Category: production notes

As some of you may have recognized, the intro music is from the theme to Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex: 2^nd GIG. That was a last minute decision, while I was editing this episode I kept thinking how much the rescue scene reminded me of the premier episode when Section 9 stormed the geisha house in their thermo-optic camo suits. It occurred to me that using that music to open up an action sequence would awesome. :) I ended up using the 2^nd season theme rather than the 1^st as it starts off with more energy. I think the Ghost In The Shell parallels work for the rest of the chapter too, as the Section 9 crew would often sit around as a group in debriefings and try to figure out what the hell was going on.

I’m glad to have so many people contributing voices to the show now. I didn’t actually add up the seconds, but I think this is the first episode where my speaking time is less than half of all the speech in the show! If only someone had cared to do Thicknesse I would’ve gone an entire chapter doing only the Narrator. :) (well ok, and a few words by Harry)

Have I mentioned before that I love Quirrell-heavy chapters? :) I can’t get enough of him, so this was another fanboy chapter for me. I don’t think I quite captured the distaste and contempt in his voice as he speaks of politics that I’d imagined, but I’m happy with it nonetheless. I don’t have much to say about this chapter aside from loving everything about it.

This episode again brought to the fore the problem with sound effects. The opening scene takes places over a few seconds. In text this can all be compressed in the reader’s imagination, with the rocket roar throughout. In audio format it takes several minutes to read through it all, and having the rocket roar from the previous episode underneath that narration for the entire period would simply be tiring. And having it fade in and out at key points would probably be too distracting. I decided to just drop it altogether and let the listener’s mind fill in the blanks.

I feel there was a missed opportunity during Albus & Amelia’s broomstick flight. It would have been nice to have the sound of wind whipping past them as they flew. Which, I realize, contradicts my position on the rocket roar. However wind is a much gentler sound, much easier to speak over and simply have in the background, like in Frontal Override. Also, the broomstick riding sections are fairly short. Unfortunately I hadn’t asked the actors for Albus and Amelia to stage-shout their lines, and it would’ve been weird to have people conversing normally with the wind howling around them.

I really liked the disassociation Harry feels in the final scene of this chapter, I’m sure everyone’s felt that kind of thing before, and I wasn’t sure how to capture it. I played with having the standard high-pitched tinnitus & murky sound that is commonly used for post-explosion concussions in movies and video games. However those don’t ever stretch for multiple minutes, and it would have made the audio harder to understand, which is a pretty big concern in an audio book. Having only Harry’s words muddled (with a combination of Audacity’s Low-End Rolloff effect + bass boost) struck me as the best compromise, especially with how the text describes his words as seeming to come from someone else.

Originally I had only asked my friend Autumn to do Ms Camblebunker, a quick one-shot role. I loved her voice so much, and she enjoyed it enough, that she’s coming back to permanently voice Minerva. :)

The “WRONG. DON’T.” alarm from both chapter 16 and this one come from Kill Bill. It’s very jarring, which I think works well, as it reflects how jarring Harry’s sense of doom must have been to knock him out of his Akira-moment.

I loved the Quake soundtrack, I listened to it often while not playing the game. The entire time that I was reading the Azkaban arc I heard Hall of Souls running through my head, over and over. It was the perfect background music – full of stalking, creeping menace. The whispers in the back of your head, the feeling that just beyond the doors things lie in wait that wish you only harm. I kinda wanted to have it running in the background the whole time, but I figured that might run into the same problem as the Phoenix Song (doesn’t work for everyone). Instead I used it as one of the intro/outro songs over the course of this arc. Because obviously there was no way something like Catch That Goblin could work here without destroying the entire mood.

It was the Azkaban arc that finally cemented in my mind that I was going to do this audio-book/podcast project. Before I had only been thinking “Man, I really wish this was in audio form so I could listen to it while working.” Afterwards I thought “Wow. This has to be done. No one else is doing it… what’s stopping me?”

I almost wanted to just jump straight to the Azkaban arc and do it right away. But there was simply no way for the arc to have the effect it does without all the groundwork laid down by the previous chapters. It’d be like listening to “Still Alive” without having played through Portal first. It’s still a good song, but all the emotional context is gone. I needed to have put out all the preceding chapters first in order to do the Azkaban arc now. Fortunately, it’s easy to change the distant past if you get started early enough. :) A year later it was the present again, and I wanted to do the Azkaban arc, and this time all the preceding audio work had already been done!

I’m glad there were so many episodes to do first – I learned an amazing amount on my way to chapter 52. So much so that I had to eventually completely redo the early chapters. The Azkaban arc would have been a shameful and wretched thing had I not gotten the dozens of hours of reading and hundreds of hours of editing experience in beforehand. Instead, I can note it as a huge success.