Fthrll

Just four days to go before the release of Episode 1. The website is up on the Pendant pages, with cast details, background, a promo and an i-Tunes link.

Marleigh - in her editor's hat - and I recorded a commentary for episode 1. They're not easy, as it's an on-the-spot conversation in this case with a slight time delay also, but still it was fun.

There's only one very minor spoiler - about character interaction rather than plot, which I thought about beeping out, but as it's so woven into the conversation it would have meant a lot of extra beeping here and there. Never mind. 

The final thing to do is to make a blooper reel when I can find the time - the cast made some lovely ones, and Marleigh's lines often had a running commentary that was both useful and hilarious in places, along with a huge number of adlibs, many of which made it into the show. Other than that, though, Red Sands is finished, the beach huts are locked against the elements and the fair is closed down for the season.

Thanks to the absolutely wonderful cast and people at Pendant - in particular Jeffrey, Marleigh, Panda & Dale. Hope you enjoy the show.

Red Sands Investigations is complete and in Pendant's vaults for release:

Episode 1: Oct. 12

Episode 2: Nov. 9

Episode 3: Dec. 7

Episode 4: Jan. 11

I'm hoping to be able to do at least one commentary as I do have a lot to babble about, not least about the cast's performances, although it will depend on fitting it in.

My favourite commentaries by far are those on 'The Tomorrow People' and 'Garth Marenghi's Darkplace'. The latter starts with the sound of opening beer cans, and the former I can't recommend highly enough for anyone into older-style Sci Fi. The actors take the proverbial out of the show and each other, whilst pretty much slandering their fellow actors and crew. Fantastic.

It would be fantastic to do a spoof/light-hearted commentary one day, but sadly I don't think Red Sands is the time or place for it... ;-P

On the home straight... I'm now working on Episode 4, which being the finale is kind of enormous. Twenty three scenes in total, although many of them are very short, as the action speeds up. Nonetheless, there's still a long way to go and very little time left. I'm much more in the swing of it, now, and with less time to faff around and worry about it, it's getting there quicker. Also, as certain locations come up again, the fx and so on are already decided, which makes things easier. 

Something curious has happened with the acting. Originally, this was a 5 part thing. When I started holding auditions, I'd written about 4.5 of the episodes. To make it tighter, I decided to ditch a branch of the storyline and so extensively rewrote parts 3 & 4.  

In the original story, there was a romantic brush between two of the characters. In the later draft, I removed all of that. So Nick, Dale and Tiff are pretty direct most of the time (Tiff only when she gets drunk - although that's a fair old bit of the time...) but otherwise, while other characters do hold slight torches for each other, it's very much repressed.

So, I was very surprised to hear, when the two actors' lines came in, that they both still sounded like they were on the brink of a relationship, even though I'm certain I removed any hint of it.

I could be mistaken of course, although in fact, one actor apologised for one take, where they thought it might have sounded too flirty. I'm purposely not naming the characters as when the episode is released, I'll see if they notice it and ask if it was a conscious thing on their parts, or not! I do find it interesting with satellite shows how actors can sometimes seem to predict each others' deliveries with uncanny accuracy. When doing Wonder Woman, I had a scene with half a dozen characters reciting a prayer. Bizarrely, almost all of them came back with such similarity in tempo and delivery that I actually had to cut them up quite a bit to stop them all merging into one another. Yay for actorly ESP!

Jeffrey sent me the logo he's been working on and it is simply stunning.Combining that with Daniel's episode promo pics, this is going to be visually a very cool show, at any rate :-P

It's dead exciting! 

Well, 22 scenes left... and hopefully about 2 weeks... and counting...

Episode 1 is now complete and has been accepted by Pendant as is, which is very heartening. It's a real boost to know that they think the style works - it'll make it much easier to continue that with the music and fx in the next episode, now.

Episode 2 is a little trickier to mix than 1 as it has musical numbers in it, for starters, but I prefer it as a story, which also helps. Episode 1 was really establishing the main characters.

The musical number is going to be fun - I've done it once before in this way. The actor listens to the music and then performs the song. The job then is to match the timing of the original music to the actor's singing, through extending or adding or removing notes or part of them. In the last case, it was a sung piece over arpeggios - it was easy to break up the accompaniment because it was all individual notes, but I think it took a couple of hundred cuts to edit and the timing itself wasn't so easy. I really enjoyed doing it, but it was very much a trial and error thing (with lots of error!) 

In this case, I'm hoping it'll be simpler, as it's a rehearsal situation in a theatre with an elderly pianist. T actor is performing a Music Hall-style song, so has sent along a semi-sung, semi-spoken version. (Which, I have to say, has fantastic delivery - I was blown away by it). So it isn't meant to be melodic or polished, anyway, which hopefully will make it easier to tackle.

Six weeks left to mix Eps2-4. Episode 2 should be done by the end of next week. It's just about doable. Just...:-P

Just a few days ago, Jeffrey introduced me to the cover artist assigned to Red Sands Investigations and we've been discussing ideas ever since. I have to say, I am extremely happy he volunteered for this show. Not only is his art simply awesome, he's also a delight to work with.

His first question was asking about how far Red Sands was based in gritty noir, and how much was modern - at which point I realised we were on the same wavelength.

The answer is the town itself is very much based on that kind of background, noir being a favourite genre of mine. But, as I would never begin to attempt to tackle that kind of use of language that writers like Chandler or Hammett do, it had to be I guess 'post-noir', plus it's set in England, which also changes things culturally.

