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Click here to view the 2020 Signal Boost application form.
For your application, you’ll need to submit a short creative pitch responding to the theme ‘Public’. There are two elements to the pitch:
- A written outline or overview of your idea (maximum 400 words); and
- A creative audio teaser, treatment or trailer for your idea (maximum three minutes).
Tell us how you’d approach creating a fresh new audio story or podcast series on this theme – and show us how you would interpret, explore or subvert the theme ‘public’ in an audio setting.
You can interpret the theme as literally or as abstractly as you like; it can be experimental, fictional, journalistic, playful, serious, obscure or anything in between!
To get you thinking …
Who, or what, is ‘public’? If there’s a ‘general’ public, what are the other ones? What’s the public interest? (And what, then, is the opposite of public?) What does it mean to be in public – especially now?
You might take your cue from public relations, public enemies, public sex, publication, or the public domain. After all, what’s public affects us all – or does it?
Note: The pitch is only intended for the purposes of the application. If you are selected for the Signal Boost programme, there will not be any expectation for you to develop or continue with this specific pitch.
More about the audio task
For your audio response: in (up to) three minutes, we want a run-down or trailer for your idea – a show or series, a one-off feature story, or something else – that demonstrates how you would approach the theme and turn it into something captivating and listenable. Think of it like an audio teaser or trailer for a movie that doesn’t (yet) exist, or a pitch to a studio.
(If you aren’t able to produce an audio recording that gives an example of how your podcast might sound, please contact us ahead of the application closing date to discuss possible alternatives.)
The audio sample must be supplied in MP3 or M4A format, using the filenaming convention surname_firstname.mp3 (so we can easily identify your application).
Don’t worry about it sounding perfect; we just want to get a sense of your creative approach to audio. Feel free to use the voice memo app on a smartphone for this task; equally, feel free to go wild with all the sound you can muster!
Still stuck?
Check out our launch event on video – where a handful of outstanding audio storytellers take a theme, 'float', and transform it into their own new ideas.
