I'm currently writing a horror short for audio. It's peculiar because, while a lot of what I read and watch does have horror in it, and that's okay, I do dislike horror as a genre.  I don't find catharsis or even much fun in horror - just, well, horror.

Saying that, I love sci-fi and noir and action-drama there's some nasty stuff in those.  Things that stay burned in the memory, like a favourite character in Battlestar Galactica [nope, still don't want to spoiler, just in case!]  torn from loved ones, spinning desolately through space - and frozen solid; the hapless person sent to a lonely eternity in Sapphire and Steel; any number of vicious attacks and blood and gloop in Fades - and some astonishng brutality in films like Oldboy,  but that's all in the context of a bigger drama. The terrible loneliness of those characters' fates or sudden shocks of gore heighten the tension, make the stakes all that higher for the characters left behind.

I can peek through fingers at gore (and do!) & it does have its place in drama -  I just wouldn't choose to do that for a full couple of hours non-stop and I avoid anything with extended torture scenes because it's not a fun way to spend my time. In fact, the only time I've walked out of a film was 'Wolf Creek' for just that reason.

Anyway. so why write a horror tale?
Well, thanks to a piece of mature stilton, a few months back I had the most  vivid dream: red plush cinema curtains parted to reveal an early talkie film - the camera focused on a ticking clock with a voiceover describing a myth in rhyming couplets. The whole story was there - a monster story. I wrote the poem down when I woke up, but shelved it for months because I wasn't sure about spending time writing horror with a suitably unhappy ending. Just the same as enjoying watching stuff with some kind of redemption (although Noir films deserve an exemption there - can't think of much redemptive in Touch of Evil, but it's incredible!), I like writing things which have a bit of positivity and hope in them somewhere and this was all about lack of hope.

But I couldn't just leave it all half-written, so as an exercise in finishing something, I've just spent a few days working on it. It still needs a bit of work, but I'm glad I did it. While the concept upset me, I enjoyed similar elements to some of those that cropped up in Red Sands - creating mythologies and working on character interactions. And the characters themselves could have warmth for each other in a horrific situation, so it wasn't quite as grim an experience as I was expecting.

Perhaps it's not a true horror. Perhaps that has to be that element of utter loneliness and helplessness for it to be so. I'm not sure as I'm of the 'bring on the mind-bleach' mentality, so haven't possibly explored the genre fully. But anyway, it was an interesting trip to the boundaries of comfort.

Back to action-adventure, methinks, and I'll be laying off the evening cheese for a good long while!

_ Posted on April 4, 2010 at 2:19 PM
Red Sands Investigations has been out and complete for a few months now and I have been thinking about a possible two-part sequel.

I do have a sketchy plot outline and a couple of new characters, although much of it will centre on the old characters, readjusting to a slightly different town now that different people are vying to run things.

It's still very much at a pre-pitch stage, but if I can get it into a story that definitely seems worth telling, then I'll pitch it and see what happens. The original Red Sands is complete in its own way, so I don't want to try to do anything to it if that doesn't actually add anything to the original. So yes, this is all very tentative at the moment.

So far the sequel involves donkeys, puppets and blackmail, which feels like a fun combination to start with at any rate..

Anyhow, from this moment I'm actively working on it, so hopefully it'll be plotted out in the next couple of weeks and I'll see from there if it's pitchable. Here's hoping so.

_ Posted on October 10, 2009 at 1:25 AM
Just four days to go before the release of Episode 1. The website is up on the Pendant pages, with cast details, background, a promo and an i-Tunes link.

Marleigh - in her editor's hat - and I recorded a commentary for episode 1. They're not easy, as it's an on-the-spot conversation in this case with a slight time delay also, but still it was fun.

There's only one very minor spoiler - about character interaction rather than plot, which I thought about beeping out, but as it's so woven into the conversation it would have meant a lot of extra beeping here and there. Never mind. 

The final thing to do is to make a blooper reel when I can find the time - the cast made some lovely ones, and Marleigh's lines often had a running commentary that was both useful and hilarious in places, along with a huge number of adlibs, many of which made it into the show. Other than that, though, Red Sands is finished, the beach huts are locked against the elements and the fair is closed down for the season.

Thanks to the absolutely wonderful cast and people at Pendant - in particular Jeffrey, Marleigh, Panda & Dale. Hope you enjoy the show.

_Posted on July 10, 2009 at 6:57 PM
On the home straight... I'm now working on Episode 4, which being the finale is kind of enormous. Twenty three scenes in total, although many of them are very short, as the action speeds up. Nonetheless, there's still a long way to go and very little time left. I'm much more in the swing of it, now, and with less time to faff around and worry about it, it's getting there quicker. Also, as certain locations come up again, the fx and so on are already decided, which makes things easier. 

Something curious has happened with the acting. Originally, this was a 5 part piece. When I started holding auditions, I'd written about 4.5 episodes. To make it tighter, I decided to ditch a branch of the storyline and so extensively rewrote parts 3 & 4.  

In the original story, there was a romantic brush between two of the characters. In the later draft, I removed all of that. So Nick, Dale and Tiff are pretty direct most of the time (Tiff only when she gets drunk - although that's a fair old bit of the time...) but otherwise, while other characters do hold slight torches for each other, it's very much repressed.

