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In Conversation with Terry Shepherd
In Conversation with Terry Shepherd, award-winning broadcaster and author of the Jessica Ramirez Thrillers. A deep dive into the people and support systems behind the stories we love.
In Conversation with Terry Shepherd
Elliot Blake - Into the Great
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Dive into the limitless universe of storytelling with executive producer, director, and author Elliot Blake. From directing A-list talent in Audible's hit Moriarty trilogy to crafting Emmy-winning animation, Elliot is now exploring the written word with his debut sci-fi novella, Into The Great. Join host Terry Shepherd as they discuss the transition from screen to page, the power of personal choice, and what happens when an alien invasion simply stares back at you.
In This Episode, We Discuss
- 👽 A New Kind of Invasion: Discover how Into The Great uses silent, observing aliens as a profound metaphor for real-world instability and rapid societal change.
- ✍️ Script to Prose: Hear about Elliot's creative transition from the present-tense world of television and audio dramas to mastering the intimate, past-tense interiority of prose fiction.
- 🌌 Love in the Void: Explore how the novella balances a sprawling space backdrop with an intimate, character-driven romance about personal freedom and taking control of your destiny.
- 🎙️ Directing Legends: Get behind-the-scenes insights on collaborating with voiceover powerhouses like Sir Ben Kingsley and Dominic Monaghan on the Moriarty audio series.
About the Guest Elliot Blake is an Emmy-winning storyteller whose dynamic career spans animation, comic books, and audio dramas. He serves as the executive producer and director of Audible’s acclaimed Moriarty trilogy and as an executive producer for Apple TV’s The Sisters Grimm. His new sci-fi novella, Into The Great, marks his highly anticipated return to prose fiction.
About Terry Shepherd Terry Shepherd is an award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author dedicated to exploring the creative process. Through "In Conversation," Terry brings listeners deep into the writer's craft, shining a spotlight on the artists and support systems that bring our favorite stories to life.
Links & Resources
- 📖 Get your limited edition copy of Into The Great at Little Factory: lilfac.com/shop
- 🌐 Visit Elliot Blake's official website: elliottblake.com
- 🎙️ Listen to Moriarty: The Great Chaos on Audible
- 🎧 Terry Shepherd Official Website: TerryShepherd.com
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In conversation with Terry Shepard, award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author, a deep dive into the writer's craft with the artists and support systems who create the stories we love.
SPEAKER_00Today's guest is a storyteller who seems equally at home in a recording studio, an animation suite, a comic book panel, or the far reaches of outer space. Elliot Blake is the executive producer of the Apple TV animated series The Sisters Grim and the executive producer and director of Audible's acclaimed Moriarty trilogy. Its final installment, Moriarty, The Great Chaos, is available now, featuring an extraordinary cast led by Dominique Monahan, Phil Lamar, and Academy Award winner Sir Ben Kingsley. Elliot's career also includes the Emmy-winning animated web series Tomb Raider Reenvisioned, the crime comic The Package, and the Cocktails and Comedy Podcast Daydrinking with Gary and Elliot. As a creative consultant, he has worked with companies including Moonberg Entertainment and video game developer Player Undone Productions. Now Elliot is turning his attention to the page with Into the Great, a new science fiction novella set during an alien invasion of human space. But these are not the usual attacking invaders. They are godlike humanoid beings whose silent observation of humanity sends society into turmoil. Elliot Blake, it's great to be with you. Thanks for the conversation. Hey, thanks for having me, Terry. I'm pleased to be here.
