WORKSHOP 101 Presented The Dramatic Podcast at The 2018 HEAR Now Festival
Workshop 101 is a crash course in audio theater. In three and a half days, HEAR Now's instructors take participants through the basics of writing, directing, producing and performing audio theater works. Participants create or adapt a script that will be performed, directed and acted by the Workshop 101 participants and enjoyed by all on the final day of the festival. Participants get the opportunity to interact with their accomplished teachers while also geting to meet many professionals throughout the field, who can become valued contacts.
Workshop 101 is a continuation of our educational mission begun in 1979 and brought forward by the National Audio Theatre Festivals (HEAR Now's parent 501 (c) 3 organization.) Over the last three decades NATF/ HEAR Now, and its faculty, have been producing audio theater workshops nationally. Workshop 101 reflects that knowledge in a tight program that will give participants better understanding on how to create their own audio theater projects.
Here are this year's Workshop 101 original works:
SCROLL DOWN THIS PAGE TO HEAR PAST WORKSHOP 101 SAMPLES....
2018 Workshop 101 Faculty
Kc Wayland, 2018 Workshop 101 Leader
Kc Wayland Lead Faculty
KC has carried within him a passion for the creative arts from a young age. As a teenager, he earned the Award of Excellence in Arts and Best Student Editor and graduated with top honors from Orange High School Media Arts program for Acting and Film Theory, earning the Principal's Medallion. Upon graduating, he was awarded an academic scholarship to attend Chapman University's School of Film and Television.
In January of 2002, Wayland enlisted in the United States Army, taking a leave of absence from Chapman. He received two certifications in broadcast engineering and was awarded both Top Graduate and Distinguished Honor Graduate. He returned to Chapman in 2003, but was deployed to Iraq midway through his first semester. From 2003 to 2004, Wayland served with the 222nd Broadcast Operations Detachment in the heart of Baghdad. His service earned him a nomination for a Bronze Star for meritorious service. During his time overseas, Wayland filmed his personal experience that would later become the feature-length documentary "365 Boots on Ground."
Wayland returned to Chapman within a month of active combat. During this adjustment period back to civilian life, he focused his energy on completing "365 Boots on Ground." The documentary would go on to earn several awards, including: Best Documentary at Chapman 2005, Best Student Documentary at the Bear Bear Film Festival, and Best Student Film at the Tiberon International Film Festival. He graduated from Chapman in 2008 as valedictorian of his class.
While teaching film production at Costa Mesa High School and Coastline ROP, he began writing what would later become "We're Alive: A Story of Survival." What started off as a means of coping with his military experience, "We're Alive" evolved into a wildly successful and revolutionary zombie audio drama. Wayland acted as lead writer/editor/director/producer of "We're Alive" on each of the 48 episodes from 2009 to 2014. The rise of "We're Alive" coincided with the booming popularity of podcasts and zombie culture, standing out for its gritty urban realism and focus "theatre for the mind" audio techniques. Its success earned the show a place within the Nerdist Podcast Network, garnering over 50 million downloads in the course of its run. The series was also nominated for and Audie by the Audio Producers Association, and was in iTunes Best of 2012.
A sequel of sorts to "We're Alive: A Story of Survival" entitled "We're Alive: Lockdown" was successfully funded via Kickstarter in July of 2015 raising over $55,000 for the production, and was released in April 2016 to rave reviews.
Following the success of "We're Alive," Wayland signed with the Paradigm Talent Agency in February of 2016, and began working on the 10-part audio-theater series, "Bronzeville" starring Laurence Fishburne and Larenz Tate, to name a few from the all-star cast and debuted in the Top 10 on iTunes. Kc Wayland continues to strive towards expanding the audio-drama industry and helping others understand and build on the new art wave that is "Theater for the Mind".
KC has carried within him a passion for the creative arts from a young age. As a teenager, he earned the Award of Excellence in Arts and Best Student Editor and graduated with top honors from Orange High School Media Arts program for Acting and Film Theory, earning the Principal's Medallion. Upon graduating, he was awarded an academic scholarship to attend Chapman University's School of Film and Television.
In January of 2002, Wayland enlisted in the United States Army, taking a leave of absence from Chapman. He received two certifications in broadcast engineering and was awarded both Top Graduate and Distinguished Honor Graduate. He returned to Chapman in 2003, but was deployed to Iraq midway through his first semester. From 2003 to 2004, Wayland served with the 222nd Broadcast Operations Detachment in the heart of Baghdad. His service earned him a nomination for a Bronze Star for meritorious service. During his time overseas, Wayland filmed his personal experience that would later become the feature-length documentary "365 Boots on Ground."
Wayland returned to Chapman within a month of active combat. During this adjustment period back to civilian life, he focused his energy on completing "365 Boots on Ground." The documentary would go on to earn several awards, including: Best Documentary at Chapman 2005, Best Student Documentary at the Bear Bear Film Festival, and Best Student Film at the Tiberon International Film Festival. He graduated from Chapman in 2008 as valedictorian of his class.