The existential detective is already dead.  Carla is an outsider to the genre, with a clear sense of right and wrong, trying to work with the more morally ambiguous characters around her. A lot of the time she fails, but whether it has a traditionally bleak ending or not would be spoilering. :-) 

In fact, the British/American English language aspect was even more challenging than I'd thought. Several characters in the show are American, most notably Carla herself.

Being a huge fan of American film and tv shows, I tried to 'Americanise' her speech, but missed the mark on lots of occasions. Luckily, Marleigh was absolutely invaluable as a script editor. I learnt a lot of new phrases and structure - and words that just simply don't exist like roundabout (the driving kind), seafront, tatty, to name just a few. Seafront was a particularly tough one to lose, as 'beach' just doesn't mean the same thing in British English.

I was fully expecting it to be hard to write with any hope of authenticity, but even going in expecting that, I was amazed by how different the two Englishes are - and that's just standard dialects.  If I do any more writing in future, I think I'll stick to British or non-specific dialects and encourage the actors to improvise around their own dialect.

But back to the artwork - the artist's name is Daniel Chon - and he's simply fantastic. The designs he has come up with so far are really stylish, professional and... well, I'm really, really excited about having him on the team.

At least, whatever I do with the mixing, this show is one that'll look good... ;-P

Mixing for episode 1 is now fully underway. Much of the dialogue is set and locations reverbed, so then it's just a question of effects, panning and music. 

Normally when actors send lines, I try to listen to every one of them in full in advance, and if I have time, do stuff like noise reduction and volume tweaking there and then. As this production's episodes are so long, I didn't manage to listen all of the way through every take for every single character as they came in - just enough to check that there was nothing missing and that there was at least one 'clean' take.

So I'm still getting some surprises in the takes, which is always a fun part of the process. I was delighted to hear one of the actors actually light up a cigarette (or make an excellent impression of doing so, lighter and all) when the script called for it. Not that I'd want to encourage voice actors to endanger their health, of course, but for purposes of authenticity, it was absolutely wonderful. :-P

Feeding Episode 1 into Wordle resulted in the image below (The size of the word indicates how many times it occurs in the text). Carla gets to dominate on account of her 128 lines for this episode. Poor Marleigh's had an enormous job voicing this character!

Anyhow, onward with the mix...

The script for the final episode has been edited and accepted and has now gone out to the cast. So now the focus is on post-production. I'm rather glad that, despite some 'real' life things cropping up, the show seems to be on track. 

Looking at the length of the scripts, Pendant is labelling this as an Original Feature, rather than a mini-series. It makes more sense as it is more of a 4-part arc than an episodic show. Also, I think Original Feature sounds rather cool.

The episodes look as if they'll end up at about 30 minutes long. It's hard to tell exactly, as I'm going to be trying for fairly tight dialogue mixing, but want to give some space for the atmosphere, too. I know in my head how I'd like it to sound, but whether that's going to be easy to translate into audio, I guess I'll soon discover. ;-) Looking forward to trying anyhow.

Anyway, all lines are in for episodes 1&2, bar a couple of redos, and so I'm hoping, if at all possible, to have finished all episodes before mid-July.

The one absolutely essential sound effect for setting is some seagulls, it being a seaside town. Obviously, all effects and music have to be royalty free creative commons, and I looked high and low for the kind of background seagulls that just do a few cries and set the scene.  It was a trickier hunt than I'd thought. There's a real dearth of good quality seagull 'extras' out there. The only ones I could find sounded like they were tearing each others' heads off - really hamming it up.

In the end, I had to actually buy a set of seagulls' cries (pretty cheaply - and they'll get extremely good use). They may have charged a nominal fee, but these ones were proper pros, giving a much more subtle performance which is just ideal.

Birds! Hah! Never again... :-P

The lines for the first episode are half in, which is extremely exciting. It's great to hear how it's starting to come together and the actors sound wonderful in the parts. I've cleaned and evened out the volume on the ones in so far, when I've had a spare moment here and there, so they'll be good to go in once the rest arrive. 

As for the scripts, episode 2 has been edited and will be fine to go out at the beginning of next month.

I'm in the process of rewriting the last few pages of the fourth, final episode one more time before submitting it.  I'd like to get it as good as possible before it goes in to the Script Editor. As episode 3 and 4 are very much attached, she'll look at both of them together.

Her comments have been really useful so far and the scripts that have come out have been stronger, I think. I will be relieved, though, once the rewriting is over. Whilst I've enjoyed the writing enormously, it'll be nice to have that part done and then I can concentrate on the mixing and the sound of the show.  So yes, overall, it is all still on track at the moment and hopefully if everything goes to plan, there will be a complete mini-series ready for release by July.  Here's hoping anyway!

Fantastic news - the show is going to be released by Pendant Productions.

First, to explain about Pendant, and then what it'll mean for the show.
I've been involved with Pendant for oooh, must be coming up for two and a half years now. I've done and still do some acting there; they trained me in audio directing and I directed 15 monthly episodes of Wonder Woman, Champion of Themyscira.

Pendant is a well-run, friendly group who release monthly shows to a regular schedule. They produce or have produced 7 original shows to date, and 11 fan-based ones, with several others in the pipeline.

They have an established listenership and good reputation.

In terms of Red Sands Investigations, I will still be directing (mixing) it. When all four episodes are completed and mixed and approved by Pendant, they will then be released to schedule.

I intend mixing it at the same pace as any other Pendant production: giving actors 3-4 weeks for each episode's script, and mixing the episode within a month of receiving lines.

So, in summary, this means that there will be almost no change at all for the actors in the actual pacing of the putting together of the show, but it will benefit from the support, experience, advertising and established listenership that'll come from being under the Pendant umbrella.