How Jack Came to Be!
Like all good ideas, the origins for "Squadron Leader Jack Steel and the Starblade" occurred in a public house when Wayne came up with the idea of creating a Podcast based on creating a radio drama in the style of the 1930's Flash Gordon movies.
As per usual with the various "Trappies" leading busy lives, this idea took a long time in coming to fruition. Wayne, James and Lucy came up with the initial story and character outlines, and then handed this over to Chris and Tom for them to come up with the scripts. Initially the plan was to have the scripts written by both Tom and Chris, but it soon became apparent that Tom wouldn't have the time to devote to writing for Jack, so Chris became the solitary writer.
So, the scripts were written and then another pause in production occurred. In order to inject some enthusiasm into the process, It's A Trap! Committed to the project by spending pretty much all their banked money on recording equipment, so after clearing out the funds, work on recording finally happened. The bulk of the recording was done over the course of a couple of weekends, but then there were frequent filler sessions. Once the majority of the recording was "in the can" (or more appropriately on the hard drive) Chris and Wayne started collecting sound effects, some of these are taken from the net, some recorded by the It's A Trap! Radiophonic Workshop.
So at long last, and with the invaluable aid of Frank Reding (with his sound engineering magic) Jack was edited together. The artwork for Jack Steel has been done by two artists, Nigel Potter and Ben Magrath. Ben is responisible for the cartoon style artwork, and Nigel has done the "darker" artwork. Examples of both work are available on the Artwork page.
Episodes 7-12 (Series 2)
It's been a longer while coming than expected, but the various members of the cast & crew had extremely busy summers which meant we didn't start the recording process until October 09. Once it takes a few weeks to do the editing, add the fx, master the recordings and all the rest of the gubbis. We really wanted a pre Xmas release date, but unfortunately that wasn't possible, fortunately we were able to finish things in time for the end of January.
The second batch of episodes are set much more in space, and capture more of what we wanted to originally achieve, which was a tongue in cheek space adventure / comedy. We've all learnt a lot over the recording process and would like to encourage other people to give it a go. It's a lot of hard work but well worth it in the end - plus we'd like to hear what other people are doing out there!
You can read more about what we've been up to on our Blog page.
Production
All site content © It's A Trap! 2008
Wayne Bolt, Chris Burdett, Ben Magrath, Nigel Potter
Squadron Leader Jack Steel & The Starblade by It's A Trap! is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.