On October 26, the VPM + ICA Community Media Center will host a pitch party as a part of the 2024 RESONATE Podcast Festival.
The third annual RESONATE Podcast Festival takes place from Oct. 25-26 at the Institute for Contemporary Art at VCU with a full schedule of workshops from skilled producers, a special live podcast performance and the opportunity to get private pitch feedback from industry veterans. Tickets to this year’s festival are sold out.
The pitch party, sponsored by VPM, brings together established and aspiring podcasters to pitch their best idea for a chance to receive funding to produce a pilot episode of their show.
Following a national call for submissions, three podcast producers were invited to attend the festival to pitch their shows to a panel of judges. The winner will receive a first-look agreement with VPM and $10,000 to produce their podcast pilot.
VPM has been a sponsor of RESONATE since its inception in 2021. At the heart of the partnership is VPM’s belief in the power of community storytelling and the ability to provide access to resources to help tell those stories. This was also reflected when the VPM + ICA Community Media Center opened its doors for the first time in 2021. The media center, a production studio and workspace that offers media education to the public for free, was created to address issues of access and the barriers diverse voices often face as they try to tell and promote their stories.
In advance of the pitch party, read how the finalists describe their podcast ideas in their submissions.
“Beyond the Radio” – Anna Rubanova and Adam Bozarth
"Beyond the Radio" is a showcase for storytellers to embellish their real life into tall tales. It seeks to elevate offbeat and quirky personal histories into dreamy radio fiction.
The goal of "Beyond the Radio" is to stand out from the crowd. Similar to the offbeat works of Joe Frank, pieces on "Beyond the Radio" range from abstract monologues and imagined dialogues, to stories from real life, all blanketed in rich soundscapes.
Listen to the trailer.
“Creation Myth” – Helena de Groot
In “Creation Myth,” Helena goes in search of a different kind of purpose. It starts with the moment that her husband of 12 years realizes she’s not going to change her mind, and leaves. Desperate for guidance, she goes looking for peers. People who are on the path she’s on, only further along. As she talks to more people without children, she has difficult conversations about guilt, loneliness, aging and even dying alone. Her spirits are lifted spending time with a childfree lesbian couple in their 70s who fill their life with purpose of a different kind, from helping a Ukrainian accordion teacher get out of a war zone, to playing music with friends. And throughout the series, she leaves room for doubt—and there's plenty of it. What if she did want a child?
The arc of the series follows the failures and breakthroughs of Helena’s quest as they happen, through documentary audio such as recorded voice memos, phone calls and interviews with strangers, friends and family, who share their own complicated truths about life with and without children. But what ties it all together is Helena’s voice: darkly funny, intimate and relatable.
Listen to the trailer.
“The Haunting of Nokomis” – Julie Censullo
The Haunting of Nokomis is an experimental audio docu-fiction series that will explore the history of the wetlands below the Nokomis neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN. The neighborhood was constructed on top of a filled-in bog in the 1940s, and it has been plagued with flooding and sinkholes in recent years due to warmer, wetter climate. This series will examine how the decision to fill in the bog – an urban development project proposed by Minneapolis Parks Superintendent Theodore Wirth – in the mid-20th century is currently catching up with the city of Minneapolis. It will look at the choices that residents and city officials will face in upcoming years, as climate change threatens the infrastructure of the neighborhood.
Additionally, the series will take a surrealist approach to the character of the land by giving voice to the bog that has been suppressed for the last 80 years. While the reporting in this series will be thorough and factual, the narrator will be a semi-fictionalized character that was devised from archival research. The narrator will be based on Richard Kihlstrum, a real 5-year-old boy who fell into a bog excavation site in 1941 and who, in our telling, has become a spirit of the land. The narrator's character will serve as a liaison between our world and the wetlands — both human and environmental at once.
Listen to the trailer.
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The RESONATE Pitch Party will take place on Saturday, Oct. 26 from 2-3 p.m. in the auditorium of the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. Tickets to both days of RESONATE are sold out.
