Author: Eneasz

Hoo boy, that was a tough one! Fun though! Which I suppose is a common enough theme, the tougher something is, the more fun it is to do it. When I first started mapping out this episode in my head I thought to use the Prometheus Trailer Theme for the summoning ritual. But I didn’t feel quite right about it – it was a very recent movie, so it felt fad-ish, and it was a pretty bad movie to boot. I spent way too long searching for other options. There were many I liked (the Inception theme was almost used – it has a very similar sound, and comes from a much better movie. But it sounds less horror-esque, and the music is actually an important part of the plot of the movie, I didn’t want to bring in all that baggage). Ultimately nothing really hit me as just over-the-top enough with a horror feel like the Prometheus Trailer.

Of course the full trailer theme is only a minute and a half long, so I had to do some looping to stretch it out. Fortunately the song already has a lot of abrupt swells and falls, which made good break points. And it allowed me to time the fade-out very nicely to the narration. The seams aren’t perfect, but they work.

The voice-masking effect was tricky. Generally for 60-Minute-type shows they just drop the pitch drastically. The “blurred into unidentifiability by a buzzing undertone” is easy to imagine, I’m sure we all know what that should sound like, but how the hell does one actually do it? Blurring too much makes the words hard to understand, which is probably OK if you’re beating up 11-year-old girls, but it’s a big no-no for an audio book. Underlaying a buzzing doesn’t really mask the voice at all, it just creates a buzzing in the background. I tried mixing the audio with white noise via the vocodor option, as was suggested at various sites, but that produced too much of a robotic auto-tuned sound.

I sometimes adjust the tempo of speech a bit for various nefarious purposes, but I quickly learned you can’t alter it by more than a few percent, or you get a “clicking” effect. I decided to use that to my advantage in this episode, first dropping the tempo by 70%, then speeding it back up to normal again. The clicking is an irremovable artifact of the slowing process, so bringing the voice back up to speed left the distortion. It’s not the world’s best masking, but it provides plausible deniability, and it sounds similar to how it was described.

I hope I’m not dating myself too badly with the Mortal Kombat theme. I recall a time when every other fight AMV was set to that song…

It’s amazing just how much information can be transferred visually in a written medium without even needing to read the words. The first section of this chapter is a montage, with summaries of every-day mundane activities in plain text interlaced with vingettes giving a sampling of the memorable extraordinary events in italics. One can quickly grasp the back-and-forth nature simply by looking at the page and seeing the alternating plain and italicized text. As with the POV-changes and reading-of-letters previously, I had to find some way to do this with audio cues. I read the daily-life sections in a more relaxed voice, and the vingettes with a bit more intensity, but that only did so much. It still sounded like a somewhat jumbled mess. I tried to mark the vingettes with the echo effect of the Humanism Flashback Scene, but it was far too portentous for what this was. But it did trigger the “treat it as a flashback” idea, and I settled on a variation of the “going into a flashback” noise that I remembered from Lost to separate the two narratives. It seems to work.

It’s been a busy week, so a short Production Note today. You’ve likely noticed a lot of pop-culture references in HPMOR (and for that matter, some high-brow-culture references as well). A lot of the fun of reading this sort of fic is finding them on your own and basking in the in-group glow, so I don’t generally point them out (that, and I don’t catch them all either, and I don’t want to look like an out-group loser :) ). But I must make an exception for The Tragedy of Light. Because it’s very good and you should see it if you haven’t yet. It’s a reference to the anime Death Note, and while it drags in the middle, the first half is awesome and finale ain’t bad at all. One of the best animes I’ve seen, so this is a recommendation.