SPEAKER_01Why write a book? Because I could. It's really what it comes down to. It was not on my bingo card, but the opportunity came along. And when it did, I had both the time and the inclination. I was I had just wrapped up the Sisters Grimm and the publisher I happen to know from Player Unknown Productions. We were both consultants for that company. I was doing the creative consulting and he was doing the business side on consulting, and we just hit it off. Liked the same kinds of science fiction and kinds of stories. And he said, Hey, I'm starting a boutique publisher and I'm going to publish sci-fi stories that I like. Do you have anything? And I happen to have this story into the grate in my back pocket because I had written it as a comic book about a decade ago and wasn't able to produce it. It's just expensive to make a comic book, and I wanted to be able to pay the artists well and as they should be. And we just couldn't raise the money to do it. So I just put it on the shelf, but it never left my head. And so opportunity knocked and I answered the door. Do you think of yourself primarily as a writer, director, producer, or storyteller? Yes. I think storyteller primarily. But I all of those things that I've been able to do all kind of funnel into that category. So although the as a producer, think of myself as a storyteller and think of my job as trying to create an environment where people can do their best work and to help facilitate the good storytelling. As a director, it's definitely about a storytelling and helping voice actors get where they need to go in order to tell the story. Although, to be honest, with when you get to work with incredible talent like Sir Ben Kingsley, Dame Helen Miran, Dominic Monahan, the you don't there's not a lot of directing that you really need to do. They come to the table prepared and they know what they want to do, and it's more just saying, like if they flub a line saying, let's go again, or let's do this a little differently, or maybe there's contextual clues that you want to give them so they can get where they need to go. But a lot of the times it's let's do this one a little faster, let's slow this one down, let's put the emphasis here on this word. But they're they're tremendous talents and been very lucky to get to work with the people I've gotten to work with.
SPEAKER_00How do you avoid being starstruck?
SPEAKER_01Having lived and worked in Los Angeles for as long as I have, you see a lot of famous people, and it's very rare that I bother any of them for an autograph or anything like that, because they're just out living their lives and doing like I am, running errands or whatever. And I the only I can think of maybe one time where I had to go and say hello to somebody, and that was when I saw Stan Lee at the Burbank Airport, and I just I'm a big comic book fan and I love Marvel Comics, and so I had to take the opportunity to say hello and to thank him for all the great characters that he helped create.
SPEAKER_00Where did the idea come from for Into the Great?
SPEAKER_01Boy. It really started as a digital comics exercise. I wanted to explore everything that I could in that format, and because it it allows you to do some things that are a little bit different than you would on the traditional comic book page. And and stories can start pretty much from anywhere. And I always knew that I had this idea, I always like stories where you have characters from opposite sides of the track that have to work together, that come together for some reason. And so that was the initial impetus for the story. But as when I came back to it as a pro piece of prose fiction, I had other things in mind. And my publisher also published pushed me to go deeper, which was really helpful. I I not that I didn't have deeper ideas in mind, but I think they were very much in my subconscious, and I wasn't really entirely sure what I was writing about, other than like the basic plot of the story. And it's not uncommon for writers as I understand it, so only the writers I've been lucky enough to work with, to really understand what thematically they're writing about until they've done a draft. And that was true for me as well. One of the editors that I was working with, I had been talking to him about how strange it was and how there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance for me being able to lose myself in a story while all this other big stuff is happening in the world. Because I was writing this right after the 2024 election and into 2025, and there was a lot of big change happening that I personally found distressing. I know a lot of people did as well. And so it was great to have something to retreat into, but also it felt strange to be writing and paying bills and paying rent. Well, it felt like the world was on fire. And when you have to do those things, you have to still live your life. And um one of the editors said to me, Is that really what this story is about? And I said, Huh, yeah, it is. And the aliens are uh the avatar of that. They're the destabilizing, they're the destabilizing force, and they can represent whatever, as a reader, whatever you want them to represent. But for me, they just represented this idea that rapid change and that you are forced to reckon with. And the story is about how you choose to deal with that and how you choose your choose your own destinies as you move through life.
SPEAKER_00We're talking with Elliot Blake about Into the Great. His website is elliotblake.com. How does the arrival of these beings change everyday human behavior in your world?
