What was the original concept?
The original idea was to have it be this demon-possessed environment. I don’t want to say too much else because some of these elements may come back later, but it was definitely less of a mystery and more of a “let me scare the pants off you” type deal. But as I started writing these characters and getting more involved with them, working with my actors, I thought that I didn’t want this to be a story where everyone’s screaming into the microphone, like, “oh my god, it’s coming for us!”
What is different about directing actors for a podcast versus a film or TV show?
So, here’s what I like to tell people about audio dramas, scripted podcasts, whatever you want to call it. It’s not film and it’s not theater. It’s something kind of in between but also on its own plane. About ninety-percent of my actors did not have any voiceover experience. They were all brand new to it, which is great because they all knocked it out of the park. I mean, you would never know because they’re professional actors. Living in LA there’s obviously no shortage of actors. I got to work with my friends first and foremost – my sister is one of the leads. It’s been fun to expand that and work with my roommate who plays the lead Markus. It’s been fun collaborating and really pushing each other. It’s most fun working with actors and directing them when you have actors who are really open and put all the back-story work into the character before they even show up, which all of my actors did. They were asking all these questions about the characters. Like they’d ask me, “OK, so what was Sarah’s favorite food in high school? How many siblings did she have? What’s her favorite color?” Fortunately, since I’m really OCD, and script everything, I had these answers ready. It was really cool to see the dedication they have to bring out these characters in a way that went beyond my own ideas for what I wanted these characters to be.
What were these differences between what you wrote and what the actors brought?
Part of what I try to do when I’m writing dialogue is to try to keep it as conversational as possible, which is hard when you’re writing a script because it’s automatically scripted. One of the things I like to do when working with my actors to have a conversation with them. We’ll usually do just a cold pass of read throughs. We don’t worry about screwing up lines. I really love letting them explore as we get to know the characters, not necessarily improv, but to change the words in a way that would fit their character. It can be overwhelming when your mind is trying to juggle these twelve very different characters. If that’s all coming from the same mind, you have to be very cautious of them all sounding the same. So, I’ve had some of my actors tell me, “hey, man, I like this scene, but this line sounds like something you would say, not something Alena would say.” And I’m like, “oh shit, you’re right.”
Given recent podcast adaptations like Homecoming and Dirty John, how do you think podcasts should be adapted into something visual?
Speaking only for Rose Drive, I know that if it were to turn into a visual medium, I don’t want it to be so far removed from the podcast because the podcast is already shaped like a TV show. Whether it’s Homecoming, or Dirty John, or Limetown, or whatever – shows are easier to produce if the content is scripted because there’s already a structure there. When it’s unscripted you have free rein to create something completely new. My thing is to always be conscious of what the source material is so that if it were to adapt, you keep the tone, you keep the essence of what the actual thing is.
You have interactive features on your website that augment the podcast. You incorporate listener letters on the show itself; how does that change the trajectory of the podcast?
Part of what differentiates Rose Drive from some of the other shows is that I didn’t want to break character at the end of each episode by coming on as the creator and asking people to rate and review the show. I wanted to create it in a way so that you can interact with Markus. You can send him emails; you can tweet at him. Rose Drive the podcast isn’t just what you’re listening to but it’s a world that Markus is creating himself to get help in finding Forest or whoever he’s looking for. Especially with Markus not trusting anybody in town, he thinks, maybe I can outsource this and get help from people who are not going to be biased one way or another. It creates a fun environment and people can go up on the website and they can leave fan theories, we’ve got a few fan theories there. I wanted for this to be an opportunity for fans and listeners to, either, sit back and just listen to the story, or if you have your own theories and want to involve yourself in it you can do that.
Would you say that you’re reverse engineering the mystery of the show with a fixed destination in mind, or are you moving forward and improvising as you go?
Every story starts off with you kind of bullshitting. You’re figuring out, okay, this sounds good, this seems cool, how does this work? It’s funny you say this because one of my best friends from high school, she was listening to the podcast and one of the episodes in the middle of the season is just Markus reviewing everything that’s happening. He says, “please, please, tweet me, send me messages, I don’t know what to do. Give me your theories.” It was different from the other ones. And my friend said, “I have a theory about your theories,” it was so funny, she said, “are you just crowd sourcing so that the listeners will finish your story for you?” That would actually be really genius, but no. That stuff was more to make it so the show’s accessible. The overall story is there. It existed from conception to putting episode one out.
Looping back to music, the show includes a score and the characters create songs as well. Can you talk about scoring a podcast and also incorporating it into the actual plot?
Honestly, I wanted to do this so that I could write music for it as the composer. I wrote all these different themes and textures and ideas of what I thought these characters would be if they were music. And I considered the town itself – what the sound of the town would be. I knew I didn’t want traditional themes for Markus, South Hampton, and so forth. Part of it is the sound design. There’s a really fascinating trend in scores these days that you have sound design and score morphing into one. I could even say it from where I’m at: you look at Blade Runner 2049, you look at Dunkirk, there’s so many times where you can’t tell if that’s music or is that sound design? They work so well together, and this show being a little bit out there, and mysterious it dips into other genres. I wanted to make sure the sound design was a strong element as well; instead of a giant orchestral score we have all these textures. Even the sound design for Markus’ headaches is comprised of patches that were actually musical and I flipped them, did some processing to it to make it its own texture.
You mention Blade Runner, and that score has an industrial-type sound to it, did you incorporate any sounds of things or places that you recorded and then incorporated into the podcast’s audio?
Oh, totally. Absolutely. I work on a couple of platforms, one of them is a raw, organic method of recording where I’ll record Foley, and I’ll do it at my house. I’ll do keys jangling, or footsteps, or whatever, anything I can. Ideally, all of the sound would be completely from scratch or from a Foley environment. But when you don’t have the resources at your disposal, you use what you can use and find a way to make it sound like it came from the same environment. I really like taking these organic sounds, like sharpening knives, or opening a desk drawer, and finding a way to turn them into percussive elements or musical elements, and weaving them into the score themselves. The idea is not to have them be the main focus point, but they’re one small piece of the overall grand puzzle. And you may not even really hear it, it may be buried under a bunch of other stuff, but without it, it doesn’t make quite the same impact. So, that’s one way that I do it. The other way is getting into more of a synth design. There’s a program that I use where you can start from just this sine wave, this really bland sound, and you start adding more patches and plugs, all these things to create anything. I will build upon that and see where the sound is taking me. I never really go into it with the expectation of what I want to make. I start playing with stuff, let it guide me itself and decide, okay, this it leading more into a pad or a percussive element, and then I shape it around.
To close out, what’s next for this podcast, what are you looking at doing?
We’re at an interesting point for the show. I have most of the first season done. I announced back in June that we’re working on getting the final block of this season closed off. But instead of doing the traditional twenty-minute episodes, I’m creating a podcast movie as it were – still audio but it’s a feature length episode. And that will answer so many of the questions that have been building up in what you’ve heard so far and start segueing into what will inevitably be season two. I’m at the final stages of writing it right now. Closing off this first season and gearing up for season two is what’s going to start happening come January 29th.
Many thanks to Raul Vega for taking the time for this interview.
Sam Kitagawa
