Episode 01 – Casey at the BAT
Posted in Uncategorized on January 23rd, 2010 by trickstermoonNot to get all philosophic on you, but if a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? For the purposes of this blog, Confucius say: a-yuh. Now, if I were to produce a podcast wherein the listener was supposed to picture that falling tree, which nobody was actually around to see, and I did it by setting my microphone on the ground and dropping some dead leaves and a stick on top of it, would anybody care? Yes. Yes, anybody would. I say this, because I am just such an anybody. When I first got into the whole podcast scene, I came down a well-traveled road: Audiobook Lane, let’s call it. I was looking for a good read- one where I wasn’t the one doing the reading, seeing as how I tended to tend to my habit while I was on the nine-to-five.
My job, my current paying gig, is a torturously dull one, wherein I spend a lot of time chained to a desk in a bare-walled white room with only the beat of a copier to keep me otherwise occupied. And seeing as how my brain quickly and dementedly revealed to me that said beat just happened to be the same as that to the theme song for Mister Ed, and I didn’t want to be dragged from one bare-walled white room into another screaming, “A HORSE IS A HORSE OF COURSE OF COURSE!” over and over and over until the Thorazine kicked in, I needed to find other ways to occupy my mind, and fast. So I bought an iPod and I transferred my entire CD collection over to it. All 4,500-odd songs’ worth.
Problem solved, some might say. And some well might, only I began my CD collecting in the 90’s, long before we were graced with the frictionless force-field technology that most CD collectors use today ($49.95 on S-Mart.com, go look it up!). So, that left me with a collection of about a hundred songs that didn’t skip after the first ten seconds. All well and good if you’re “Weird” Al Yankovic putting together another masterful polka-jam, but for the discerning audiophile tired of listening to either A) Metallica’s Black Album; B) CAKE’s Fashion Nugget; or C) CLASSIC TV TUNES!, track three of which actually was the theme song to Mister Ed, the job wasn’t getting done. And since my wonderful white-walled job didn’t pay me well enough to spend $4356 re-downloading my mangled musical library, I decided to check out a much cheaper route. A free route, in fact: the free audiobook.
Y’see, there are people out there that write stories and then read them into a microphone and then put them on the web and then they don’t expect you to pay a single dime for them. The nerve. And you know that old saying, “you get what you pay for”? Bollocks, dear friend. Though you may never have heard their names, there are true literary giants that walk unseen behind the airwaves. People like Scott Sigler, J.C. Hutchins, Christiana Ellis, and Tee Morris, who may not be household names to the world quite yet, but whose tales deserve just as much space in the folds of your brain as those of Stephen King, Michael Crichton, or Tom Clancy. Their stories are out there on the net, are every bit the equal of any dog-eared paperback in your collection, and they are available for free.
These free audiobooks are, of course, a trap. Because once you’ve listened to Jack Wakes Up, or downloaded a couple or forty short stories from Pseudopod, you’re going to have to have more- and more there is. There are free podcasts out there like Comedy Death-Ray Radio, a free-form hour of hilarity hosted by Scott Aukerman, with guest appearances from major movers and shakers like Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt. There’s The Uncanny X-Cast, a show hosted by Rob Briscoe and Brian Perillo, a podcast which is, on the surface, about the X-men, but underneath is about… well, it’s kinda like an episode of Seinfeld. It can go anywhere, without the slightest provocation, and in the process it will often leave you breathless, clutching at your sides, and wondering how you are possibly ever going to explain to your staring friends and co-workers that the laugher-induced tears coming from your eyes are because of the interview the guys just did with the creator of Cherry Poptart, and how you’re ever going to explain what Cherry Poptart is without incurring a massive sexual harassment lawsuit. And then there’s the hard stuff.
