Today we’d like to introduce you to Travis McMaster and Mark Whitten.
So, before we jump into specific questions about your work, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
We met in Orlando, Florida through mutual friend at Disney World about a decade ago. We all moved to LA for the BIG SHOW, HOLLYWOOD, JOIN THE CIRCUS! ETC! Mark came out here for his acting career. He’s been working heavily in voice acting for a number of shows with DreamWorks, Disney, etc. and major games for Nintendo, Playstation, and the like.
Travis is pursuing writing for film and television and has written and is producing a number of short films while also conceiving of the Theatre of Tomorrow, The Hotel, and eight billion other podcasts lying in wait… one for each human on the planet as has been Travis’s ultimate wish. Well obviously “making it” in Hollywood is double tough, so we teamed up to make our own damn show! With total artistic control, we could write, produce, and act in whatever stories we wanted to tell, however, we wanted to tell them! For free! (mostly). Being life long genre fans, it was a pretty easy decision to start production on a science fiction anthology series.
We actually cover the full origin story for The Theatre of Tomorrow in our first YouTube video on our channel. After four years of producing our own audio show, we’ve definitely caught the bug and couldn’t stop if we wanted to. It’s so supremely satisfying to put so much work into our passion and to challenge ourselves to get better and better. Also now Travis won’t stop trying to write more shows (like The Hotel, our horror show) and Mark has to reign him in so we can finish the shows we ALREADY HAVE.
Has it been a smooth road?
Since making and distributing podcasts is (almost) free, and we don’t have any creative oversight from studios or bosses yet, the challenges are all internal. Firstly, learning HOW TO MAKE ONE, figuring out where to put them, how people listen, how to find collaborators, how to advertise, how to get people to listen to the thing after you make it! We had never expected to have to work out advertising, social media, audience trends, engagement, anything like that. We just wanted to tell cool stories, so it’s been a huge learning process (ongoing!) and you can really see it reflected in the work of the past four years.
Creative challenges still crop up in every single episode of course. For our second stand-alone episode, Heaven, it ended up being too short by about half of what we were comfortable with. So we brainstormed and came up with the talk show framing, and Mark went in the booth and came up with Bill Knightly and the Evening Show. Suddenly the episode was 10 x better than it ever was on the page! In our latest season, we had to figure out how to indicate hugging. It’s always a process.
Please tell us more about your work. What do you guys do? What do you specialize in? What sets you apart from competition?
We produce science fiction anthology stories. Full “seasons” of 4-5 episodes with stand-alone stories in between each one. Once a year the Theatre of Tomorrow turns into the Theatre of Terror and we release a spooky fun Halloween special with new artwork and theme song and everything (you know when the Haunted Mansion gets a Nightmare Before Christmas overlay? Its like that but with aliens) Because of the intense level of sound design and world-building and scheduling so many actors, it takes a long time to produce these to a satisfactory level. We’re always looking for ways to increase production, but with the other shows in production, plus now our YouTube channel and other acting/writing/producing projects we’re working on the schedule is a little spotty.
Hopefully, we make up for it with an A+ show! I think we can play up how we differ from the rest here. I know we’re not alone in what we do or level of quality but our production strives to be really top-notch, and done by professionals in the business… and while in some ways it can seem like our hobby (as it is with many others out there), it really is our profession, and but for the grace of something we don’t get paid for this in particular… yet. As much technical work as we put into it to give the audience an immersive experience, we try not to get too gimmicky. We write character-driven stories, and as life long genre fans we weave that knowledge and references into the show. Hopefully, each season is as deeply realized as it would be if it weren’t just one story, but an entire series. We’ll let the audience decide that though.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
LA has tons of diversity, tons of things to do in nature (beach, mountains, forest, hiking!) a progressive and robust artistic community, many groovy food trucks (shout out to the Ragin Cajun and their amazing bisque!). Being around so many people who are interested in creative collaboration is incredible. It even has its own Disney and Universal Studios!
But my God it’s expensive, dusty, way too hot when it’s hot, crowded and THERE IS NOWHERE TO PARK.
And as wonderful and soft and accepting as it is, that first couple years of transition is no joke. If you’re not ready it’ll bite you. Hard.
We’ve made fantastic friendships and some pretty great art since we got here though so overall a positive experience. Though a thunderstorm would be nice.
Contact Info:
- Website: TheatreOfTomorrow.com
- Email: [email protected]
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/theatreoftomorrow/
- Twitter: @tomorrowtheatre, @thehotelpod
Image Credit:
Theatre of Tomorrow logo by Andy Hamer
Theatre of Terror logo by Lauren Pokorney
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