AUDIO PRODUCTION DEMO REEL, ABOVE

TRANSCRIPT

[elevator noises] 

CRACKLY NOISE, AI VOICE: This file is for individual use and should not be published. Please do not share the following without explicit consent. For the best listening experience, wear noise-canceling headphones.

[MUSIC]

Hi there, my name’s Georgia Wright. Thanks for tuning in to my demo reel. 

I’ve been an audio producer since 2016. Since then, I’ve worked on dozens of projects, stories, and podcasts. Some are documentary, some are fiction. Some are personal, some professional. And some are hard to categorize. 

Over these years, I’ve learned a wide range of production skills.

scripting, hosting, researching, recording, collaborating, planning, booking, voicing, editing, storyboarding, interviewing 

I’ve also learned that how we tell a story is as important as the story itself. Intention matters. So, as a creator, I also hold my values close. 

Imagination, sensitivity, patience, collaboration, justice, sustainability, play, precision, curiosity, integrity, compassion

​

There is something inherently vulnerable about using my speaking voice to tell stories. It feels revealing, almost intimate. 

​

But that’s part of why I love audio. It’s expressive. It also borrows from other mediums I love, like writing, theater, and music. 

​

And writing for the ear is not the same as writing for the page. Flowery sentences get you nowhere. Instead, you strive for clarity and simplicity. You know, to write the way you speak. 

​

For example, take one of the stories I produced in college. It’s one of the first pieces I ever made. 

(purring) Hi, baby. (pause) My name is Georgia, and I'm a crazy cat lady.

[Lisa Simpson: They call her the cat lady. People say she's crazy just because she has a few dozen cats. But can anyone who loves animals that much really be crazy? (degenerate screaming)]

I don't think I'm a crazy cat lady, of course – I resent the label. But the character trope is pervasive, like in that Simpsons clip. And maybe it started with the crazy cat lady, or maybe it started elsewhere, but over time I've formed this theory. Society sees cats as feminine creatures, and it hates them for it. [Eartha Kitt: “I am Catwoman. Hear me roar.” 

When I listen back to this story, which was called “I am Cat Lady, Hear Me Roar,” it sounds pretty green. My editing was choppy, and my narration was kinda rehearsed. But I’m still proud. Some of my favorite stories from podcasts like Radiolab, made by producers nerding out about their favorite subjects, which you can really hear in this piece. I was researching a pretty dubious claim, but I was doing it with humor, and journalistic dedication, curiosity. And I feel like I really delivered on this. 

Cats and women are associated relentlessly, whether in the cat lady stereotype in ancient Egyptian goddesses or Catwoman movies. They're even associated in the way we talk. Feline language is used to denigrate women on the regular. (Cougar. Catfight. Sex kitten. Hissy fit. Pussy. Catty.) Even when I was too young to know the alternate meaning of these phrases, for some reason I always thought cats were a more feminine pet, maybe because I had one. 

​

“It did seem like girls liked cats better. That was my perception. The cats themselves weren't more feminine, but I did feel like girls were more attracted to them. And did that make me more attracted to dogs because I was a boy and I didn't want to be girlish? I don't know. Maybe. I don't know.”​

​

This is my dad. Growing up, he hated cats. He isn't the only one. I know a lot of people that have a seemingly unfounded loathing for felines.

​“I can never know what they're thinking, and I have this underlying fear that they'll swipe me at any moment. Like, just like this, like, instinctual fear that they're evil.” 

​​

Over time, I veered away from the personal. My first leadership role in audio was as the head producer at a start-up called Gesso, which partnered with museums to make thoughtful content about art and culture. Here’s photographer Tyler Mitchell, one of the people I got to interview. 

My work is really, you know, exploring the black body through fashion, um, exploring identity through dress, and, um, considering these ideas of what it is to be young and Black today.