Audio dramas are my heroin. The Metamor City Podcast might as well come with a spoon and a lighter, honestly. It’s not just the stories (Which are enthralling), or the bevy of voice-actors at his command (Which are fabulous), it’s the cohesive feel of it all… Metamor is more than just a dot on a made-up map, it’s a place that you can never go, wish as hard as you might. There’s an essence to Chris Lester’s locale as ethereal and as real as New York City, or Paris, or Mordor. If you ever go through the gates, you’ll know you’re there, and a part of you will never come back. But the true black tar for me has to be Christof Laputka’s The Leviathan Chronicles. The instant I tried it, I was hooked, and damned. Listening to The Leviathan Chronicles is like watching Star Wars with your eyes closed. That’s as close as I can explain it. The episodes don’t come out very often, but you know what? I can understand why. This thing must be an absolute beast to put together. From the deep complexity and continuity of the show’s scripts, to the sheer amount of movie studio-quality sound effects, to the truly astounding work put together by the show’s cast, to the absolutely stunning soundtrack beneath it all, not a second of this podcast is put together half-heartedly. It’s all done with such exquisite and obvious care and precision, that I have no doubt that each episode must take months to put together, and to me, it’s well worth the wait. Although, being hooked on TLC as hard as I am can make it extremely hard to listen to dramatized podcasts that don’t try as hard. Which brings me back to my tree.
I’m pretty much a perfectionist when it comes to editing, whether it be writing or audio or video. Case in point: I’ve been working on this blog for two days now. Not because I’m the world’s worst typist, but because I have this tendency to go over everything with a fine-toothed comb, always fine-tuning and picking and generally pissing off my loving and understanding wife. Were it not for her influence and her solid grip on the computer, I would still be working on Episode One of our podcast, which took more than a month to get up in the first place. Now, sure, a lot of that was due to first-timers disease and technical errors… no, let’s say technical nightmares (A hint for the would-be’s out there: don’t ever use an “Essentials” program and think you’re going to get away with making anything professional come out of it. The programs are made to make you buy the full version, and unless you’re ready to put some serious time in pulling teeth from an angry, fully awake timber wolf, there are a dozen programs available for absolutely no cost online that will get you exactly the same results, if not better), but honestly, after being spoiled on podcasts like those I’ve mentioned, I’d spent a lot of time spinning my wheels because I had it in my head that it wasn’t impossible, and I could pull this off, just like the big boys.
I was wrong. You see, no man is his own crew, and I quickly came to realize that I couldn’t make this thing believable. Not on my own. I couldn’t take my microphone and drop sticks on it and call it a falling tree, and it took me half a month of stubbornly trying to make the computer do it my way to realize that. So I did what the pros actually do: I reached out. There’s this guy I know, Aaron Meier, that runs his own recording studio out of North Carolina (Check him out at http://www.steppingstonesound.com !), and he did wonders with fixing what I already screwed up. He took my barely-audible audio, cleaned it up, and sent it to the ball with a smile on its face, and for his help and his pointers on going forward, I will be eternally grateful. I also used three of the most valuable resources available for podcasters on the web: soundsnap.com, the freesound project at freesound.org, and the Podsafe Music Network (AKA musicalley.com). Without the substantial libraries available for public use at these websites, our podcast would have become something I’d never listen to. And I think, at least, that it’s now become something that anybody might actually listen to and enjoy. Even if that anybody is me.
- Dean Sasser
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ATTRIBUTIONS FOR THIS EPISODE
Sound Effects
Samples used from Soundsnap
Soundsnap – Big Room Sound:
http://www.soundsnap.com/user-name/j_r_fountain
Samples used from Freesound
January 6, 2010
By Incarnadine (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=36298)
modulated_radio_static.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=16997)
By ermine (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=15220)
bleep1p0.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=24053)
bleep10.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=24052)
By cognito perceptu (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=57789)
am band static.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=38693)
By parabolix (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=1036771)
zombie news.wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=72832)
By Experimental Illness (http://www.freesound.org/usersViewSingle.php?id=265625)
M207b13_we_interupt_this_broadcast_to…wav (http://www.freesound.org/samplesViewSingle.php?id=31681)
Music
Music used from Music Alley
David Emeny: Dark Matters:
Adrina Thorpe: MIDNIGHT
Hudson Cerone: One Plus One