SPEAKER_01Imagine, if you will, a bunch of aliens just showing up and not saying anything and not asking any questions and not telling you why they're here, and then just staring at you, and then having little groups of these aliens popping up all over the world and on these different colonies that in the this far future story where humanity has populated space, and they just stare. And it would be incredibly unnerving. And we don't know why they're there. And that's and I don't, and it's a and I don't really answer that question either. I it's the because they're for me, they're a metaphor, but that will I just think that if that happened, it would really radically change things and it would drive people nuts.
SPEAKER_00At its heart is into the great more of an alien invasion and story or a romance or a story about personal freedom.
SPEAKER_01It's a it's a story about choices, and it's a more personal story. I think that the the aliens are in the that alien invasion is the backdrop, and it affects the characters in a deep way. Even though they're not, they never actually I can't say they never, they don't interact with the aliens until towards the end of the story. I can say that without giving anything away. But their arrival has an impact on everyone. And for example, one of the two main characters is a guy named Bax, and he is the chief of security on a mining planet, and he has uh plans that he's going to transfer to from this security job to a different security job with the with the Navy, essentially, with the Space Navy, and indulge some this wanderlust that he's had with the kid since he was a kid. And he doesn't get to do that because these aliens have arrived, and the powers that be his superior officer has decided that it's more important to keep Bax in place to keep an eye on this mining planet because it has resources that would be useful to the federal, to the space government, and just in case these aliens decide that they're going to stop staring and start attacking or whatever it is that they're going to do. And so Bax is trapped by this circumstance. And and then when he meets Lila, who's the the other protagonist in the story, he finds his way out. And she also lives on a mining planet or in a mining colony that's on the outside of civilized space that's not part of the big government. And she's a wildcatter, they call them for self free spacers. And she, in this colony that she's grown up on, that she was born into and grown up on, is not doing well, and she doesn't think it's going to make it, and she's feeling trapped, also. And when she meets Bex, she sees maybe there's a way out with him. And so that's where, and her life is impacted by the aliens as well, but also by in a more removed way, because I don't want to give too much away. Just suffice this to say that that they have an indirect impact on her colony and on her life as well.
SPEAKER_00Without giving too much away, how do these two central characters that are on ostensibly opposite sides of the law, how does their relationship give them a sense of control during this period of chaos?
SPEAKER_01Well, they meet in an unusual circumstance in that he she's trying to steal some stuff from the colony, and he is trying to catch her. And when they meet, there are sparks. There's something unusual happens. I guess, I guess I could say what is a kiss. And that unlocks something inside both of them and where that they have to pursue. That each of them can't get the other out of the mind out of their minds. And so it's I suppose it's like a romantic meet cute, except it's in a in an action sequence. Not exactly it's not a romantic comedy, but there is definitely that romance is definitely a big part of the story.
SPEAKER_00Elliot Blake is our special guest. We're talking about Into the Great. His website is elliotblake.com. How do you balance the intimate relationship between characters with the enormous scale of an alien invasion?
SPEAKER_01That part was easy because I focused almost entirely on the human scale of it. Because that's the kind of that's really the story that I'm interested in is what is what's the human impact? What's the human, what's the cost to humanity when you have and to your own personal humanity when everything you knew has is being upended. And so the aliens are really a way for me to explore those ideas.
SPEAKER_00What did you decide to leave unexplained as you were building this world?
