Just the Beginning
12 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 4 years ago - ★★★★★ - 48 ratingsThis is Just the Beginning, a new podcast from Kickstarter featuring stories about how independent creators bring their ideas to life. Meet an engineer turning air pollution into ink, a married couple who invented a device that lets you sing like a robot, an artist touring the US in a mobile tattoo shop for women, and other creative people of all kinds. You’ll hear what inspires them, scares them, and keeps them going—and how they’ve remained true to their visions, even if mainstream culture didn't buy in.
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Episodes
The View From Somewhere
January 30, 2020 14:58 - 21 minutes - 19.6 MBIf there’s anything you know about journalists, it’s probably that they’re supposed to be objective: relating just the facts, with no personal bias. But is that really possible—or a good thing to strive for—in the “post-truth” world we’re currently living in? For this bonus episode of Just the Beginning, we’re sharing the first episode of The View from Somewhere, a podcast about journalism with a purpose, produced by Lewis Raven Wallace and Ramona Martinez. In it, Lewis shares the story of l...
Deconstructing the Voyager Golden Record
November 06, 2019 17:42 - 34 minutes - 63.5 MBIf you had to make a playlist that represented life on Earth, what would you include? That’s challenge a team of artists, scientists and musicologists led by astronomer Carl Sagan set for themselves in 1977. They compiled a gold-plated record of greetings, sounds, and music representing life on this planet, and sent it into space on NASA’s Voyager probes. The intended audience was extraterrestrials who might discover these spacecraft and wonder who sent them. That’s right, it was a mix tape...
Making Waves
October 25, 2019 04:22 - 20 minutes - 36.7 MBWhy are wild animals the key to making fighter jets more exciting on-screen? Who bailed out Stanley Kubrick when his epic battle sequence sounded like pots and pans? And what did Jacques Cousteau have in common with Darth Vader? Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound, a groundbreaking new documentary, covers all this and more as it introduces us to the often unsung heroes of Hollywood sound design. Liz Cook Mowe, Kickstarter’s Director of Documentary Film, presents this preview of Making...
Reconstructing the Past
May 02, 2019 04:00 - 42 minutes - 77.7 MBIn this episode, we explore creative projects that attempt to reconstruct the past—at least a version of it. Plus, we take a look back at some personal moments from the first 10 years of Kickstarter, as told by creators and backers. Say Something Bunny Interdisciplinary artist Alison S.M. Kobayashi came across a seemingly mundane audio recording of a family gathering in 1950s Long Island. It was garbled, filled with obscure references, and she set out to unlock its mysteries. Her unique on...
The New News
April 18, 2019 04:00 - 30 minutes - 56.5 MBOriana Leckert, Kickstarter’s Journalism Outreach Lead, joins us to explore creative new approaches to reporting the news. Tortoise Founded by industry veterans who have previously helped run The Wall Street Journal and the BBC, Tortoise aims to create a new kind of newsroom—one that takes a slower, deeper approach to covering stories. With an eye toward staying financially independent, they’ve pursued a participatory, membership-based model. And they invite members to directly contribute ...
Listening Party!
April 04, 2019 04:00 - 44 minutes - 82.1 MBJoin us to listen to some podcasts made by Kickstarter creators. Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls: Frida Kahlo read by Pamela Adlon The bestselling Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls books tell stories of extraordinary women from the past and present in the form of lushly illustrated fairy tales. For their podcast, they invite notable contemporary women to read these stories. We’ll hear an excerpt from an episode featuring actress and comedian Pamela Adlon telling the story of painter Frid...
Science Fiction Gets Real
March 21, 2019 04:00 - 32 minutes - 59.9 MBScience Fiction Gets Real Meet creators making work that explores the gap between science fiction and reality. Inspired by science-fiction movies from the ʼ80s and ʼ90s, Shawn Frayne, the founder of Looking Glass Factory, dreams of making a holograms a part of everyday life. In his comic BLACK, set in a world where only Black people have superpowers, Kwanza Osajyefo uses science fiction to highlight some important truths about race in America. His follow up, WHITE is currently live on Kic...
Road Tripping
March 07, 2019 05:00 - 31 minutes - 58.6 MBRoad Tripping Join us for an audio road trip to two places that were created with the help of Kickstarter backers. Tattoo artist Shanzey Afzal realized that the sexism she faced working in traditional tattoo parlors also affected women getting tattoos. So she turned a vintage travel trailer into a mobile tattoo shop for women called Ink Minx and hit the road. Vince Kadlubek is CEO and cofounder of the Santa Fe artist collective Meow Wolf. With their wildly popular—and just plain wild—imme...
Unnatural Resources
February 21, 2019 05:00 - 28 minutes - 51.6 MB"Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value. ― Buckminster Fuller" Meet two designers turning environmental pollution into useful products. Anirudh Sharma and Graviky Labs collect carbon air pollution and turn it into ink for writing, drawing, and printing. They call it Air Ink and envision a future in which local newspapers are printed using a city’s own pollution. Michigan native Ali Rose van Overbeke fo...
Finding Your Voice
February 07, 2019 05:00 - 29 minutes - 54.6 MBWhat does it mean to sound more like yourself? Voice teacher Daisy Press guides us through some pretty unusual vocal exercises. Maya and Bosco Kante are the founders of ElectroSpit, a family business devoted to helping people sing like robots. They tell us how an ungainly vintage instrument and a disappointing performance with Kanye West inspired them to create it. As a teenager, people told Ionnalee that she had a good voice… for singing backup. She started the mysterious Iamamiwhoami pr...
Things Get Personal
January 24, 2019 05:00 - 28 minutes - 53 MBStories about what happens when bringing a creative project to life becomes your life. Photojournalist Nancy Borowick used photography to cope with a family tragedy. She tells the story of what happened when both of her parents were diagnosed with stage-four cancer, and how she celebrates their lives in her book, The Family Imprint. Kelly Rakowski, founder of the Herstory Instagram account, explains how how she's creating Personals, a new kind of dating app for the LBTQIA+ community, inspi...
Series Preview: This is Just the Beginning
January 09, 2019 05:00 - 3 minutes - 5.52 MBThis is Just the Beginning, a new podcast from Kickstarter featuring stories about how independent creators bring their ideas to life. Join us for an honest conversation about the value of creative work. How it challenges us—and empowers us to challenge authority. How it helps us face the hard truths of the world—and sometimes escape them. We’ll hear directly from creators about what inspires them, scares them, and keeps them going. Subscribe now and catch our first episode on Thursday, J...