User:Aaronmvivian/sandbox

'Ballweight'
Presentation
Hosted by	Aaron Vivian
Genre	Podcast Miniseries
Language	English
Updates	Weekly, on Mondays
Production
Production	Aaron Vivian Kierston Ghaznavi
Audio format	Podcast (via streaming or downloadable MP3)
No. of episodes	6
Publication
Original release	April 5 – May 18, 2015
Cited for	N/A
Cited as	"The first fictional podcast miniseries."
Provider	Panopticon Productions
Related
Website	Ballweight

Aaron Vivian, the host, creator, and executive producer of Ballweight

Ballweight is the first fictional podcast miniseries, a story told in six parts. First released in April 2015, it is an adaptation of an original screenplay with the same title, also written by host, Aaron Vivian. Episodes vary in length between 24 and 42 minutes, and were released weekly throughout April and May of 2015. It has already ranked high on iTunes store's New and Noteworthy section in the TV and Film category.

Ballweight tells the story of two people: a 17 year-old boy named Damon, who lives with his drug addict mother in a rough neighborhood, and a 44 year-old woman named Karen, who lives by herself in a nice, urban subdivision. Damon and Karen are from opposite sides of the social spectrum, but they come together and form an unexpected bond in a way to help each other achieve their goal. Both characters go through a lot of personal changes throughout the course of the story, and neither of them are prepared for the journey.

Aaron Vivian hosts the series, which he also created and produced.

Plot Overview

Two people, from opposite sides of the social spectrum, form an unexpected bond to help one another achieve their goals. Damon Johnson, a rough city boy with a love for basketball, dreams of one day playing professionally. Karen Ferguson, an introverted sign language interpreter, wants to finally lose the extra weight. She finds a deserted park with a small track to start exercising on, but, on day one of her fitness plan, she has already lost her motivation. Damon, who has been skipping school to practice basketball at the same park, notices her give up and takes the opportunity to tease her. Damon knows sign language as well. His father, Walter, is deaf, so he learned it as a little boy. He, assuming Karen doesn’t know sign language herself, signs an insult her way, but she makes it very known to Damon that she knows exactly what he just signed. Damon is shocked and Karen leaves the park. It isn’t until Karen talks with her work crush, Bud, that she realizes she has an opportunity to help this boy. So she goes back to the park and pitches to Damon the idea of “coaching” each other. Damon is just a troubled teen who needs some guidance, and she wants to do good and try to help him. Damon, like any teenage boy, is reluctant to take help from a middle-aged librarian-look-a-like, but eventually he agrees and they both set out on the journey of helping each other.

Damon and Karen both know sign language, which deems useful one day when Damon tries to take back the money his mother stole from his bedroom to buy herself more drugs. He needs his money so he can take the bus to meet Karen, who at this point is suspicious of his mother’s ability to parent a child. During Damon’s altercation with his mother, Sheelagh slices open his forearm with a knife. Wondering why Damon hasn’t shown up at the park yet, Karen stops by Damon’s house to check on him. When she sees his bleeding arm, Karen uses sign language behind Sheelagh’s back to tell him that he needs help. Noticing how overwhelmed and unfocused Damon has become, Karen offers to take him up north to visit his father, Walter, who is currently serving prison time for manslaughter. Damon hasn’t seen his father in over nine years, so the long-overdue reunion is exactly what Damon needs to refocus on basketball tryouts coming up. He knows that he needs to make the Varsity team in order for scouts to find him and invite him to play collegiately. But Damon’s mom finds the “Waupun Prison Visitor” papers in his bedroom, which sends her into a tirade and later that night she overdoses on heroin. Damon is the one to find his mother’s body. He goes to the park to hideout and process what has happened. Karen, who is finally on a date Bud, gets a phone call from the police. She, being the only one to know where Damon ran off to, rushes to the park to console Damon. She arranges for Damon to move in with her, and tries to give him a stable living environment so that he can focus on the approaching basketball tryouts. When the big day arrives, Damon seems prepared. However, he does not make the Varsity team. Now Damon cannot help but feel hopeless. He starts acting out at school again, landing him in detention, where he encounters a classmate who teases him about his dead mother and incarcerated father. Damon begins to fight him, but it is in this moment that he realizes he simply is not meant to play basketball professionally, and instead he is meant to do something else with his life.

