A new, sci-fi thriller/adventure style audio drama. We're female lead, LGBT+, and completely independent

The main crew (Holden, Jasmine, Eric, David and I) met in an acting studio in Los Angeles. The rest of the cast auditioned/were recommended to us by others in our studio, or by connections in Philadelphia.

To sum Icarus up briefly, we follow a group of young adults during their final weeks in a deep space training program. While we follow Marcus Vella (Holden Glazer) from his first steps on board the station, the rest of the crew have been in the thick of things for a while. As the launch gets closer things begin to go haywire, and cracks in the program's facade begin to show. Our main crew is now left with the difficult task of finding out just how far they're willing to go to reach Mars.

Our audience is mainly females between 23-27, though we've also seen our non-binary listenership and those in the LGBTQ+ react positively to the show.
 

I (Kayla) have listened to podcasts like ours for a while. Namely the Penumbra and Welcome to Nightvale. After moving to LA I began writing scripts for Film and TV. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to write a script for an audio drama as most of my previous work was very visual heavy. I wound up really loving the story, and when the pandemic hit, thought it would be a great time work on a show that didn't require being in person.

I love sci-fi, but I personally find the genre lacks strong female characters that I can personally relate to. While I put a lot of myself in Carina, I think each of the characters introduce something fun and special without feeling heavy handed in regards to their representation. Their interactions reflect more of the natural cadence I've seen in myself and my friend groups. I also just really want someone write one wild fan-fiction about the story for the lizard part of my brain.

I'd been writing the script for about a year (though who knows with how Covid played out) and we began filming in March of 2021.

We've been very consistent with our two week schedule, so we record one week, and I spend the next week editing. That being said we didn't release the first episode until I had two completely edited just to build in some buffer room as I figured out the software.
 

We're sticking with every other week for uploads! Though we are about to record the final episode for the first season and after we'll just have to see. We record anytime between Wednesday- Sunday the first week, and then I have until Monday night to wrap up edits and prep the launch.

At the moment I'm still on the Covid-19 supplements after an unfortunate end to my last retail job, so check back in during season 2 to see how much scrambling I'll be doing.

I'm very lucky to be able to fund this myself with most of the cast having their own recording equipment already, and with my partner and I 'executive producing' the show through an Adobe Audition subscription. We host via anchor, which is free to use, and have been marketing on social media free of charge. We did make stickers which were about $150 for 200? It's been pretty bare bones over here, financially speaking.
 

Anchor provides a sponsorship through their hosting site, though the cpm isn't anything to get wealthy off of. We're certainly open to other sponsorships if their products we genuinely support. The goal is to share the revenue with the cast once/if it reaches a union rate.

The Anchor sponsorship is provided at the drop of your first release in exchange for a small percentage of the money you cash out.
No new sponsors to speak of at the moment, but we're looking!

The crew and I have certainly grown closer, and from a career perspective this will provide all of us with quality VO reel material, as well as IMDB credit, which is pretty beneficial for a rather green group of actors. I'm also hoping to use the platform to search out writing agents or sound editing work.
 

Adobe Audition is our main editing software, though each cast member has their own preferences as to what they like recording on. Free sound.org is a wonderful recourse for foley and sfx that we look to for the more exciting sequences.

Each script has been written in advance, so we'll do a quick edit to adjust any last minute things and from their it's on me to cut lines and prep the sfx depending on what's been written.

All of our recording sessions have been done over Zoom so we can at least work off one other person, though we're about to try discord to avoid the time limit issue.
 

We're a pretty mixed bunch when it comes to where we're streamed! Apple Podcasts and Spotify are our biggest platforms (39% and 25% respectively) and it breaks down from their with 11% on 'Other'; 7% on both web browsers and podcast addict; 3% on Google podcasts, and 2% from both Pocket Casts, and Overcast.

Tiktok is the big platform we're trying to figure out since it has such a big reach, though we're still on the classics like Instagram and Twitter.
 

I heard once that a minute of action is an hour of sound direction, and really should have trusted that more. It would've saved me several long nights if I'd prepped better for some of the more intense sound sequences.

For our show, the biggest thing is just exposing yourself to as many other things in the genre as possible. Know what you think works, what you'd rather see, or what you feel you could add to the genre. The Expanse was a huge inspiration for the writing process, though once we went into recording its more important to trust your actors to make their character as authentic to them as possible.
 

We're available at @icaruspod on twitter and instagram, or on our host site Anchor. We'll be setting up a patreon between seasons to prep additional content while we work on season 2, so stay tuned for that.