’re both audio professionals. He’s an engineer and works at a sound effects library, I work in public radio for Innovation Hub. We both work with sound for our day jobs. It’s really fun.The Most Important Part of the Writing Process: CollaborationAaron: I brought you on because you and Dan recently launched a modern radio drama podcast called The Deep Vault. I like the description you guys wrote: “The Deep Vault is a serialized, seven-episode audio drama set in in the almost-post-apocalyptic United States.“The story follows a group of longtime friends as they journey from the uninhabitable surface world into a mysterious underground bunker in search of safety, shelter, and answers to their past. Robotic servants, tooth-filled monsters, and terrible computers collide within the claustrophobic, steel-reinforced walls of The Deep Vault, a modern day homage to the golden age of sci-fi radio drama.”I want to hear about your background and how you got into audio and radio. Before we get into that, I have to say that the Audible ad read at the end of the first episode of The Deep Vault is one of the most genius things I’ve ever heard. Good job on that, whoever had that idea.Marc: Listen to the second episode, because it gets crazier. With podcasts that are more host-driven and not fiction, it’s usually the hosts talking about how much they love Blue Apron or Squarespace. For us, it felt a little weird to break the world and say, “Hey, it’s Marc Sollinger and Daniel Powell, and we’d love you to try out Audible or Blue Apron,” so we came up with the idea of a robot that’s not a character in the show. It’s just a random robot that’s gradually gaining sentience and is really pissed off at his masters. It’s fun and hopefully people will enjoy listening to it. The main thing is we wanted it to be fun.Aaron: Mission accomplished. So when did you get started with audio?Marc: I fell in love with audio in high school when I was driving around in my car and I heard a This American Life episode. It was one of those proverbial driveway moments, where I stayed in my car for 30 minutes because the story was so good.(Audio storytelling is a powerful medium.)I feel in love with it and I adore the power of audio documentary and public radio. That’s my day job now, but I started listening to older radio dramas like Orson Welles’ The Mercury Theatre on the Air. That’s really good; start with War of the Worlds.If you’re looking for other great audio drama podcasts, AV Club has a good list of creepy radio dramas from the 40s, 50s, and 60s you can check out.Aaron: So you were listening to those and you thought, “I have to figure out how to do this for myself?”Marc: Yeah, I noticed when podcasts were getting big in 2007 that there weren’t a lot of audio dramas. There were a couple and there were a lot of audio books released as podcasts, but I didn’t feel like there were a lot of podcast audio dramas that were at the same level as stuff from the 40s and 50s.For my college thesis, I made a 10-episode audio drama that I released as a podcast. This was before Dan and I started collaborating, but he was featured as the main actor, playing a nebbish anthropologist who crash lands on an alien world and has to discover a bunch of secret stuff.It’s called Transmission and it’s still something I’m proud of, but I didn’t do any promotion. I fell into the trap of thinking, “This is really good, obviously it’ll get big,” which is not a good mindset to be in. It’s a Patreon reward for our Patreon page now.Aaron: So you dove in and made a 10-episode podcast series. What kind of experience did you have with audio at that point?Marc: I interned for a summer at Chicago Public Radio’s Youth Vocalo, and I studied radio, television, and film in college. I did some work for Nick van der Kolk of Love + Radio. I interned for my local NPR station and I learned a lot about sound from the incomparable Douglass Quinn of Syracuse University. I fell in love with audio by listening to This American Life and old radio serials, but I became someone who could do audio through learning from Douglass Quinn. That shows the importance of having a really good mentor.Aaron: When does Dan come into the picture?Marc: We met in college (Douglas Quinn was his mentor too). Quinn kind of forced our heads together and it turns out we really liked each other. After college, we went our separate ways; I worked for the PBS News Hour and then I moved to Boston to work for Innovation Hub and Dan went to Brooklyn to work for a sound effects library.He came to Boston to visit and we talked about projects we had been thinking about. Then I went to New York to visit him and he was talking about wanting to do an audio drama, something where he would be listening alone to a bunch of weird, freaky tapes. It was a really good idea so I said we should do it together. We brainstormed and came up with an outline. I wrote it, he edited it, but it was a very collaborative process. There’s a bunch of really dumb ideas that would have gone into it if he hadn’t told me to take them out.Work with people you trust and ask them for their feedback.Aaron: You’ve got to have someone you can trust to curate and edit what you come up with.Marc: It’s a matter of trust. If I really like something and Dan isn’t sure about it, even if I don’t understand why he doesn’t like it, I