The Beatles Themed Reunion Podcast Project: What Is It About?
Reunion Project Logline
The Reunion project is a Beatles themed podcast about an aging Beatles fan who, unsettled by a friend’s passing, returned to his former communist country and reunited the Beatles cover band of his youth to win back his first love he was forced to leave decades ago.
This is an Audio Drama podcast, with professional actors voicing each character, and professionally produced soundscape.
Brief Synopsis
Widlovsky (60s) attends a wake for his friend Droog, where he meets singer Abby. They bond over their shared love of the Beatles, but she sharply reminds him of someone. He pulls back and reminisces about his past. Growing up in Soviet-controlled Zagoria in the 1960’s, he fell in love with Beata back in college.
Together with friends, they played in a Beatles cover band. In the 1970’s, they planned to leave Zagoria for the West. But a KZB officer and Beata’s admirer Haritonov denied Beata’s permission to leave the country until “the Beatles are reunited.” Beata pushes Widlovsky to leave without her, which he’s regretted that ever since.
Abby persuades Widlovsky to go back to Zagoria to find his friends and Beata. In Zagoria, Widlovsky meets with his friends pretending to arrange a reunion concert. He tracks Beata down, but it would take a lot of efforts, unforeseen complications and confrontations to try to win her back.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction. Any names or characters, businesses or places, events or incidents, are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Project Development
Over the years, I have developed “The REUNION” as a novel, movie script and a stage play, and pursuing those avenues takes a long time. Therefore, I decided to produce a professional artistic podcast based on the same story. The podcast script is 100% complete and split into 6 episodes 30-45 minutes each.
My movie script was based on the same story and was evaluated several times by Slated (see https://www.slated.com/). It involved several experienced readers, who provided grades for each facet of the script, such as plot, characters, conflicts, dialogs, originality and many others. In addition, they wrote in detail about what they liked and what changes they recommend. I made several corrections and improvements, finally achieving an industry acceptable score of 70.2 ( see https://services.slated.com/analysis/).
See a more detailed description of The Reunion project evolution in “How The Reunion Project Came About” post.
Reunion Podcast Project Episodes
The Reunion podcast will include 6 episodes with the following tentative titles:
- Episode 1 – ABBY & THE ROADKILL
- Episode 2 – THE SHMEATLES
- Episode 3 – GRAZHSK, ZAGORIA
- Episode 4 – AGNEAU GRILLÉ AU CHARBON
- Episode 5 – THE COMMANDMENTS
- Episode 6 – THE REUNION
All the characters and the narrator will be played by professional actors, over background music and soundscape. I will update the information here once we audition and select the actors.
The podcast music will include many well known and lesser known songs by The Beatles as a band and as solo artists, and some of their circle of friends musicians, as well as outstanding covers of their music. All the songs will be from the pre-licensed library of Spotify and/or Apple.
The Beatles Themed Reunion Podcast Schedule
Following is a tentative schedule for the project.
- We had a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for 50% of funding, but raised 66% of 50%, therefore we didn’t collect the funds, and decided to fund 100% of the budget ourselves.
- Possibly in the next steps we can decide to raise more funds for marketing, budget overrun or other reasons.
- We held a remote Project Kick-Off Meeting with the Artistic Director, who is based in Eastern Europe.
- They are conducting auditions for the actors and other creative personnel, and send me audition files and information. We expect this process to finish in October, 2022.
- The Creative Director will then, starting in October/November, 2022, reserve the time slots at sound recording studio and proceed to record the audio.
- Meanwhile, we are composing the background music for the audio drama.
- We will record the background soundscape and music in the same time period.
- We plan to record the episodes by the end of November, 2022, for finalization of editing and post-processing.
- Meanwhile, I will prepare for the release on Spotify and/or Apple platform(s).
- We tentatively schedule the release of the Beatles themed Reunion podcast project in January, 2023.