SPEAKER_01So this is a novella, and and I have ideas for expanding it into a novel, but I don't know yet if what the aliens want will be part of that story. I like the mystery of it, but we'll see. It depends on what opportunities come my way, whether or not I explore them and whether or not that's really what perhaps a publisher would like to hear. I have a great publisher right now in Lil Factory. I don't know. This is the book, and it's just a beautiful limited edition. He's printed 500 copies, and it's got this cloth-bound hardback cover and on printed on beautiful paper. So that's it's a good I like it's a good story, but it also looks nice on your shelf. Why a novella and not a full novel? That comes from the publisher. He was interested in publishing shorter stories. And so, and for me, that was a real boon because I hadn't written prose fiction since I was in college, and that was a few years ago. And I so I needed to learn how to write prose fiction again. I coming from the world of television and audio dramas, you write in a script format, and everything that you write in a script format is all present tense, and you're describing what's happening, but you're not going internal, you're not going into the characters' heads. And when you are writing a prose fiction, that is almost you there's action, there's dialogue, but you also get that opportunity to go internal. And the big thing is that most prose fiction is written in past tense. And I really I the first two drafts of Into the Great, the book version, were written in present tense because I could not get the get it into my head how to write past tense. It took some practice, and now I've got it. But it's uh it was so but writing a shorter story was definitely a great way to get into this world and of the book, but also to get into the world of prose writing.
SPEAKER_00What is different between writing prose and writing for comics and writing for the screen?
SPEAKER_01I think really it's the interiority of the characters that you because you can explore that in a book or even in a comic book, which is also a visual medium, but comics are are are a great hybrid of visual and written word. And so you get to play with both. And you can do very interior stuff with a comic, but while you're also exploring visuals like you would in a movie or TV show. And when you're doing TV or you're doing something for the screen, the you want, you don't necessarily want to have a voiceover explaining what's happening in the characters' heads. You want what the you want the characters' actions to clue you into what they're thinking. And a lot of and you get to rely on an actor's face to convey a lot of those ideas. And so it's a so it's just a different, it's a different way of thinking about telling a story.
SPEAKER_00The Moriarty Audible series is one of those experiences that is one long driveway moment. Once you start, you don't want to turn it off. How did you become involved with that project?
SPEAKER_01First of all, thank you. That's a lovely compliment. And I got involved with that. Uh, the origin story is this is that the writer uh and creator of Moriarty, a fellow named Charlie Kindinger, we worked together at Amazon Studios. And after we both left to pursue other opportunities, for me it was creative stuff, and for him it was writing. He said, Hey, I've we got together for coffee, and he was talking to he told me about Moriarty, and I said, This sounds great. And I happened to be working out of a friend's office, one of my uh producing partners' offices, and uh there was another fellow there who was starting a podcast company, and we got to talking, and I told him about Moriarty, and we decided to work together on it, and we sold it to Audible, and uh rest is history. So it was a great it was a great opportunity to tell a story in a way that I had not I had never told a story. I was familiar with telling stories I guess with working with actors and doing doing voiceover because that's how and we that's animation where it's starts with the voice actors uh creating the characters and or voicing the characters, and then animators use that to to enhance and uh coordinate the drawing and the animation and the to give help give life to the facial expressions of the the characters. And so I was familiar with how that that voiceover process worked and the voice acting process, and so I so I took the opportunity to say, hey, I'm um I want to direct this. And again, the rest is history.
SPEAKER_00The term executive producer has a lot of meanings in the film world. Yes. For the Apple TV series The Sisters Grim, what did it mean for you?
SPEAKER_01For me, it meant so I I got involved in that I was involved with that series right from the very beginning. And so I got to see it through from the in it from its inception, from getting the the I was brought in by my producing partners because they had not done animation before, and they made an agreement with the writer of the Sisters Grim books, uh, a brilliant guy named Michael Brock Michael Buckley, who created that that middle grade book series. And it was up to me then to figure out okay, what could an animated version of this look like? And who would we want to work with? And so I found a writer and I found the animation studio that we wanted to work with, and then helped shape that pitch and helped shape what the TV version of it was going to be. And so that, and then as once as we got to a green light and got to actually make the show, that role evolved into being the sounding board for our head writerslash showrunner, and just helping her solve problems and doing things like helping the negotiate budgets and then reading scripts and giving notes and kind of keeping just having my fingers in everything, but while making sure that all the people who are like directly in charge of the creative aspects of the show had the space to do what they needed to do.
