Pre-Production.

The Magical History of Knox County had a very strange pre-production phase, because we essentially made the entire show twice. The first time around, most of the main creative staff (i.e. most of our college friend group) was on a river trip together when someone pointed out a weird impression in a rock formation. One of our friends, Chris Wilson, quickly rattled off an absurdist imagined folktale about the great battle between two giants named Oonglok and Farglinkle. We laughed, kept joking, kept adding new elements, and by the time we’d driven back to campus, we’d created a pretty extensive little world.

It was early in the school year, and I’d planned to get a show on our college radio station, so I reserved a timeslot and pitched an audio drama set in this magical version of Knox County, Ohio. We agreed, and started producing the show on a weekly basis to air on WKCO. That was an absolutely breakneck pace. We were writing, casting, recording, and editing a twenty-minute, full-cast show with sound design every week, while also attending classes and doing our actual homework. I’m really proud of a lot of what we turned out, but there were certainly times when the strain of that pacing showed. We still joke about the time our lead actors were recording an episode in one room while two of our writers sat in another room, writing the end of the episode in the very same Google Doc the actors were using.

After running the show that way for two semesters, I pitched something different for our senior year — instead of making a new show, or making more of Magical History, we’d go back through what we’d done, condense and rewrite it to show off the best material we had, and rerelease this updated redux to a wider audience. I pitched an eight episode season that hit on some of our favorite episodes and ideas from the original series, and we reassembled our creative staff to write new versions of all of those episodes.

I wanted the album art for the show to be evocative of the show’s tone without giving much away. The birds are a major mid-season plot point. It was important to me to show the protagonist surrounded by them, but in a way that felt inconsequential until the mid-season reveal. Similarly, I wanted to depict the protagonist without tying him down to a particular physical appearance. We considered it a unique advantage of the medium that our characters could look however the audience imagined them, and we didn’t want official art to contradict the impressions listeners got from the audio itself.

The show has a heavy focus on old-school and analogue mediums, so I also chose to depict the art on a paper background, to add texture and physicality. At the time, we weren’t sure if we would produce additional seasons of the show. I liked this design in particular because it allowed for new symbols to replace the birds in each successive season.

Production.

One huge advantage of producing a show on a college campus is the incredible support for student projects. We had no trouble casting our show, despite needed about forty actors total, and we were able to record in the studio at WKCO, typically used to record student bands. We recorded all our actors over the course of several days, and set to work editing the show.

I’d learned a lot editing the original series, and I was excited to be able to apply all of that to the episodes I edited of the redux. Magical History is a really fun show to do sound design for, because it’s so focused on huge, outlandish characters and big, setpiece moments. Almost every episode has room for a few moments of major spectacle, which was a ton of fun to approach as a sound designer.

Post-Production & Release.

We released the entire show at once on World Audio Drama Day in 2017, and generated quite a bit of buzz by doing so. We advertised the show a few ways, both with digital ads run via Project Wonderful and print ads posted on local bulletin boards and the like.

Physical ads for the show were a major part of our publicity strategy, and proved more effective than any other ad type. Because audio fiction was and still is a relatively niche medium, we went in with the assumption that “full-cast narrative audio drama” meant nothing to most people who would see the ad, and we should instead focus on getting people engaged with the inherent mystery and tone of the show. As a result, I made our physical ads bold and simple.

Audio drama can be a very personal medium, as it’s frequently listened to on headphones alone. We wanted to use our ads to enhance the feeling of discovering something no one else would, so we placed them in intentionally strange or out-of-the-way places.

We also advertised on social media and maintained an active presence on Tumblr and Twitter, where we created moodboards for characters and commissioned promotional art. I also designed some additional promotional images, like the one of the Phenomenometer below.

Shortly after release, we received some very positive press coverage, including a review in Wil Williams’ Podcast Problems and, later, a mention in Vox. Reviews of the show by general audiences were very positive, including some very kind iTunes reviews and a glowing write-up over on Reddit.