While teaching film production at Costa Mesa High School and Coastline ROP, he began writing what would later become "We're Alive: A Story of Survival." What started off as a means of coping with his military experience, "We're Alive" evolved into a wildly successful and revolutionary zombie audio drama. Wayland acted as lead writer/editor/director/producer of "We're Alive" on each of the 48 episodes from 2009 to 2014. The rise of "We're Alive" coincided with the booming popularity of podcasts and zombie culture, standing out for its gritty urban realism and focus "theatre for the mind" audio techniques. Its success earned the show a place within the Nerdist Podcast Network, garnering over 50 million downloads in the course of its run. The series was also nominated for and Audie by the Audio Producers Association, and was in iTunes Best of 2012.
A sequel of sorts to "We're Alive: A Story of Survival" entitled "We're Alive: Lockdown" was successfully funded via Kickstarter in July of 2015 raising over $55,000 for the production, and was released in April 2016 to rave reviews.
Following the success of "We're Alive," Wayland signed with the Paradigm Talent Agency in February of 2016, and began working on the 10-part audio-theater series, "Bronzeville" starring Laurence Fishburne and Larenz Tate, to name a few from the all-star cast and debuted in the Top 10 on iTunes. Kc Wayland continues to strive towards expanding the audio-drama industry and helping others understand and build on the new art wave that is "Theater for the Mind".
Tavia Gilbert
Tavia Gilbert - Performance Faculty
Winner of the 2017 Best Female Narrator Audie Award, Tavia Gilbert is a producer, writer, and acclaimed narrator of more than 500 full-cast and multi-voice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. She is a nine-time Audie nominee, three-time nominee and one-time winner of Voice Arts Awards, and the recipient of seventeen Earphones Awards, a ListenUp Award, and three Parent’s Choice Awards. She is a trusted and sought-after actress for work across every genre, from children’s and YA, to literary fiction, non-fiction, and genre fiction. Audible named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir, and Library Journal has written of this highly-acclaimed actress that she is "as close as you can get to a full cast narration with a solo voice." Tavia earned a BFA in Acting from Cornish College of the Arts, studied audio documentary storytelling at the Salt Institute, and holds an MFA in Creative Non-fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the co-founder of Animal Mineral Press, which publishes fiction and non-fiction that intends to manifest social justice and the founder of Juniper Street Photography. She is a popular guest lecturer on writing and performance at the college level.
Winner of the 2017 Best Female Narrator Audie Award, Tavia Gilbert is a producer, writer, and acclaimed narrator of more than 500 full-cast and multi-voice audiobooks for virtually every publisher in the industry. She is a nine-time Audie nominee, three-time nominee and one-time winner of Voice Arts Awards, and the recipient of seventeen Earphones Awards, a ListenUp Award, and three Parent’s Choice Awards. She is a trusted and sought-after actress for work across every genre, from children’s and YA, to literary fiction, non-fiction, and genre fiction. Audible named her a Genre-Defining Narrator: Master of Memoir, and Library Journal has written of this highly-acclaimed actress that she is "as close as you can get to a full cast narration with a solo voice." Tavia earned a BFA in Acting from Cornish College of the Arts, studied audio documentary storytelling at the Salt Institute, and holds an MFA in Creative Non-fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the co-founder of Animal Mineral Press, which publishes fiction and non-fiction that intends to manifest social justice and the founder of Juniper Street Photography. She is a popular guest lecturer on writing and performance at the college level.
Melinda Peterson
Melinda Peterson - Performance / Casting Faculty
Melinda Peterson has been a professional actor for over 45 years and after slogging through 20 of them, she was introduced to audio theatre when she played all 17 of the female roles in Proctor & Bergman’s Power which aired on NPR as a regular segment of John Hockenberry’s HEAT. She still wonders why she wasted so many years in make-up. Since that time she has worked with all-star casts in We Hold These Truths and Empire of the Air for Other World Media, performed with The Firesign Theatre on The Great Internet Broadcast for the Toyota Comedy Festival in New York and traveled several times to Dublin to act in Crazy Dog Audio productions for RTE, Ireland’s public radio service. She is most proud that she was Norman Corwin’s very favorite Lucretia Borgia in his The Plot to Overthrow Christmas. Cast as Agatha Christie she lead the companies of The BBC Murders in Kentucky, Washington and Florida. She has been a member of Los Angeles’ classical theatre ensemble, The Antaeus Company, since 1991 and lives in LA with her darling husband, Phil Proctor, and her even more darling cat.