What I liked about Gesso, and what I like about the audio world more broadly, is that our work was critical, but it wasn’t pretentious. We tried to use audio educationally, to make the art world more accessible. As a producer, I went deep on all sorts of subjects, from architecture to history to craft. Here’s art historian Helen Harrison, who’s talking about abstract painter Lee Krasner. 

Lee is one of those artists who does not have a style per se. She had more of an approach, a philosophy about art that enabled her to change and grow and develop in a very free way without it being a linear progression.

The skills I sharpened at Gesso propelled me to my next role as Senior Producer of a Radiotopia podcast called Adult ISH, a culture podcast for young folks of color. Like Gesso, Adult ISH aimed to subvert dominant narratives. It was important to our team that we platformed guests whose voices had been historically ignored by mainstream media. I wasn’t the host, but I led the production process behind the scenes. And sometimes I’d sub in to interview people. 

When I was reading your piece in Vogue about that incident, something that really struck me was how the queer community rallied around you after this traumatic event.

This is from my interview with Panda Dulce. She’s a drag queen whose performance was interrupted by hateful far-right extremists a couple years back. But instead of focusing on the terror of that day, we talked about her healing process. 

​

How did that experience of, you know, the queer community showing up for you in particular change you? And, you know, how are you feeling as we're going into Pride Month of this year?

​Panda Dulce: “You know, I'm somebody, I'm a bi-gender person of color, and I'm a little chubby. These are all things that have been and can be maligned by queer communities, and I want to be transparent about that. Like, it's not necessarily an acceptance utopia that it's often marketed as by Citibank or whatever. So when the pride floats roll around, I don't necessarily always feel that warm giddiness that a lot of people kind of idealize about pride? And after the incident happened, I realized that that warm giddiness wasn't the aim or wasn't what I should be feeling. It's more so like the quiet mutual aid and the check-ins and people sitting with me and watching Drag Race with me without talking because I just wasn't in a place to do that. It was life-saving, full stop. That outpouring of support just, it was a beautiful thing.”

Okay. So far, I’ve played you pretty text-heavy clips. But one of the things I love best about audio is not just the way listeners are impacted by speech, but also the way they’re impacted by SOUND. 

[water sounds] 

One of my favorite activities while moving through the world is to gather sounds. My collection is vast. Nature is my best inspiration. I’ll just bring my phone with me, and I’ll turn it on if there’s a moment that kind of catches my ear as I’m out wandering the world. 

[bubbling brook] [bubbles] [walking at night, crickets] [murder of crows] [buoys] [sheep shearing]

Careful sound design can make a story more evocative. It can be literal, or abstract. When executed well, it can bring listeners closer to the subconscious or emotional truth of a piece. 

So let’s take this next story. It’s an experimental fiction story I called a dream meditation. Using nature sounds and my own faint vocals, pensive music, I aimed to capture the surreal and beautiful experience of dreaming. It’s hard to imagine this piece succeeding in another medium. 

You float to the next window. The house is filled with a tiny model of the solar system. No, not a model, actual planets hanging in the air. It's like you're peering in at the Milky Way. A tiny comet flies past. (sizzle) The planets swivel to look at you. They have faces. They want to talk. But when they open their mouths, all that comes out is Ave Maria. (singing) You retreat. (greenhouse sounds) Next up is a greenhouse, or maybe it's a terrarium. Either way, it's massive and pained with glass. (music and humming) Vines and fronds and enormous palm trees pulsing and growing in front of you. Flowers expand, contract, bloom, wilt, and die. They photosynthesize before your very eyes. They hum. A self-contained ecosystem, complete with a fog of clouds gathering at the slanted glass ceiling, precipitating fat raindrops. The water cycle in miniature. 

In fiction, sound design can also pair with acting to bring characters to life. Take this clip from U’TOPIA, an experimental multimedia project I helmed last year. This character is a robot-alien overlord called THE GUIDE. I artificially pitched my voice up to make them sound especially otherworldly. 

