Author: Eneasz

One of the challenges of doing this sort of thing non-professionally is that there’s no way to gather a bunch of people together at once. Many of the voice contributions come from people from other states. This makes it very hard to have to two characters say the same thing at the same time. When people are together they can sync up their timing and inflection instinctively. When they don’t even have a chance to hear each other it rarely sounds right. The tempo is too out of whack, or the stress is too dissimilar, or something.

I was actually pretty lucky in the previous episode where I got all three “um…”s to sync up. It helped that there’s not many ways to say “um”, Hannah said “um” several times, and Hermione submitted two takes. But generally the way I avoid this is by simply saying the repeated phrase in narration. It didn’t sound quite right with ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ in today’s episode, so I doubled Lavender’s line, offset it a bit, and changed the pitch so it sounded more like two different people.

It would be possible to coordinate multiple takes to get well-synced simultaneous lines, but it would be a fair bit more work for everyone involved. I don’t want to ask too much from my volunteers, and I need spare time to pursue my other interests as well, so I haven’t bothered yet. The work-around isn’t perfect, but it works well.

IIRC, Eliezer once said that when he first heard of feminism, he was flabbergasted that a concept as basic as “women should be treated as equals” would need a special word to define it. This mirrors my own experience, and I think the confusion of the SPHEW witches captures that initial dumbfoundedness very well. I realize it’s a perk of male privilege to be that unaware of sexism, and no girl would’ve made it to her early tweens unaware that her gender is systematically treated worse. I consider myself a feminist nowadays, and the SPHEW arc has held a special place in my heart since it was first published, in part due to the culture shock of the witches as they learn how muggle women have been treated and how they’ve had to fight against it. It’s probably akin to the shock Harry felt when learning of the wizarding world’s medieval  political/judicial system, but this time we’re seeing it from the outside side.

I mentioned before that initially I didn’t want to involve anyone else in the podcast project, because I knew it would span several years and I didn’t trust anyone else to stay committed to it that long. And that this was first overcome by my longtime friend Drake Walker volunteering, since I figured we’d be friends for a long time still and I could show up at his door and refuse to leave if I needed more lines badly enough. :) I still didn’t trust unknown people enough to ask for submissions in the podcast.

This changed when I received an email from Jocee Cotton. Attached was audio of EVERY SINGLE LINE by Daphne Greengrass. Completely unsolicited. Despite the first appearance of Daphne being months away, and the real meat of SPHEW being a year or so away. It took me by surprise and completely blew my mind. It had to take a fair amount of time to track down every Daphne line in the text and record them all, with no assurance that I’d be willing to do anything with it. And if that wasn’t stunning enough – they were actually good! This was entirely usable! The effort a stranger would put in for something like this with no expectation of anything in return or any idea if I’d even accept it really restored some of my faith in humanity. I opened up minor roles to submissions because of Jocee’s initiative, and received Tracey and Susan almost immediately. Since then more and more people have been lending their voices and (in James’s case) helping out by tracking down available lines (pdf). The world is a better place than I thought a year and a half ago. :)