SPEAKER_00I grew up with Jay Ward, Looney Tunes, Hannah Barbera. Yep. How is animation different today?
SPEAKER_01In a lot of ways, it's not. It's still animated, if you will, by that same spirit of fun and love for the medium. Every animator that I have ever worked with, also I'm of a certain age, and a lot of those animators are also of a certain age, but they also love all those classics. And that was the reason why they got into it. And then this younger generation, they love animation because they fell in love with anime or they grew up watching SpongeBob, which was their Looney Tunes, and from there learned all about they just they had to do it, they had to make those cartoons. I would say the biggest difference is where all of the Bullwinkle and the original Looney Tunes cartoons were all drawn by hand on paper and then transferred to a cell, painted onto a cell. Now a lot of animation is still done by hand, or especially 2D animation, it's still done by hand, but instead of drawing on paper, people are drawing on computer tablets, and all the painting and everything is done digitally. And also now there's a lot more opportunity for for adult kind animation as well, and that's thanks to shows like Simpsons and King of the Hill and Family Guy and all those big primetime successes. What does it feel like to win an Emmy? That's pretty cool. I got it in 2008, and it was it was a uh at the Southeast Regional Emmys, because I was living in Atlanta at the time, and the company that I was working for was Turner Broadcasting, who was based in Atlanta. And I got it from Ernie Johnson of Inside the NBA, he was the who lives in Atlanta and was a Turner, longtime Turner employee, and was the host that evening. And it was really it was quite a thrill. And what was what's funny is I when we decided we were going to move back to Los Angeles from Atlanta, I came and stayed with a friend of mine who was one of my college friends, and he's been had a very successful career as an editor and director on The Office, and he had won an Emmy for editing the office. And I saw his on his mantle, and his is bigger, and I discovered that the regional Emmys are like, I don't know, 20% smaller. So that was a funny, that was a funny thing. It's still a real Emmy, but it's but the regional ones just aren't as they don't they take up less real estate. So that's that was an interesting thing to learn. There's no size on a resume when they say exactly it doesn't matter. Exactly. It doesn't matter at all. So it's yeah, it's a nice thing to be able to say. And I would still one day perhaps if it would like to win a full size one. So I have the the big brother and the little sister.
SPEAKER_00What are your hopes for Into the Great? What do you hope the readers will take away from their encounter with that book?
SPEAKER_01I just I guess the first thing, of course, is I hope they enjoy it because I'd like to do more of this kind of writing. And I think if the book sells well, and I think that will provide more opportunities to do that. But as far as takeaways go, I think I don't know. I like to leave that to the reader. I would say that the message is that you always have a choice. I guess that's the message in the book for me. And so I think that's an important thing for people to remember to as they're reading there. A good takeaway that you always have a choice in your life about how you're gonna comport yourself and how you're going to and what you're going to do.
SPEAKER_00After completing the Moriarty trilogy and this fascinating book, what's next for you?
SPEAKER_01That is a good question. I'm developing other projects, taking have a pitch in a few weeks with a couple of pitches in a few weeks with a few of the streamers. So more animation. I'm working on a screen adaptation of Into the Great because I would like to see. I have an idea for how to do that as an animated feature for a grown-ups.
SPEAKER_00Definitely more writing. And the book is available now at Lil Fact, L-I-L-F-A-C, LilFact.com. Tweets very well, doesn't it? Slash shop. Written by our special guest, Elliot Blake. And if you haven't yet had the opportunity to either digest the beautiful Apple TV animated series, The Sisters Grim, or to listen to the spectacular Moriarty series, I highly encourage you to do it. Elliot, it's been great to be with you. Thank you so much. Hey, thank you very much. Terry, it was a blast.
SPEAKER_02In Conversation with Terry Shepherd is a copyrighted presentation. All rights reserved. I'm Lisa Davis. Join Terry Shepherd next time in Conversation.