Welcome to Project Utopia. I am so glad each of you has taken precious time away from daily life's many responsibilities to join us today. As you know, you have been invited here due to your singular prowess in your profession of choice. Congratulations. To be standing in this room amid the highest echelon of human society is a tremendous honor. Please, take some time to introduce yourselves to one another.

Sound design is one of the things I love most about audio. It’s heady and intuitive, almost expressionistic. But it can also make a story feel more tangible, more immediate, like this next piece. 

November 13, 2018. The moment that really sent shivers down my spine was just like walking through the halls of Congress, the labyrinthine, concrete, super dingy basements. The single file line of young people just went so far. It was like, holy shit, there are a ton of people here. 

​

Deep in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building stood a formidable crowd of party crashers. Their uniform? All black t-shirts, printed with striking yellow letters. 

​​

We were all lined up against the walls, just singing, disrupting, being so cool. It was so cool.  

​​

This crew of teenagers and twenty-somethings began to move. They marched through the winding corridors of Congress and arrived at one particular room at the end of a long hallway. It was the office of the third most powerful person in the U.S. government, Nancy Pelosi. 

​

Her office assistant was at this huge desk kind of in the back of the room, and you could tell he was just like, oh man, here we go. Like, this is happening. 

​

​Pelosi's assistant watched apprehensively as the crowd started to file inside, holding signs emblazoned with statements like “GREEN JOBS FOR ALL” and “TWELVE YEARS.”

​​

Our generation has witnessed the failure of our leadership for as long as we’ve been alive on this damn planet. 

​

​In each of their hands was a manila envelope stamped with bold letters which asked a simple question: What is your plan? [MUSIC] 

This is the opening scene from the first season of Inherited, an award-winning podcast that I co-created and produced with my friend Jules Bradley. At the time, the youth climate movement was totally exploding with momentum. Teen activists were stopping traffic, they were confronting senators and pushing for a Green New Deal. And it felt like this rare political moment of energy, excitement, anger, and possibility. It felt like there was a real potential for catalyzing change. Audio documentary, we felt, was the only way to capture it all – not only the moments of activism, but also the individual climate experiences shaping the lives of young people in our generation. 

“The day after Hurricane Sandy, we had no power, so we turned on the radio. The biggest thing we heard was water. There was water everywhere. There was water in the streets. There was water in people's basements. And the other big thing we heard was fire. There were fires in the Rockaways, and that was the scariest thing, because they didn't say where.”

​The fire started about 11 o'clock when the hurricane was at its height. By the time firefighters made their way here, water pipes were bursting and there was little pressure in the hydrants. They laid hoses in the rising water. 

​There were fires in Breezy Point and there were fires in Bell Harbor, which is where I grew up. My neighbor, two doors down from us, their house burned to the ground. The entire block, one block over, 20 houses burned. My neighbors next door were literally throwing rocks at the window of their next door neighbors because their house was on fire, trying to get their attention. They got out, but they had to swim through flood water to get out.

Inherited was picked up by a journalist-led podcast network called Critical Frequency, which became our distributor. Our executive editor, Amy Westervelt, is an established climate journalist, and she was really eager to help us platform youth climate stories. And our stories were wide ranging. We explored the psychology of young people, the emotions they were feeling about the climate crisis, and our collective visions for a better future. 

My ideal future would be one where elected officials govern out of love. /Where nature is not forcefully codified by Western geology and economic valuation./It's got clean, green energy for all./Most work weeks are three to four days, and people have significant free time./The unsheltered have safe homes. The hungry have nutritious foods. The sick are cared for without cost. And we've healed our water and soil./Loved ones will care for the dead and return them to the earth in a green burial. They will act essentially as fertilizer, for the plants./I want to be connected with the land, working through regenerative agriculture. I want to be writing more. I want to be taking care of the land, of livestock, of a family. I want to be in community. I think that's really what it's about. That's an economy of care right there, and that's what I'm fighting for. [MUSIC: I don’t just want to survive, I want to thrive.”]

