UNLV Students Podcast: Where Science Fiction means Real Science

College is typically an incubator for new ideas and concepts promoted by young adults who are guided by seasoned professors. For colleges, podcasts are relatively inexpensive to produce as compared to other more established media and they offer students a more open welcoming ecosystem.

For example, the Real College Podcast, from Radio K (KUOM) at the University of Minnesota, is a 30-ish minute podcast focusing on artistic and cultural events and trends happening in the Twin Cities and told through “first-person storytelling and reporting and delivered instantly through any internet connection anywhere.” The podcast has run for several years and captures student ears in numbers large enough to sustain the production.

In Brunswick, Maine, The Commons is an independent podcast written, edited and produced by students at Bowdoin College, a liberal arts school. The podcast, which has also been produced for several years, is a platform for students to tell stories about themselves or others at Bowdoin and in society.

At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) students and faculty have taken the college podcast concept to a new level of theatrical drama, creating a witches’ brew of ever-shifting realities, art converging with illusion and sonic wizardry.

UNLV is located on a 332-acre campus about 1.6 miles east of the Las Vegas Strip. It offers more than 300 degree programs. The university has dabbled in podcasting before with a 2016 student-run podcast called UNLV: Different, Daring, and Diverse, which was a new student-run podcast. University Communications created the podcast and partnered with a journalism class helmed by Greenspun College of Urban Affairs professor Frank Mueller as well as Las Vegas-based podcast producers Swell Story Media. 

UNLV has been in the forefront of offering degree courses on audio and podcasting and in attracting experienced people like Adam Paul to teach at the university.

Drinking from the “wells”

The UNLV podcast is called POD 115: Kessel Run. Its tagline is “Where science fiction meets real science.”

The podcast is written by Rae Binstock -- a playwright and television writer based in New York City – and UNLV Adjunct Professor Adam Paul with a story co-authored by Rae and Adam.

Adam Paul is an actor, writer and director best known for playing Mitch, 'The Naked Man' on the CBS hit "How I Met Your Mother." He is also the creator and star of the Starz original series "Hollywood Residential," and appears in the films "The Informant," "One for the Money" and "Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron."

“The aim of the podcast has been to create a series that turned the traditional podcast on its head,” Adam Paul explains. “As a lifelong fan of Orson Wells’s 1938 Mercury Radio Theater of the Air broadcast of  War of the Worlds,I wanted to update that real-time science fiction audio story for a contemporary podcasting audience. We also clearly reference The Blair Witch Project."

The War of the Worlds is a 1938 episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles as an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds. It was performed and broadcast live as a Halloween episode at 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938, over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Welles's War of the Worlds broadcast has become famous for supposedly tricking some of its listeners into believing that a Martian invasion was taking place due to the "breaking news" style of storytelling employed in the first half of the show. The illusion of realism was intensified because the Mercury Theatre on the Air didn’t have its first break in the program until almost 30 minutes into the show.

According to Professor Paul, the podcast cast is made up of UNLV undergrad acting students who are in a podcasting class taught by Paul.

“In the class, the students create their podcast ideas and pitches,” Paul says.

This project – POD 115 – Kessel Run -- was always intended to be a public-facing presentation, according to Paul.

Professor Paul explains the podcast concept this way: “POD115 - Kessel Run is what we internally call the ‘Shell Podcast,’ with the actual story being the students’ investigation into the very bizarre occurrences that seem to be infiltrating the uploads of each episode and eventually their lives.”

The technical issues that weren’t

“Our technical issues in the early episodes were deliberate. Some recorded ‘dirty,’ some engineered,” Paul explains. “Verisimilitude was important to our team, as we found many fictional podcasts to be a little too ‘clean’  or over-produced in their execution. Perhaps, at times, our efforts were too good?”

The podcast created fictional characters as “podcast co-hosts and producer and the sponsor touted on podcast feeds like Podbean – Tonopah International -- is a total fabrication of the podcast team. Tonopah is even the podcast’s Instagram name.

The podcast episodes were released in late April with the nine episodes all released by early June. As the podcast was released to a wide general audience, the UNLV marketing team and the cast used social media and online life to run simultaneously with the episodes, with a hashtag of #pod115.

So far, listener numbers have grown steadily as audiences experience the illusion of digital life as real life – or is it?

According to Professor Paul, their target audience are the fandom community, UFO enthusiasts, conspiracy buffs, sci-fi fans, and of course, college students.

“We’ll be producing a second season in the fall, with a new cast,” Paul proudly announces.

Head of the class

Clearly, POD 115-Kessel Run by a podcasting class at UNLV in Nevada isn’t just another college podcast about life on campus. This college podcast has already scored several notable achievements, including high-quality production values, innovative storytelling that blurs the line between the podcast reality and the reality inside the podcast. Moreover the podcast has attracted a well-known New York-based television writer and a professor who has been successful in front of and behind the camera.

If you’re searching for a podcast where nothing is as it seems and you constantly question your perceptions, try POD 115: Kessel Run.

In this post-fact world, the podcast could be classified as science, science fiction, fantasy or even a magic show with all kinds of misdirection and brilliant illusions.

Here’s a link to a video trailer for the podcast. Check it out.