FIREBREAKER (2024) | Audio Drama Review/Retrospective
Something cool I got to work on!
A continued happy Easter to all! Since yesterday was the feast of St. George, I thought it would be appropriate to talk in some more detail about a very fun and exciting project that I worked on (and one that I’ve teased a few times on this publication) - Firebreaker!
Firebreaker is an audio drama of the story of St. George and the Dragon, produced by Coronation Media, created and overseen by Gary Gasse, and written by myself and my dad, Jim Morlino. Unlike a typical review, this post will be a behind-the-scenes look at the writing process of Firebreaker.
In May 2022, a few weeks after my then-fiancee and I got engaged (fortuitously, on the very feast day of St. George), my dad called me to pitch me the project as he had it from Gary. I said yes to co-writing it with him.
We started meeting Gary regularly over Zoom: I was in CA, my dad was in CT, and Gary and Coronation were based at the time in MD. Gary gave us some concept art and some very simple and broad notes on style and story, and the rest was up to us.
The original idea was ten scripts, each about nine pages long - thus ten episodes, each nine minutes long. A moderately short feature film length in ten small chunks. We compiled all of Gary’s notes into a “bible” (i.e. a writer’s collection of project notes), and added our own, and the writing process was begun!
I proposed that early on in the process we treat the project like a single piece in order to flesh out the barest bones of the story, and add more detail very gradually. I figured we’d get overwhelmed having to plot and structure ten mini-stories from the start. We took the essence of the George and the Dragon story - a Roman soldier named George travels to a North African kingdom named Silene and saves the people (and a princess named Aia) from a deadly dragon - and slowly started adding in more details. We started with a story summary that was only a paragraph long, and ended up with a page-long summary. In this process I tried to use the basic methods outlined in books like The Anatomy of Story by John Truby (the finest screenwriting book I know of).
From this point, we separated out the ten individual episode scripts. We made divisions in the story where we thought it would make sense and be compelling. Then, once we had a paragraph or two of summaries for each episode, we went back to Gary for his approval. I will point out that most of the writing process is the process of planning and plotting, not the actual writing of scenes and dialogue. That is, unless you have tight deadlines and a creative and helpful producer shepherding the process, like Gary.
By this point, I had moved back to CT, and now my dad and I could actually write the scripts together in the same room. Keep in mind that I had never written anything longer than a short film before, and I had never written anything with my dad. I don’t think either of us knew exactly how it was going to work. It turned out that it worked great!
Like I said, I have a lot of book knowledge on writing but less actual experience writing, whereas my dad is much more of an intuitive writer with great instincts on flow, rhythm, and humor - probably due to his training and many years working as an actor. So we sometimes often butt heads with each other, but we also brought out the best in the other. We wrote first drafts of all ten scripts that very summer - a huge amount of work in a very short time.
Gary was busy on some other projects around this time, so we basically did second drafts all on our own. Gary’s ideas and ours were remarkably well-aligned, so we didn’t need to make any minor revisions, just dozens of teeny ones. We had a third draft of each script.
The last major change is that Gary wanted more backstory on the origins of the dragon. We added this as a new episode 2, inserted in between the old 1 and 2. This meant eleven episodes in total, and by this point each script was more like fifteen pages long rather than nine. Quite a hefty project now!
My dad was now in charge of the production on the actual audio recording of the episodes. At this point my work was pretty much done, but I did record a bunch of temporary voice work for the main villain and a number of side characters. I figured that most of these would be replaced by “real actors” at some point. That happened for the main villain (good thing too, because that actor is the best in the whole show!), but when I listened to the final product I was delighted to hear my voice in a number of places.
I had a wonderful time working on Firebreaker. I was somewhat surprised to hear a number of script changes that were made without my involvement. Some of these I didn’t think added significantly to what my dad and I wrote originally, but some were better. In essence, though, this is my writing and I’m very proud of the work we did. Thank you for reading this little retrospective, and I hope you go listen to Firebreaker here on the Coronation website, or wherever podcasts can be listened to. And stay tuned for more Firebreaker yet to come!