Big Data and Big Dreams
An interview with Ryan Estrada, producer of Big Data
Ryan Estrada is the creator, producer, and all-around wrangler of the heist-filled audio drama about the keys to the Internet. The show, Big Data, has the biggest cast of talented actors I’ve ever seen in podcasts, and it convinced enough people to help out in paying those actors fairly. Ryan was kind enough to answer some questions about how the whole adventure went down.
Can you tell us more about your background, and the path that brought you to Big Data?
I describe myself as an artist/adventurer. I graduated from animation school the same year as the entire animation industry collapsed. So while the dust settled, I found myself on a world-wide adventure, taking teaching jobs, getting into trouble, and making comics. But I loved it so much that when I had the opportunity to go back, I just kept going and started traveling and making comics full time. I slept on park benches in typhoons in Japan. I was almost eaten by lions in Kenya. Worked on a Bollywood film in India. Dug toilets for refugees in Thailand. Played with monkeys in Costa Rica. All the while, turning those experiences into stories: some of them for major publishers, some of them for my own website. It wasn’t until I moved to Busan, South Korea that I started getting involved in radio. For a year and a half, I had three different shows on Busan eFM, the local English-language radio station. And that gave me the bug.
I think your choice to kickstart the podcast was a really interesting and strategic one. The fact that Big Data is a contained story over an ongoing podcast made funding it through Kickstarter make a lot more sense than a Patreon. I assume it also made sense with such a star-studded cast, to pay them all fairly. What sort of thought process went into the funding and structure of Big Data?
The most important thing to me was that I was going to pay my actors. I run a comedy Twitter account called @forexposure_txt that anonymously quotes the weirdest and most entitled unpaid artist want ads. So I wasn’t going to be THAT GUY. I had had success with Kickstarting comics before, so I decided to pay everyone out of pocket, trust that people would like the idea as much as I did, and that I would be able to earn back the money.
Luckily, I did! Of course, I had so much fun that I went ahead and kept spending money after the crowdfunding ended, so I’m still pretty deep in the hole but it was all in the process of doing what I loved.
What inspired you to write the story, and to make it a podcast instead of a comic?
I thought long and hard about a project I could do that would involve all of my talented friends from different countries and artistic backgrounds. Then, I remembered the true story of the seven keys to the internet. I had long considered turning that into a comic. I mean, in real life our entire society depends on a network that is controlled by seven people from seven parts of the world who hold seven keys and have to meet every three months to do a ceremony to keep it running, surrounded by Mission: Impossible style lock cages, safes, retinal scanners and armed security guards. It was begging to be a heist story!
Thinking about it with my cast in mind, I realized how readily the story lent itself to an anthology format, with every heist happening in a different part of the world. I knew it was the perfect project to try out audio drama with!
What was it like to bring the cast together?
Big Data has a massive cast. And that was all just because there were so many awesome people to work with!
The city of Busan, where I live, has the most vibrant and welcoming artistic community I have ever seen. There are Shakespearean actors, stand up comedians, slam poets, radio deejays, musicians, filmmakers, authors and visual artists from all over the world. I had become part of that community, made many amazing friends, and wanted something I could work with all of them on. So there were already a lot of people I wanted to cast. But when I put out a call for auditions, I was blown away.
I had to rent an entire bar out for 12 hours, with my wife managing the waiting room just to fit everyone in. It was covered in local and national newspapers, and on the radio. It was like hosting American Idol (or Superstar K, since I’m in Korea and should alter my references accordingly).
After that, I started bringing in the guest stars! Through Twitter, or e-mail, through agents or Facebook messages, I contacted some of my favorite performers and sold them on my weird show. It was rough to start, but the more people signed on, the more other people wanted to be involved. I got an opening theme by Jemaine Clement (of Flight of the Conchords) and The Doubleclicks. I got both Felicia Day and Paul F. Tompkins (the mayor of podcasts himself!) on board as major recurring characters. I just kept getting lucky. While I was looking for someone to play my host De Anne Dubin’s mom, it turned out that she was friends with Amy Stoch, who had played both Bill and Ted’s mom in the Excellent Adventure series. And she joined in! Then Samm Levine from Freaks and Geeks. The cast kept growing!
