“Growing up, I had many nicknames. But both of my parents called me Sophie.”
Catherine the Great is an iconic figure, but her strength and humanity have been lost to history. In “Long May She Reign”, we explore this and other stories of powerful rulers throughout history that are rarely told.
About the Author
Ash Prodromou is a high school senior with a love of acting, history, and powerful women. They’ve been writing fiction since elementary school. They attend Freestyle Academy as an offshoot of Los Altos High School, where they’ve learned a lot about audio editing and how they can express themselves through various artistic mediums. In their free time, Ash enjoys knitting, reading, and listening to, you guessed it, podcasts. They hope to pursue more acting in the future, both onstage and through other mediums.
Introduction
The goal of the podcast project, from my understanding, is to create a work that combines a passion of ours with the application of audio editing skills that we’ve learned throughout the last two years. It was also a challenge to us to tell a compelling story through a medium that we may not be as familiar with. I took a lot of inspiration from popular monologue-based fiction podcasts like The Magnus Archives, as well as morbid history podcasts like Lore and Noble Blood. Additionally, I took a lot of my structural inspiration from Jump Blue, a fictional podcast from the perspective of real-life Russian free-diver, Natalia Molchanova.
The Production Process
The final product:
Final Thoughts
Creating a fictional narrative based on the life of a real historical figure was a great experience. I enjoyed taking the research I had done into Catherine’s life (including reading her actual memoirs!) and condensing it into a comprehensive narrative from the perspective of Catherine herself. I also had a good time voicing Catherine in the podcast; it was a cool acting exercise to embody a real-life figure, and creating small differences between her voice and mine. I haven’t used Pro-Tools in a while, so I was pleased to get a refresher editing this project. I’ve been doing basic audio editing as a part of my internship working for my theater company, and I was glad to dive a bit deeper into adding sound effects, music, and other extras to an audio track.