Paul Bae's The Big Loop Podcast | Interepreted by Ohio State's Big Loop Ensemble

The Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts is producing our first audio drama. For the source, we turned to The Big Loop Podcast by Paul Bae, an award-winning audio drama that began in 2017. With permission from Mr. Bae, a former teacher himself, our students are interpreting and producing a three-part audio drama series based on the original.

THE ORIGINAL PODCAST

The Big Loop is an award winning anthology series by Paul Bae. The Big Loop spans the genres of horror, science fiction, and dark comedy with self-contained, character-driven stories. Replete with mind-bending plot twists and unpredictable reveals, the series tagline, “Stories of finite beings in an infinite universe,” serves to bring the focus on characters confronted with the familiar and fantastic exigencies of human experience.

Inspired by the documentary style single-person narratives of Love + Radio and This American Life, the podcast shares stories of loneliness, depression, family, identity, and death. And, yes, sometimes, joy. We encourage you to enjoy the original series available on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, and most major podcast platforms.

PAUL BAE

Paul Bae is a writer and podcaster based in British Columbia. He is the award-winning co-creator and writer of the podcast The Black Tapes, which has been downloaded more than 43 million times. He also directs the Marvel Studios podcast Marvels based on the classic comics. A former teacher, Paul is also know for his book You Suck, Sir: Chronicles of a High School English Teacher and the Smartass Students Who Schooled Him. And be on the lookout for the two new audio series that Paul is developing with Spotify: Amanda Chi and the Ghost Sessions and Boyland.

Paul has been kind enough to join us for a webinar about his work and the intersections of podcasting and theatre. Our conversation took place on April 8th and was hosted by the Ohio State Office of Advancement.

Ohio State University’s BIG LOOP ENSEMBLE

The students of the Big Loop Ensemble are Varsha Babu, Murdith Byrne, Jingxuan Du, Mohan Fitzgerald, Dominic Fleshman, Jacinda Forbes, Shaciah Lee, Griffin Mason, Kelsey Painter, Devin Reeves, Rachael Staley, and Ben Teitelbaum. Learn more about each of them here!

The Ensemble has spent the spring of 2021 learning about fiction podcasting, voice acting and audio engineering. They’ve looked at the original scripts and adapted them them into three discrete episodes. The rehearsals have all taken place online but the recording sessions have been a rare opportunity to work together face to (masked) face. Although we have been able to use Paul Bae’s original texts, all of the music, audio and effects for this production are being created by the ensemble. The project has been led by faculty and staff from the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts including: Amanda Fox, Keya Myers-Alkire and Brad Steinmetz.