Kristopher Kaiyala recording an idling engine, and attempting to interview his unimpressed Shiba Inu (below).
The past doesn’t always stay buried
A behind-the-scenes peek at Dirt - An Audio Drama
There’s a moment about nine minutes into chapter one of Dirt - An Audio Drama when the narrator, Joseph, and his sister, Kim, are at Kim’s home in Santa Monica watching 8mm home movies from decades ago. It’s 2020 in their world, but the grainy film footage transports them both back to 1966 as they observe their grandfather, Aimo, walking across a residential street and into a park in Portland, Oregon. In his arms is a metal detector.
Although metal detecting technology existed prior to World War II, it wasn’t widely or recreationally available to hobbyists until the 1950s or 1960s, when anyone could purchase one from a department store or catalog. Suddenly every field, trail, yard, and parking lot became a potential goldmine. Centuries of buried treasures—some valuable, some mundane—could be easily located and unearthed by the simple wave of an electronic wand over the ground.
While the siblings enjoy the family footage on a purely nostalgic level, Joseph is scanning the screen for something else. A pattern of behavior. Something consistent in his grandfather’s actions that might unlock clues to a secret recently revealed to him. For reasons that become clearer as the narrative progresses, Joseph suspects that his grandfather, whom he barely knew as a child, might be telegraphing messages to him—in celluloid and in writings that are more than 30 years old. Messages that hint at the need to find things that were long ago buried.
Dirt - An Audio Drama is a new, independently produced serial fiction podcast launched in September 2020 by STUDIO5705. It’s primarily the work and side hustle of Kristopher Kaiyala, a Seattle-based features writer and tech-agency creative director turned podcast writer/director/producer, with the generous help of a small group of family members, close friends, and co-workers who all chipped in in various ways—consulting, acting, designing, critiquing, encouraging, sometimes all five—outside of their day jobs.
Kaiyala had been toying with numerous short fiction ideas when he decided it might be fun to mash them all up into a single audio narrative. “The more I listened to fiction podcasts—big ones like Limetown, Homecoming, and The Black Tapes, but many great smaller ones too, like Video Palace, Point Mystic, and Girl in Space—the more I felt that my ideas could work well in this medium. The characters, the sounds, the music, the way you can combine everything into a rich, layered atmosphere. And the freedom to just make it myself. I knew I had to at least give it a try.”
With little audio production experience beyond creating mixtapes as a kid—and recording entertaining greetings on his parents’ telephone answering machine—he began the process of researching the gear and software he’d need to get started in August of 2019. “Like a lot of people, my model for success was NPR and This American Life. Fortunately, both are pretty open about the gear they use—and how best to use it. Between that and online tutorials, I ate up everything I could find.”
He says the self-taught and scrappy nature of the format is one of his favorite things about fiction podcasting. “I’m intentionally not going for polished radio or a highly produced sound. In fact, the one thing I told all my voice talent up front was I don’t want it to sound too much like any of us are acting. I don’t want it to sound overdone. I just want us to sound like real people talking real to each other, in real situations.”
The first contributor he approached was Genie Leslie, who plays the role of Joseph’s sister, Kim. Kaiyala was familiar with Leslie’s voice from their day jobs (they worked together at the same digital agency). He says he knew that her stage experience in the Seattle theater scene combined with her playful personality would be perfect for the role of the teasing yet supportive and determined big sister.
Recording her Chapter 1 dialogue was Kaiyala’s first big test outside of the confines of his tiny home studio—basically a converted storage room in his basement. He had been using his new gear to record his own voice and background sounds, but sitting across the table from Leslie, recording their lines together, was new territory. Yet he says he quickly began to learn what works and doesn’t work. And he took those learnings with him for later in-person recording sessions with Sho Ito (Kenji), Jhonattan Fuentes (Salvador), Ana Noval (Maria), and Megan Morales (Antonia).
Yet due to COVID and other logistical limitations, not every performer was recorded in-person. Some recorded their lines using professional microphones that they had access to. Others simply used their phone’s wired earbuds. “The mic on the wired earbuds is actually pretty good in the right situations, especially for scenes where there’s already a lot going on in the background or the character is on the phone, that kind of stuff. Sometimes you can’t be picky and just have to find a way to make it work.”
One sound Kaiyala knew for sure he had to get right was that of the handling of a metal detector. Rather than try to reproduce it with foley, he purchased a vintage Coinmaster IV on eBay from a collector in Wyoming. It’s the same model and era of metal detector that Kaiyala’s own grandfather used to dig up “coins, rings, and other stuff” decades ago.
Whereas the first six chapters of Dirt - An Audio Drama, which together make up Season 1, deal primarily with Joseph trying to understand an initial major piece of the puzzle, seasons 2 and 3 delve more deeply into the brewing conflict between Joseph’s work responsibilities and his suddenly intense desire to find things that are hidden all over Washington state. A state that is rich in family history both within the podcast and outside of it. (Season 4 is pending release in mid to late 2024.)
That’s perhaps what’s most at the heart of Dirt - An Audio Drama: the personal connection to Kaiyala’s own life. Although the story is completely made up, the new podcast producer has no problem crediting inspiration for many of the story’s elements—and characters—with real events and people, particularly the character Aimo.
“Aimo is a mashup of my grandfather and great uncle on my father’s side, who both grew up in a large Finnish-American family on the Washington coast. I grew up outside of Spokane so the eastern part of the state is very familiar to me. My sister is the keeper of tons of home movies and photographs from that amazing generation. And best of all, my grandfather wrote down nearly a hundred stories about his life in the years before he passed, some of which are told or paraphrased in the podcast.”
For more information about Dirt - An Audio Drama or to request an interview, please email info@dirtaudiodrama.com.