trust him enough to know that there’s something wrong, something that needs to be fixed.Archive 81: Writing, Editing, & CastingAaron: This podcast you’re talking about–where Dan listens to freaky tapes–is called Archive 81. The description for this show is, “Three months ago Daniel Powell vanished. These are the tapes he sent me.” How long did it take you to get all these episodes written, recorded, and edited? What was the preparation process like for Archive 81?Marc: For the writing process, I can write about two episodes a week.Aaron: Part-time on nights and weekends?Marc: Yeah, and I’ve been a hermit. It’s a lot of work. After the episodes are written, we have a two or three week period where we heavily revise it. We script everything out and we usually do a table read over Google voice and we pause and re-write when anything sounds weird.Aaron: Once you’ve got the script for the episode in a good place and you feel good about it, what happens after that? Studio time?Marc: We recorded all 10 episodes at the same time. I’m glad we did that instead of writing an episode and then recording it, writing an episode, and then recording it. That saved us a lot of time and money.For Archive 81, we got our cast together and then one of our friends let us record in her bedroom. For The Deep Vault, we went to an actual studio. With Archive 81, since it’s tape-based, it’s a lot of two people talking to each other, so the bedroom worked fine for that. With The Deep Vault, it’s more action, adventure-y and there were going to be five people in a room at the same time. You need an actual studio if you have five people in there at the same time.Aaron: So you recorded all 10 episodes of Archive 81 in a bedroom. Were all the voice actors friends of yours?Marc: A mix—some friends, some Craigslist, some family. We pay all our actors, which is something we think is really important. We didn’t pay them as much as we would have liked to but we did pay them.Aaron: I noticed that the guy that plays Dan’s boss has the same last name as Dan. Is that his father or one of his brothers?Marc: His father. It has a bunch of creepier overtones when you realize it’s Dan’s actual dad, who turns out to be a really really good actor.The Hardest Part of Creating a Modern Radio Drama: Making TimeAaron: Were there any struggles or hurdles you overcame that stick out to you during producing or recording either one of those shows?Marc: The biggest one is how busy Dan and I are. We’re both working full-time jobs or more than full-time jobs. We started Archive 81—writing it, promotion for it, and releasing it—and then as soon as we began to release the episodes, we started to develop The Deep Vault, so there would be no pause between shows.Episode 10 of Archive 81 was released at the same time as the teaser for Deep Vault, then episode one of Deep Vault went out the next week. It’s just a lot of work, managing time and pulling through it. We’re working on Archive 81 season two now while Dan is still finishing edits for the Deep Vault. We’re doing promotion, starting an LLC, working with advertisers, and responding to fans on Twitter. It’s just a lot for two people to do.For the most part, we’re been really lucky and blessed to work with wonderful actors, and Dan is a wonderful partner. The studio we worked in for the Deep Vault was really great. It comes down to time management and knowing when to say yes to stuff and when to say no to stuff.Aaron: Is one of your goals to take Dead Signals and make it a full-time job?Marc: Maybe. I really enjoy my full-time job, but if the audience was there…The trouble is that it’s very difficult to do it unless you’re Welcome to Night Veil or you have the backing of Panoply or Giblet. It’s something we’ve discussed, but right now we’re not at a point where we could do that.What Would You Do If You Had a Million Dollars in the Bank?Aaron: I was talking to my friend Sean the other day, and discuessed a question: “If we had a million dollars in the bank, what would we do?”Let’s say you and Dan had a million dollars in the bank. Would you want to spend most of your time on podcasting, or do you think you’d be happy keeping your day job and working on podcasts on nights and weekends?Marc: If money was no object, I think most people would say, “Let’s go to Belize and surf!” For me, it’s all about weird creative projects. If we had a million dollars, we’d probably work on creating more interesting things. We’d be able to rent out more time at studios. We’d be able to do a weekly thing instead of a bi-weekly thing (I hate bi-weekly).Aaron: Weekly is great, but with all the work you guys have to do for each episode, I understand why you do bi-weekly. I have a hard time keeping up with my podcast and it’s not anywhere close to the kind of work that your shows are.Marc: Maybe if we were doing it full-time we could do it weekly. If I had a million dollars it would be nice to work with other writers and sound designers to do more weird stuff.What’s Next for Dead Signals Productions?Aaron: I had a related question, which was, “What are your plans for the future?” but it sounds like you’re just going to keep pushing forward. You’re working on season two of Archive 81. Are there plans for a season two of Deep Vault?Marc: It depends on how it’s received. Deep Vault definitely has an ending. It leaves