AJ Churchill is Tom Fox’s guest in this week’s show. He is a composer, sound designer, and founder of the Lunar Company. He is also a producer on the audio drama, Earth Eclipsed. This week, Tom switches things up as he and AJ talk about AJ's podcast series, the challenges he and his team faced in developing it, and how powerful storytelling is to get messages across. 

The Power of Podcasting

'The sound world is our creation, the limit is our imagination,' is a quote that AJ strongly believes in. "Nowadays we want the audience to be able to put on their headphones, close their eyes, and just completely escape into our universe," AJ tells Tom. The podcast series medium of Earth Eclipsed allows listeners to have the freedom to fully utilize their imagination and conceptualize how everything looks. The concept of the audio series and the techniques used are not new, but modern podcasting is unique in several ways. Podcasting is on-demand now, and the technology and techniques are much more advanced.

Why Apollo

The main challenge that content creators in fiction podcasting face is building an audience and making a name for themselves. AJ and his team came up with the solution for this by way of their app Apollo which will be launched mid-December. Normally, creators would crowdfund, spend money on voice actors, upload content to their RSS feed, then pray to get featured. Keeping momentum for the subsequent episodes via ads doesn't work for fiction shows. AJ and his team created Apollo, which is an app that is exclusively dedicated to fiction shows. The app will be categorized according to genre of fiction and will be free for the listeners. 

Fiction As A Communicator

Fiction allows the creators to tell good stories, convey messages, and tackle themes in ways that elicit less of a hostile response. With fiction, the listeners can come to the realization themselves. "You show them the story, you present them the character, their arcs, and the conflicts… and the listeners can put one and one together, and it's a different way of shedding light on an important problem," AJ says. Fiction allows you an insight into a person's mind and their point of view, and you can get messages across in ways that are not only informative and educational, but also entertaining. 

Resources

AJ Churchill | LinkedIn | Twitter

The Lunar Company