An Unexpected Adventure Audio Sketch

My first opportunity to do any audio drama work came from a minister who was one of my mentors growing up. He and another minister in the church (the youth pastor at the time) created these CDs which were designed to help kids who were involved in Bible Quizzing with the United Pentecostal Church International.

The company was called DoveNet and the audio CDs were called DoveTales. They consisted of three parts:

A short 5-15 minute audio skit which incorporated the 15 or so verses the kids in the program were supposed to learn that week.
A song that went along with each of those verses.
A segment called "Repeat-After-Me" where an adult said each phrase of a verse, and a child repeated that phrase.

The primary goal was to help kids learn the Scriptures that were included in each CD. The idea behind the stories at the beginning of each CD was that the story would end with some sort of cliff-hanger, and once a child had learned all the Scriptures from the first CD, he or she would receive the next CD with the next part of the story and the next set of Scriptures.

Each year, 18 CDs were made! This was obviously quite ambitious and expensive, but the company continued making the CD sets for 5 years, from 2004-2009.

I absolutely loved the idea of the stories, and the men who were creating the stories graciously allowed me to do some voice acting in some of them as a kid, and then even to write several of them in the later years as I got older.

To my knowledge, these stories aren't available any longer, except to people who bought the CD sets during those 5 years. But they played a significant part of my creative journey, and I will always be grateful for the kind-heartedness that let an annoying preteen take such a large role in the creation of these stories. One of the greatest moments in my life to that point was when after helping to make these audio dramas in Colorado, a kid in St. Louis, Missouri recognized my voice from those audio dramas when we were staying at their home on a Bible Quizzing trip.

Though these particular stories may not be available any more, the man behind them has always been very supportive of my creative endeavors, and when I was tinkering around with trying to create my own audio dramas, he allowed me to use his equipment, sound effects library, microphones, and recording equipment to tinker with some of these ideas on my own.

One project was a collaboration with some friends from a local high school acting group I was part of and friends from the Lamplighter Guild (which I wrote about previously). I will post those dramas in a future post. In this post, I wanted to share the short audio drama I made entirely on my own.

There was a potential opportunity with a local radio station to create an audio drama and to promote a few local churches in the area. I made this sketch as a pilot of sorts to both test my own abilities and practice making an audio drama, as well as to have something to show the radio station if the opportunity manifested. The radio station connection didn't pan out as it turned out, but I had a lot of fun making this anyway, and now I have the chance to share it on this website. The style is very similar to the DoveTale episodes, from which I drew so much inspiration as a young creative mind. Much credit to Gary Kiwimagi and Charles Beaver for their creative influence on me!

Hope you enjoy this very silly attempt at a pilot audio drama!