Karen visits her husband’s grave and finally realizes that she deserves to love again, and is very grateful that she can be a guardian to Damon, since her husband passed away before they were able to have any children of their own. Damon is thrilled that he has been voted to be Team Captain, taking a leadership role on the Junior Varsity team. He is also becoming interested in going to college for Social Work. Karen’s relationship with Bud has bloomed, and they are both very excited in the bleachers at Damon’s first basketball game of the season. Karen brought a video camera, so that Walter can watch all of his son’s games after he gets released from prison.

This story blends a wide-range of elements: think American Beauty meets Juno. Some of the different elements in Ballweight include: sign-language, interpretive scenes, artistic underwater human exploration, brief singing, and more. These aspects engage and challenge the audience to flip their current perspective and look at everything from multiple angles. The use of sign-language in parts of the film is a very vital component. It is meant to show the audience that we need to embrace human imperfection, not suppress it. All living things in this world are a gift, if you look at it a certain way. Imperfection is strong, and can be a weapon in giving someone the determination to do good in this world.

Lead Character Summaries

Damon dreams of becoming a professional NBA basketball player, and his first step in achieving that goal is by getting onto the Varsity Basketball team for his senior year at Wilson High. If he doesn’t make the Varsity team, he knows there would be no opportunity for scouts to see him and offer him to play in college. So he is determined to make Varsity. What he is lacking, however, is the support at home. His mother, Sheelagh, has had a drug addiction that she has been struggling with most of her adult life, and Damon is not her priority. Damon’s father, Walter, who is deaf, is currently in prison serving a sentence for manslaughter. It was because of his hearing-impairment that Walter mistakenly killed one of Sheelagh’s drug-dealers. Unfortunately for Damon, he is now growing up without his father in his life, but he is trying to practice hard in preparation for basketball try-outs coming up. He has been skipping a lot of school to go to an abandoned park to practice, but he is having a hard time understanding that getting good grades is just as important to scouts as their athletic skills…

Karen has been wanting to lose weight for many years, and she doesn’t understand how she is in her forties. Life has passed her by, and not in the way she imagined. She works a desk job writing captions for telephones for the hearing-impaired. Although she enjoys her line of work, she has been steadily unhappy with her personal life. She has a crush on an office co-worker, Bud, but lacks the confidence to know she deserves someone like him in her life. She attempts to take the first steps to better herself by going to an abandoned park to walk the track, but lacks the motivation to stick to it. There are many layers to Karen that slowly reveal themselves throughout the story.

Setting

Ballweight is set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Damon attends Wilson High School, a fictional, inner-city school on the west side of Milwaukee's downtown. He and his mother, Sheelagh, live not too far from the school.

Karen lives in Glendale, a quiet suburb on Milwaukee's northside. She has lived there for over 20 years. She works at Captel in the heart of Milwaukee's downtown.

Damon's father, Walter Johnson, is currently serving a prision sentence at the Waupun Correctional Institution located in Waupun, Wisconsin, which is about 70 miles northwest of Milwaukee.

Main Cast

Name	Age	Height	Connection	Occupation	Goal
Damon Johnson	17	6'3"	Walter and Sheelagh's son	Student (Senior at Wilson High), and yard work for his neighbor	To make the Varsity basketball team
Karen Ferguson	44	5'7"	Lisa's estranged friend	Interpretor at Captel	To lose weight
Sheelagh Hanson	36	5'8"	Damon's mother, Walter's ex	Bartender at Wonder House	To get her next fix
Bud Whitman	48	6'0"	Karen's mutual love interest	Systems Analyst at Captel	To get Karen to agree to a date
Walter Johnson	38	5'11"	Damon's father, Sheelagh's ex	Currently an inmate at the Waupun Correctional Institute, was an Animal Care Coordinator at the Milwaukee County Zoo	To get Damon to go to college, and to get out of prison early on good behavior
Lisa Shore	42	5'7"	Karen's estranged friend	Mother of three, and part-time Sales Associate at Pottery Barn	To bring Karen back into her and her family's life
Steven Rhine	34	6'1"	Damon's Guidance Counselor	Guidance Counselor at Wilson High	To get Damon on the straight and narrow

