Quote Originally Posted by Litmaster View Post
Listening to "The Accidental Creative" podcast got me thinking about creative projects in general, and specifically audio drama and the aggregation of skills involved in its creation. It's not good enough simply to be a good writer. Or a good producer. Or a good director, or sound engineer. Creating a product of this magnitude involves being all those and more...

Not only that, but often as creative people, we discover that, by investing our focused effort into a creative project, we accumulate new skills and develop ourselves in ways that were perhaps unexpected at the outset of the project. Not only do we create the project, but the project creates us as well.

So Kc, I'm wondering: What skills, knowledge, and abilities have you acquired/developed in the five-odd years of 'We're Alive' that maybe were not so developed prior to the creation of this project?

Here I'm thinking of anything from writing techniques to sound design, software development, rights and legal aspects, casting procedure, session direction, public relations, interpersonal relations with cast & crew, social media, etc.

The short form of my basic question is this: In what ways has creating We're Alive helped you to grow?
Well, for me the biggest one so far is confidence. Good, or bad, I feel that I have the ability to make compelling stories and characters that people enjoy. The second part of that is characters. Before WA, my characters were very thin and not evolved, but now I feel that when you get to spend a lot more time with these people in your heard, you start to learn and develop the mechanics to what makes a character flushed out.

Pacing is something you just have to learn by doing. Letting the action sequences be complimented by setups, and the proper balance of what goes where even in terms of dialogue. Motivation is another. If the scene isn't motivated by a character and rather just a plot element, then it's sloppy. BUT if a character's motivation coincides with the plot direction, it'll be smooth and more accepted.

The worst thing I had to learn is the legal/paperwork production side of things. Contracts first, before anything. And protect IP.

Social media used to work well, but is becoming more of a broken system. Still works, but not as much as it used to. There gets to be a point where too many people are liking or "fanning" pages and there's too many pages, and things get lost.

Software and computer hardware? Computers get slower as the software versions increase, even though they still do just about the same damn thing they did before. We started in Pro Tools 8, and now they're at 11. Same computer that whole time. I use a similar number of tracks, but now the system constantly gets overwhelmed now.

The techniques in sound design have been many. I can't list them all, and who knows some of that stuff might be considered trade secrets now. Either way I am much more picky about the smallest things now because I've honed my craft. The poor stage one sound designers... I keep re-doing their footsteps.

In all, it's given me a direction and goal that is achievable and I think that perhaps this show might be able to let me do this sort of stuff for my day job.