The future of my wildest dreams is one where I don’t have to worry about the future. I’m not thinking what’s going to happen next, what am I doing, how can I protect myself and my friends, my family in the coming years. The future of my wildest dreams is where we’re living in the present moment, because the present moment is just so glorious, and no danger is looming ahead. 

I think part of what made this first season of Inherited so special is that so many young people left their fingerprints on the project. It captured this feeling of community that drew us out from our isolation and fear. And it got a lot of press. 

… Georgia Wright join us now. Good morning to you both, guys, really good to see you. I love the podcast, it’s so well done but you guys are such badasses what you’re doing up there... 

This is the one and only Gayle King, interviewing me and Jules on CBS this morning. Somehow, I made it through the conversation without vomiting from nerves. But it was a close call. 

…But then Georgia there’s the thinking that you guys are overreacting. 

I simply think that’s not the case. This is the future that we have in our hands right now and quite frankly we are extremely pressed for time. Every moment we can get right now… 

It was clear our work was resonating. And finally, we got some funding from our partners at YR Media. So we made two more seasons. 

But these next two were different. Instead of hosting and running the whole show ourselves, Jules and I invited young people around the world to pitch us their climate stories. We assembled cohorts of aspiring climate storytellers, and we trained each of them to create an audio story of their very own. We were the editors and the educators, but they were the ones on the mic.   

The first time I noticed noise pollution was during a hike along the Appalachian trail. My grandmother used to be a very successful farmer. Like my mother and grandmother before her, she grew coffee, cocoa, yam, and atare. The body itself is a site of nature./ As a child, I had no idea my family and I were breathing in poison every time we walked out the door. /I’m a Queer, trans Filipino person from the South. Like, that’s a weird person in America. / A big thing that really kind of shook me, standing to get water… 

We even tapped in a new host, Shaylyn Martos, for Season 3. Our goal was, and continues to be, handing off the show to a new generation. 

My name is Camara/I’m Paloma./ I’m Emma/ I’m Mo/ I’m Vi./ My name is Radu Stochita/Hi, my name is Keerthi. 

These are the voices of your season 3 storytellers. This amazing cohort is bringing you climate stories from all over the world. My story takes place… in Boulder, Colorado, Dominica, Orchid Island, Taiwan… From personal stories, to fictional folklore, to political analyses, these stories are unique and beautiful as the storytellers behind them. 

It’s impossible to quantify how valuable the process of creating Inherited has been to me. It allowed me to work through my own climate feelings. It gave me an opportunity to take ownership in interviewing, sound design, editing, writing, and all of the other skills I’ve been developing for years. It exposed me to the world of movement journalism, a practice where stories can help shape societal change, and are informed by activism.

But most importantly, Inherited has shown me I am most fulfilled as an audio producer when I work with others. Every single person who contributed to the show, whether they were a composer or sound engineer or editor or host, they all left a mark on the final product. And most especially, I feel so grateful to the young people who entrusted their stories with us and worked so hard to make them special. 

In short, if my years as a producer have taught me anything, it’s this: skill building is great. Writing for the ear is transformative. Sound design, revelatory. But storytelling in community? That’s what it’s all about. If I spend the rest of my life collaborating with other people on stories that matter, I think I’ll die happy. 

Once again, I’m Georgia Wright, and this is my demo reel. Thank you for listening. 

MUSIC CREDITS

• Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly, by Aldous Ichnite. Free Music Archive (CC BY-NC). 

• REW, by Nyasa. Free Music Archive (CC BY-NC). 

• Ambience, by HoliznaPATREON. Free Music Archive (CC BY-NC). 

CLIPS, IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

• Cat Lady - Now Here This

• I Can Make You Feel Good - Tyler Mitchell

• Good Painting, My Dear - Gesso Media

• Drag Me - YR Media’s Adult ISH 

• It Was All a Dream - YR Media’s Adult ISH 

  • Music by Christian Romo and other youth composers from YR

• U’TOPIA - independent

• Inherited, various - Critical Frequency