In a distant future where humans have been driven from the earth, one brave lunar citizen returns to our overgrown, alien-ruled homeworld on a reconissance mission. After an act of sabotage leaves him trapped on the surface, the gallant Captain Dauntless must tackle lizardmen, liase with gorillas and even come face to face with the alien occupiers themselves to escape safely back to the moon.
Captain Dauntless was a radio play I developed in conjunction with Medway Little Theatre, it’s an idea I came up with during the pandemic, forgot about and then dug up last summer when announcements for the Kent Drama Association‘s Radio Play Festival were sent out. It’s presented as a weekly serial radio series created by the propaganda ministry of a government ruling the moon, with the adventures of Captain Dauntless taking place in an extension of their reality rather than being purely fictional as it would be to us. A post from earlier this month containing the script can be found here.
Cast
Chris Loft: Narrator, Chairman (Episode 7)
Sean Stephens: Captain Richard Dauntless, Chairman (Episode 1)
Matthew “Mattihase” Crane: Writer, Director, Editor.
Kerrie Thompson: Producer
Mic Aldington: Equipment & Recording
Chris Loft: A great deal of assistance.
Special Thanks: Suzanne Wdowik, Adam Wigmore, Mike Dickinson & everyone at the Medway Little Theatre.
Album Art
Leading up to the production I commissioned a series of album covers from some friends to use as mp3 album art for each episode, with episode 3 and 4 sharing a cover. As I haven’t made the individual episode edits of the show yet, only SeijiArt’s Episode 1 cover is currently in use, but I want to show all the art that got made off here anyway. I’ve had to leave some visible Glaze artefacting on them but I’m not doing anything less than my due dilligence as far as protecting other people’s art from scraping is concerned.
Created by SeijiArt
Created by Uboaappears
Created by Pixelhat
Created by Hare
Created by Jeremy Fuscaldo
Created by Masked_Ragdoll
Accolades
3rd Best Production, Kent Drama Association 2023.
Best Actor in a Cameo Role (Az Mumin)
Best Actress in a Supporting Role (Haley Bullivant)
Nominated for/Runner Up: Best Original Play, Best Director, Best Ensemble Acting, Best Initiative in Audio Presentation, Best Technical Achievement, Best Use of Music and Sound Effects.
Originally when I started planning out Captain Dauntless I’d intended to create 2 versions. 7 Individual episodes, and one hour-long combined version to fit the contest’s required submission format. As editing was wrapped up dangerously close to the deadline, I had to drop the individual episode versions and focus on the submission version, and after I was done with that I was so burnt out on editing that I archived a lot of the files and haven’t really touched it since. At some point this year after working on some other projects I would like to go back and remaster the series, sort out some music, and release it in the intended episodic format but I want to focus on some other projects first.
I also left a couple lines in the script leaving an opening for a sequel series. I also have some ideas knocking around for further adventures for Captain Dauntless. However, like I said, I want to focus on some other projects first so don’t expect to see more Captain Dauntless any time soon.
Specifically, I think for my next project I want to work on something a little more serious, a little more emotional, that kind of thing.
Captain Dauntless is a Captain because Captain is the coolest thing to have in front of your name. His surname is Dauntless because if you’re going to be a Captain you might as well have a cool name to put after that and his given name is Richard because the fact that Richard shortens to Dick will never not be a fantastic opportunity for immature humour.
Captain Dauntless was originally envisioned as a solo project, where Captain Dauntless and his cowardly but smart sidekick would fly around earth running into various evolved animals, with the occasional voice cameo from whoever among my friends I could convince to help out. I ended up dropping this project after I spent ages trying to work out a voice and clear sense of character for Captain Dauntless but couldn’t quite nail anything down. When I came around to writing it this time around I left out Dauntless’s sidekick character (or possibly forgot him) and it ended up being much easier to work out his character from how he’d have to drive the plot working alone. I suppose the lesson of that is that sometimes having more characters makes each of them a little worse off.
The Setting for Captain Dauntless actually started out as a TTRPG campaign setting I came up with at uni called The Verdant Age, which was about humans being driven off of mainland earth onto little islands by prehistoric aliens re-emerging and mutating all of earth’s wildlife to be hostile technorganic versions of mesozoic plants. Most humans lived on islands or cobbled together boats but some had escaped to the moon. Coincidentally a couple years later a professional TTRPG came out called The Wildsea which was also set in a place called The Verdancy and full of mutated plants and animals. Very much doing it’s own thing but it’s one of those great minds think alike. Anyway, The Wildsea is pretty cool and You can check it out here: https://myth.works/en-gb/collections/the-wildsea-homepage.
My inspiration for making radio plays came from an internet troupe called AAlgar Productions. I got really in to a podcast they made reviewing star trek when I was in my teens before checking out their other stuff. A bunch of radio play sketches and bits and some full length plays. Some played with the idea of being radio shows created by a company inside the setting they had created which was pretty cool.
The idea of having Liner Notes is directly inspired by how radio plays are presented on their site, though I love when webcomics do this kind of deeper sharing of the thoughts and inspirations that went into things too.
Also the design notes for Riley, the mouthpiece character from Incredible People, the comic I worked on with Deathamaranth for ACF 2023, and their speech patterns I used in writing the dialogue, were inspired partially by Mary Madison, the fast talking undisencouragable reporter from several AAlgar Productions radio plays.
Another inspiration, especially for the poem name skit at the start of each episode, is BBC Radio 4 which I’ve listened to a lot of on road trips. I grew up with a CD of the Radio 4 version of The Hobbit, and it’s still my favourite adaptation of it, no contest.
I should also probably credit the webcomic/web animation series Bravoman: Super Unequalled Hero of Excellence also contributed to my love of meta humour that focues on taking advantage of the medium. Sadly it was all nuked off the internet by Bandai Namco after it proved unprofitable but you can find fan archived backups of it around if you want to look.
Part way through editing I went to check the Hitchhiker’s Guide radio series for ideas on what needed sound effects and what didn’t, and was delighted to discover that they didn’t have footstep sounds at all. Which is why from episode 2 or 3 onwards I gave up on adding footstep sounds. I couldn’t edit the original ones out without messing up the audacity timelines though so there’s a bit of inconsistency there, so sorry if you noticed it. I imagine the in-universe explaination would be similar, the SFX people on the moon just deciding that not having footsteps is good enough.
The voice of the occupiers is actually just all 7 episodes of the show layered over each other with a bunch of effects applied over it. I think it’s a cool and interesting way to portray a kind of completely alien-ness that using just someone talking wouldn’t. During auditions when we were going through that section I used the Mr Blobby voice, which I think is equally terrifying and inhuman, but might have run into copyright problems if it made it through to the actual show.
Working with the artists to create album art was a pretty calming (if expensive) part of the project compared to other bits, that were more hectic. I tried to get art of either key moments of each episode or “it would have looked cool if this happened” things similar to each episode. Unfortunately I couldn’t work out any ideas for the cover art for episode 3 of the series but having episodes 3 and 4 share art isn’t so bad with them being presented as Parts 1 and 2 of a multi part episode.