Melinda Peterson has been a professional actor for over 45 years and after slogging through 20 of them, she was introduced to audio theatre when she played all 17 of the female roles in Proctor & Bergman’s Power which aired on NPR as a regular segment of John Hockenberry’s HEAT. She still wonders why she wasted so many years in make-up. Since that time she has worked with all-star casts in We Hold These Truths and Empire of the Air for Other World Media, performed with The Firesign Theatre on The Great Internet Broadcast for the Toyota Comedy Festival in New York and traveled several times to Dublin to act in Crazy Dog Audio productions for RTE, Ireland’s public radio service. She is most proud that she was Norman Corwin’s very favorite Lucretia Borgia in his The Plot to Overthrow Christmas. Cast as Agatha Christie she lead the companies of The BBC Murders in Kentucky, Washington and Florida. She has been a member of Los Angeles’ classical theatre ensemble, The Antaeus Company, since 1991 and lives in LA with her darling husband, Phil Proctor, and her even more darling cat.
Bob Kaliban
Bob Kaliban, returns as Workshop 101's Performance and Voice teacher, has done more than 15,000 commercials, everything from voice-overs to on-camera announcing. Bob does dialects, cartoon voices, straight announcing, on-camera, industrials, and much more. According to Bob, he has been more than lucky; he has been wildly successful. He attended Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and then understudied in such shows as “Redhead” and “How to Succeed in Business” before getting into commercials work in the early 1960s and continuing his career through today.
Butch D'Ambrosio
Butch D’Ambrosio, past Workshop 101 Director, will be on hand this year to work with the classes. Butch got his first rejection from MAD magazine when he was 12 years old. He was their youngest intern and the last one under Bill Gaines. Butch was also a contributing member of the Usual Gang of Idiots for a long while. His involvement in audio theatre goes back almost as far, having been lucky enough to hook up with certain people… then MRTW… now NATF. Some of his other interesting things are too long ago to be relevant, a short film, a season writing for a Sesame Workshop animated children’s show, years of involvement with local theatre groups, a sketch group, doing sound effects, spending five seasons at a RenFaire, etc.. Some more recent things include being a board member of the aforementioned NATF, writing for 24 hour play festivals, and creating now abandoned Twitter accounts focusing his dislike of Justin Beiber and the Royal Wedding in Haiku. He can be heard playing great music and complaining about something every Sunday night at 11pm eastern on http://live.streamwrhu.net.
Brian Price
For Brian Price and his Great Northern Audio Theatre partner, Jerry Stearns, 2017 was a banner year. They won an APA Audie for their feature-length drama, IN THE EMBERS, were awarded the Norman Corwin Award for a lifetime of Excellence in Audio Theatre, and released their newest CD, LOOSE WHEELS AND NARROW NECKS--monologues featuring David Ossman. Brian has written, directed and worked with audio theater groups across the country including Native Voices At the Autry, the Grist Mill, and the National Audio Theatre Festivals. He is also a Mark Time Grandmaster in good standing. www.greatnorthernaudio.com
Tony Brewer
Tony Brewer, is a poet and sound effects artist from Bloomington, Indiana. From 1994-1998 he produced and directed HAYWARD SANITARIUM, a horror/thriller audio series distributed nationally on NPR Playhouse, and he taught and performed live sound effects at the National Audio Theatre Festivals in Missouri from 2001-2012. He has been the sound effects guy and co-writer of the WFHB Firehouse Follies live variety show in Bloomington since 2008, and has taught and performed at HEAR Now: The Audio Fiction and Arts Festival in Kansas City since 2013. He won an ANGIE (named for Angela Lansbury) and was made a Kentucky Colonel for his live foley work 2008-2012 at the International Mystery Writers Festival in Owensboro KY. In 2015 Tony received the inaugural Bradshaw Award (named for Firesign Theatre character Lt. Bradshaw) for Service to the Field of Audio Theatre by the American Society for Science Fiction Audio. His zombie-comedy audio play THE LAST BROADCAST won audience favorite at the 2016 HEAR NOW Festival. He has taught at Indiana University, Ivy Tech Community College, Michigan University, and the Kansas City Art Institute, and he has performed with the Knoxville Opera, VoiceScapes, Otherworld Media, SueMedia, Mind’s Ear Audio, Ruth Eckerd Hall, IU Cinema, and Wounded Galaxies Festival, as well as in dozens of independent productions. Tony is also a member of CRICKET’S BONE CARAVAN audio troupe, sound designer for STAGES BLOOMINGTON, and one third of the poetry performance group RESERVOIR DOGWOODS. He frequently collaborates with the experimental music + field recording collective URBAN DEER.
Kerby Mitchell
Kerby Mitchell returns to the HEAR Now Festival as the Workshop 101 Technical Director.
Kerby has been an audio engineer for 15 years.
"I fell in love with the NATF 15 years ago as an intern. Since that time I have recorded many radio theater productions. Through this I have worked with many, many talented people. I have also gone on to work for Metro Mobile at the Bonnaroo Music Festival."
Kerby has been an audio engineer for 15 years.
"I fell in love with the NATF 15 years ago as an intern. Since that time I have recorded many radio theater productions. Through this I have worked with many, many talented people. I have also gone on to work for Metro Mobile at the Bonnaroo Music Festival."