Category: production notes

This chapter was so short I don’t really have any production notes to share. Yay for reduced work load this week!

The link to the available roles PDF is in the sidebar. Please check with me before starting in on any of them, to make sure they haven’t been newly claimed by anyone else.

The podcast is approaching a year and a half in age, and one of the problems with long-term projects involving other people is that life is uncertain. This was why I originally refused offers from people to do voices, I didn’t want to rely on someone else to provide lines for months upon months.

I did eventually accept some help from close friends (as first mentioned here), and Hermione is one of those friends. I figured I could always show up at their doorstep with a computer and microphone and refuse to leave until I got the next chapter’s lines. :) I also trust my friends a lot more than strangers, and they knowingly committed to a project they knew would last quite a while.

It seems my strategy had a flaw in it – friends can move away, as Hermione has done. But my mistrust was foolishly misplaced – she has continued to faithfully record upcoming lines and send them to me in plenty of time. I am grateful to her. :) Her setup isn’t quite as fancy, so if you notice a decrease in the quality of Hermione’s audio, that is why. It is a small price to pay to have friends you can trust.

When Harry first started labeling his various internal thought processes according to the Houses, I knew I had to give them slightly different voices. Slytherin and Hufflepuff were easy – make ’em sound like Draco and Neville, of course. Ravenclaw is just Harry’s natural voice. Gryffindor was tougher, as Harry doesn’t have any peers in Gryffindor in MoR. I went with a sort of superman/mighty-mouse tone (or my best approximation at any rate.)

Now that I have someone new voicing Neville this will be less obvious. And when I’m done going through the earlier episodes and replacing all of my Neville renditions with Adom’s, there will be no tie between Neville and internal-Hufflepuff at all. Older listeners might remember, but anyone new – if they think about it at all – is going to wonder why that particular voice. I think I kinda like that quirk. :)

I aim for the 25-35 minute range on my podcasts. This is primarily because any longer than that and I would go insane. I only have so much free time, and my girlfriend claims a fair chunk of it. I’ve already basically cut out video games entirely in the past six months to make room for the podcast (in fairness, I was already starting to tire of them, this is much more fulfilling. But I would love to play Mass Effect 3 and I haven’t even picked it up yet). It’s also a happy coincidence that A) the average commute is about this length, and B) most HPMoR chapters are about this length.

I’ve found that 4000-5000 words fits this nicely. More than that and the episode runs a bit long. Significantly more and I have to break it up into two parts.

Chapter 63 is over 14,500 words. I was hoping to do it in two parts, but I was defeated. Therefore 63 will be my first three-part chapter. I wish it weren’t so, but I am a mere mortal and I have to hold down a full-time job too.

One thing you don’t think of first before you start an audio book is how different speech sounds from the way it’s written. Take “she’d tried harder” from this week’s episode. No problem, right? Except the ‘d’ at the end of she’d rests right against the ‘t’ from tried. When spoken, it sounds exactly like “she tried harder”. What happened to the ‘d’? Trying to pronounce both of them inserts a very conspicuous break between “she’d” and “tried” which not only sounds awkward, but is also not like anyone actually talks. I don’t actually know what to do about this, but I have gotten into the habit of over-enunciating my words so I can be understood clearly.

Relevant: this SMBC comic about glottal stops in conversational American English. I don’t think Batman is a great example, as it’s easy and not uncommon to pronounce both the ‘t’ and the ‘m’, but it’s an astute observation that applies often, and Batman makes for a better punchline.

These episodes with extreme emotion are rather difficult to do, primarily because I’m really not a voice actor. I have to really psych myself up, and do several takes. The only reason I can do them at all is because I feel what Harry is feeling, which is entirely due to Eliezer’s skills as a storyteller. When I first read the Azkaban arc I couldn’t breathe through most of it. “Acting” is much easier when it isn’t actually acting, it’s just expressing & recording what you are already feeling inside. It kinda feels like cheating. I hope it came out alright.

There’s also the technical problem of such drastic changes in volume blowing out the microphone, it seems I should have adjusted even more for that, but it’s not awful.

The phoenix call I used was primarily the red-tailed hawk cry. People often assume this is the bald eagle cry, because it is used in TV and Hollywood in place of the real bald eagle cry, which is a fair bit less impressive. Obviously one’s national bird should have the coolest cry – and if it doesn’t, we can fix that in post!