open the possibility for a season two, but we’re very happy with leaving it as a mini series. If everyone is crying out for a season two and gives us a million dollars, we’ll make season two. We also have other projects in the pipeline that we’re thinking about doing after season two of Archive 81.We’re probably going to do something new before we do a season three of Archive 81, if we do a season three. We really like doing new things.One of the reasons why we didn’t just plan for four seasons of Archive 81, or even do things in the same universe, we want to broaden the possibilities of audio drama and do interesting new things. We want to make stories that can only be told through sound.Q&A:Michal Wdowiak asks: “When recording the actors separately (even remotely) for a dialogue scene, how do you manage to keep the flow of the scene so it sounds like a real conversation? Do you ever record dialog scenes separately (remotely)?”Marc: No, we don’t. If it’s supposed to be a conversation, they’ve got to be in the same room. That’s one of our big priorities for our actors, they have to be in New York.You can splice stuff in, but I really don’t think you get the same performance when two people are not talking to each other. The actor’s performances feed off each other and having them in the same room is really important.Virginia Houser asked: “How much effort and planning do you put into creating your own sound effects for your stories, if at all? Is it worth the time to create or add sound effects? If the go-to is using pre-recorded effects from online, what resources do you use to find those sound bites?”Marc: We do a mix between creating our own sound effects and using effects from sound libraries. Dan is a manager at an online sound effects library called Soundsnap, which is helpful. He can get whatever he needs there, but we do prefer making our own sound effects so we can get the exact sound we want.Before we wrap up, I want to say that it’s a really interesting time for audio drama and podcasts. I think we’re on the cusp of something. Welcome to Night Veil, The Black Tapes, Lime town, The Message, and The Truth were all the first mainstream audio dramas to be released as podcasts, and it’s a really good time to start one yourself. If you want to start an audio drama, don’t just do it because you want to start a TV show and you don’t want to spend a lot of money. If you’re really passionate about it, get started now; companies are starting to invest money in these podcasts. It’s a lot of work, though, so be prepared to put some time into it if you want to succeed.You can head over to their Patreon page to learn more about Marc and Dan and their podcasts.Stay tuned, next week I’ll be talking audio production and sound design with Marc’s podcasting partner, Dan Powell.Links:Dead Signals ProductionsArchive 81Deep VaultPodcast: https://podcastingwithaaron.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/aaronpodcastingYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/aarondowdBlog: https://www.aarondowd.comRecommended Gear: https://kit.co/podcastingwithaaron
Josh & Dan Powell (Co-Creator & EP, "Inside Amy Schumer") talk about the process of making an animated comedy (specifically "Ugly Americans"), Dan's experience as a Comedy Central executive, and how he helped shape one of the best sketch shows ever! MORE DAN! Twitter: @danieljpowell
Amy Schumer, who stars as a romantic train wreck in the new Judd Apatow film Trainwreck, is at the top of her game in real life. The third season of Inside Amy Schumer premieres April 21st on Comedy Central. The show just won a Peabody Award. And a screening of the new season's first episode at the Tribeca Film Festival showed there's nothing Schumer won't tackle. This season, the show takes on high school football and rape, declares 2015 the Year of the Butt, and Schumer and her staff told a packed audience that one of their favorite upcoming episodes will be a recreation of the film 12 Angry Men. Hear Schumer talking after the screening, along with the show's head writer Jessi Klein, director Ryan McFaul, writer Kim Caramele, writer Dan Powell, and producer Kevin Kane. Entertainment Weekly's Sara Vilkomerson moderates.
Mandy and Graham chat with "Inside Amy Schumer" showrunner and Comedy Central O.G. Dan Powell about humor, women, and the pitfalls of animation production post-Internet. It's a laugh riot (for a woman). RiotCast.com
Ben Orenstein is joined by Dan Powell, founder of Abakas. Dan plays the role of Consulting CTO for his clients. They discuss the best and the worst of his job, his history as a Linux hacker, and what his experience has taught him about technology and technology trends, and how he stays on top of them. Also, how to create effective, well-written, maintainable software, the Rails talent crunch, developers getting promoted to management, maintaining work-life balance and how not to get burnt out, and much, much more. Abakas Microway "Screamer 533" DEC Multia Abakas Follow @thoughtbot and @r00k on twitter.
Grab the rubber chicken and a pair of Groucho glasses! Da Mayor Willie Brown mentions N1L; Irene interviews Dan Powell, Manager of Original Progamming and Development at Comedy Central in New York; Daniel Tosh shares a bit from his new CD, "True Stories I Made Up," and phones in more hilarity. Part 1 of 3.