Episodes

#	Title	Length (Minutes:Seconds)	Original release date
1	"part one: i hear"	37:50	April 5, 2015 (2015-04-05)
Damon and Karen meet and they introduce each other to their goals.
2	"part two: i smell"	24:28	April 13, 2015 (2015-04-13)
Damon and Karen beginning to form their bond. They start working hard on helping each other achieve their goals.
3	"part three: i see"	25:43	April 20, 2015 (2015-04-20)
Karen starts to see firsthand how unstable Damon's life is. She makes more concrete investments into helping him, and their relationship starts to become more concrete.
4	"part four: i feel"	30:00	April 27, 2015 (2015-04-27)
In part four, Damon and Karen finish up their arrangements to visit Damon's father, Walter. They head up and finally Damon gets to feel his dad's hug and spend time together. Also, Karen makes a discovery about Bud that is unsettling.
5	"part five: i taste (pre-finale)"	37:08	May 11, 2015 (2015-05-11)
Damon's struggle with his mom, Sheelagh, really comes to a head when Sheelagh finds out Damon went to visit his father, Walter, in prison. Karen is finally left no choice but to make a bold decision.
6	"part six: i know (finale)"	41:41	May 18, 2015 (2015-05-18)
In the finale episode, Damon finally has his long awaited basketball tryouts, and Karen opens up about her past and we understand more about how she got in her rut. Will Damon make Varsity? Will Karen find a way to finally be happy?

Development and Release

Ballweight is an adaptation of an original screenplay with the same title, also written by host, Aaron Vivian. The 120-page movie script was broken up into six-parts and transformed into the narrative heard in the podcast. The story idea came to Aaron during a workout at the gym near his home in Brookfield, Wisconsin. He was looking out the window of the gym and saw a woman get out of her car and start walking the small track they have behind the gym. There was also a boy playing basketball in the parking lot. When Aaron went back to the window only minutes later, he noticed that the woman was already gone, depsite the fact she was only just beginning her workout a few minutes earlier. He wondered why she had left so soon. Was her workout really just that short? Did she get an important phone call and have to leave? Or did something happen in those couple minutes that made her discrouaged so she left? Did the boy playing basketball have anything to do with why she is gone already? These questions ran through Aaron's head repeatedly the rest of the day, and so the story of Ballweight was born.

Music

Aaron Vivian composed the score for Ballweight, using songs from a variety of different artists:

Episode	Songs
1	"Ribs" by Lorde "Buzzcut Season" by Lorde "A World Alone" by Lorde "Team" by Lorde
2	"Ribs" by Lorde "Tennis Court" by Lorde "400 Lux" by Lorde
3	"Ribs" by Lorde
4	"Ribs" by Lorde
5	"Ribs" by Lorde "The Love Club" by Lorde "Say (All I Need)" by OneRepublic "A World Alone" by Lorde "Both of Us" by B.o.B. ft. Taylor Swift
6	"House Lights" by Keane "We Are Young" by fun. ft. Janelle Monae "Leaving So Soon" by Keane "400 Lux" by Lorde "Everybody's Changing" by Keane "Holocene" by Bon Iver "Titanium" by David Guetta ft. Sia "No Better" by Lorde "Arena" by Daft Punk

Reception

Ballweight has already climbed high on the iTunes Store's New and Noteworthy list under the TV and Film category, at one point hitting #6. Ballweight has also climbed high on iTunes Store's New and Noteworthy list for All categories, at one point hitting #80 already.

External links

Ballweight's Official Website

Category:Podcast Miniseries Category:Fiction Category:Audio podcasts