Then, when I got to know the rest of the audio drama community, many of them jumped on board to play a Greek chorus of news reporters, lead by Cecil Baldwin from Welcome to Night Vale. In the end, we have 73 actors involved in the series. But one of them is my cat.
How did your comic artistry inform producing the podcast?
Since I was used to a visual medium, that was how I saw my stories. Big Data does have its share of closed-room conversational mysteries, but it also starts with a naked man on a city-wide chase sequence. And it was an interesting challenge to create those ever-changing visuals in the audience’s mind using only sound.
I may have gone overboard at first on that end when recording the sound effects. I recreated that city-wide chase myself in mostly real time, in the exact locations where it takes place …. including sneaking the recorder into a bathhouse full of naked men (myself included). In a later episode, I needed a character to get hit in the head with an inkjet printer. I knew that if I wanted to get it just right, I had no other choice. I bashed myself in the head with an actual inkjet printer for about ten minutes.
But in the end, it was writing that did most of the work. Having a character talking on the phone is a great way to get them to describe what they see without it sounding forced. I also let my listeners become cinematographers. When I reached a scene that I imagined being a top-down view, I had a character watching it from a helicopter so that they would picture it from that point of view. That allowed me to affect the visuals created in the audiences head in much the same way I would a comic.
“I also let my listeners become cinematographers.”
Eventually I realized that the more you let go and let your audience create the visuals themselves, the more interactive and exciting the experience will become.
Can you tell me more about the stylistic choice to make episodes and conversations longer, and more realistic, rather than tightly edited?
Big Data is a show about a data dump. A reporter is digging through hundreds of hours of real-time audio to solve a mystery. I wanted the audience to feel like they were part of that quest. Listening to ‘too much information’ and getting to pick and choose what they think is important and who they trust. Characters may go off on wild tangents, or get into petty arguments, and it may seem like a distraction. But as listeners keep going they’ll realize that all of these personal vendettas and confusions ARE the reason everything happened. Ideas spread, evolve, mutate, and get mistaken as people focus on the wrong things. Much like the internet.
It seems like Big Data could have a whole bunch of audiences — computer geeks (said lovingly), comedians, podcast fans, audio drama fans, etc. Have you seen this to be true?
I have! I tried to include all of my favorite things about podcasts. The stories from my favorite audio dramas like Limetown or The Black Tapes. The mystery of true crime shows like Serial or In The Dark. The in depth looks at real subjects of shows like Radiolab. The loose improvisational nature of conversation shows like How Did This Get Made. It became a weird Frankenstein’s Monster of all my favorite things!
That has struck a chord with a wide variety of people. From tech people, to comedy fans, to true crime listeners, to the various fandoms of my guest stars. I’m most excited that actual people at ICANN have started listening. I keep getting messages that they were angry when the show seemed to be misrepresenting what they do, but as soon as they realized that it was the characters who were making mistakes, and that they would eventually pay for them, they were sold.
What was the reception like?
I have gotten a lot of amazing feedback. But my favorite thing to hear, is that almost every person listening was rooting for a different character.
What are your future plans? Any new podcasts on the horizon?
When I started Big Data, it was meant to be a one month side-project before I started my next comic. It quickly grew into a 2-year endeavor, but I specifically wrote an ending that guaranteed there was no way I could ever make a sequel series because I knew I would be done after that.
But I wasn’t. This has been the most fun I have ever had on a creative project. It’s the only medium I’ve undertaken where I enjoyed EVERY SINGLE part of the process. I spent weeks throwing up every day from motion sickness — I was having so much fun editing I couldn’t stop myself from doing it on the bus.
So, the sequel series… Bigger Data, is coming next year. And I found I couldn’t even wait that long. I’ll be in the studio next week recording the Big Data Christmas Special (which features a crossover with The Beef & Dairy Network Podcast!)
You can learn more about Ryan and his adventures on his website & Twitter. Learn more about the show Big Data, and don’t forget to subscribe!
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