About Us
Odyssey AudioWorks™ has a short but interesting history thus far. Click the Listen link to hear Tanja Milojevic and Richard Summers dialog about the Odyssey AudioWorks™ project and how it came to be in more detail.
In brief, Tanja Milojevic, a visually-impaired university student preparing to be a braille instructor became intrigued by audio drama podcasts online and decided in 2006 to create some of her own. She created her own podcasting site, Lightning Bolt Theater of the Mind where she would publish her work. Then she began to write her own audio theater scripts and to record them with the help of friends and classmates.
With few resources and not the best equipment to record or to mix and to edit the recordings on her computer, Tanja struggled to realize her overall vision of quality with her first productions. However, she learned fast and improved her technique even faster until she released her watershed production, a polished half-hour tale of terror, The Swamp (Rated PG13).
In 2011, Richard Summers, with the encouragement of Fred Greenhalgh who produces the widely acclaimed Radio Drama Revival weekly podcast, began to produce a short weekly audio review segment on audio theater for Fred's podcast. He adopted the persona of Captain Radio™ to do so.
The seredipitous intersection that led to the creation of Odyssey AudioWorks™ came after Captain Radio™ reviewed The Swamp on Radio Drama Revival. Impressed by Tanja's creation even more so when he learned of her visual-impairment, Richard imagined that a whole troupe of visually-impaired talent , given hearing as their primary sensory replacement for sight, could probably create some awesome audio theater if only networked together to do so.
Richard approached Tanja about forming Odyssey AudioWorks™ and defining its mission before then reaching out through various list mails and web forums to attract persons who wanted to join the cause. Finally, in early 2012, some short prototype audio productions began to flow from Odyssey AudioWorks™ even as they geared up to create their first full-length audio theater production, My Saving Grace (Rated G), based on an unproduced spec television script by a young visually-impaired writer recalling the dramatic onset of Retinitis Pigmentosa and how it changed his life forever.
Finally, our chosen project name is no accident, because, as every person who is visually-impaired might eventually acknowledge, coping with a world that overwhelmingly caters to sighted individuals can be as adventurous, and perhaps even harrowing, as the famous journey made by the eponimous hero of the Odyssey, one of the two literary sagas that serve as the bedrock of Western letters. Further, the author of both the Iliad and the Odyssey was none other than the famous visually-impaired bard, Homer.