Making the Kameo Podcast Series

     by Keith Cirillo, podcast scriptwriter

Creation of the Kameo podcasts was a truly collaborative effort between Microsoft and Rare. Starting out with the backstory for the game that had been finalized many months ago by the guys at Rare, including Chris Allcock, George Andreas and Lee Schuneman, I was asked to create a script that we could use for podcasting.

The plan was to have a series of episodes that would relay the Kameo backstory. We didn’t want them to be too long, only five minutes or so in length, and we wanted to bring in the same voice talent that had worked on the game for this new distribution medium. So I set about listening to a bunch of different podcasts, and it became clear that we were about to do something that would have higher production values than your typical podcast. I started thinking of it as modern day radio broadcasting, in a sense.

With that in mind, I experimented with different numbers of voices before settling on a narrator plus five others: the Mystic, Kalus, Kameo, Thorn and Ortho. I didn’t want to overdo it with too many voices where it could get hard to follow and trickier to make work, but I also didn’t want to have too few voices and therefore not enough interest and variety. Hopefully, I’ve struck a medium. I also had to be careful to remove any game spoilers.

Once I got rolling with this approach, things fell into place rather quickly. I added in sound FX direction as appropriate but left the rest up to Rare’s resident experts, Eveline Novakovic and Steve Burke. Steve also composed all the music for the game as well as for these podcasts. After a number of revisions back and forth with Rare, we arrived at a script we were happy with. Then it was time to head to the studio.

I wasn’t able to attend the recording sessions in London—that was of course handled very capably on Rare’s side. I must say it’s amazing how quickly this all evolved. I think anyone who listens to them will have a great experience.

We expect to release one chapter a week, and individuals who subscribe to the podcasts will have them automatically downloaded to their devices (whether a PC or an MP3 player) each week.

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