So, I was very surprised to hear, when the two actors' lines came in, that they both still sounded like they were on the brink of a relationship, even though I'm certain I removed any hint of it.

I could be mistaken of course, although in fact, one actor apologised for one take, where they thought it might have sounded too flirty. I'm purposely not naming the characters as when the episode is released, I'll see if they notice it and ask if it was a conscious thing on their parts, or not! I do find it interesting with satellite shows how actors can sometimes seem to predict each others' deliveries with uncanny accuracy. When doing Wonder Woman, I had a scene with half a dozen characters reciting a prayer. Bizarrely, almost all of them came back with such similarity in tempo and delivery that I actually had to cut them up quite a bit to stop them all merging into one another. Actorly ESP!

Jeffrey sent me the logo he's been working on and it is simply stunning.
It's dead exciting! 

Well, 22 scenes left... and hopefully about 2 weeks... and counting...

_Posted by fthrll on June 12, 2009 at 1:16 AM
Episode 1 is now complete and has been accepted by Pendant as is, which is very heartening. It's a real boost to know that they think the style works - it'll make it much easier to continue that with the music and fx in the next episode, now.

Episode 2 is a little trickier to mix than 1 as it has musical numbers in it, for starters, but I prefer it as a story, which also helps. Episode 1 was really establishing the main characters.

The musical number is going to be fun - I've done it once before in this way. The actor listens to the music and then performs the song. The job then is to match the timing of the original music to the actor's singing, through extending or adding or removing notes or part of them. In the last case, it was a sung piece over arpeggios - it was easy to break up the accompaniment because it was all individual notes, but it took a couple of hundred cuts to edit and the timing itself wasn't so easy. I really enjoyed doing it, but it was very much a trial and error thing (with lots of error!) 

In this case, I'm hoping it'll be simpler, as it's a rehearsal situation in a theatre with an elderly pianist. T actor is performing a Music Hall-style song, so has sent along a semi-sung, semi-spoken version. (Which, I have to say, has fantastic delivery - I was blown away by it). So it isn't meant to be melodic or polished, anyway, which hopefully will make it easier to tackle.

Six weeks left to mix Eps2-4. Episode 2 should be done by the end of next week. It's just about doable. Just...

_ Posted by fthrll on May 11, 2009 at 1:07 AM
Just a few days ago, Jeffrey introduced me to the cover artist assigned to Red Sands Investigations and we've been discussing ideas ever since. I have to say, I am extremely happy he volunteered for this show. Not only is his art simply awesome, he's also a delight to work with.

His first question was asking about how far Red Sands was based in gritty noir, and how much was modern - at which point I realised we were on the same wavelength.

The answer is the town itself is very much based on that kind of background, noir being a favourite genre of mine. But, as I would never begin to attempt to tackle that kind of use of language that writers like Chandler or Hammett do, it had to be I guess 'post-noir', plus it's set in England, which also changes things culturally.

The existential detective is already dead.  Carla is an outsider to the genre, with a clear sense of right and wrong, trying to work with the more morally ambiguous characters around her. A lot of the time she fails, but whether it has a traditionally bleak ending or not would be spoilering.

In fact, the British/American English language aspect was even more challenging than I'd thought. Several characters in the show are American, most notably Carla herself.

Being a huge fan of American film and tv shows, I tried to 'Americanise' her speech, but missed the mark on lots of occasions. Luckily, Marleigh was absolutely invaluable as a script editor. I learnt a lot of new phrases and structure - and words that just simply don't exist like roundabout (the driving kind), seafront, tatty, to name just a few. Seafront was a particularly tough one to lose, as 'beach' just doesn't mean the same thing in British English.

I was fully expecting it to be hard to write with any hope of authenticity, but even going in expecting that, I was amazed by how different the two Englishes are - and that's just standard dialects.  If I do any more writing in future, I think I'll stick to British or non-specific dialects and encourage the actors to improvise around their own dialect.

But back to the artwork - the artist's name is Daniel Chon - and he's simply fantastic. The designs he has come up with so far are really stylish, professional and... well, I'm really, really excited about having him on the team.

At least, whatever I do with the mixing, this show is one that'll look good...

_Posted on April 29, 2009 at 10:25 AM
Mixing for episode 1 is now fully underway. Much of the dialogue is set and locations reverbed, so then it's just a question of effects, panning and music. 

Normally when actors send lines, I try to listen to every one of them in full in advance, and if I have time, do stuff like noise reduction and volume tweaking there and then. As this production's episodes are so long, I didn't manage to listen all of the way through every take for every single character as they came in - just enough to check that there was nothing missing and that there was at least one 'clean' take.

So I'm still getting some surprises in the takes, which is always a fun part of the process. I was delighted to hear one of the actors actually light up a cigarette (or make an excellent impression of doing so, lighter and all) when the script called for it. Not that I'd want to encourage voice actors to endanger their health, of course, but for purposes of authenticity, it was absolutely wonderful.

_ Posted by fthrll on April 21, 2009 at 3:29 AM
The script for the final episode has been edited and accepted and has now gone out to the cast. So now the focus is on post-production. I'm rather glad that, despite some 'real' life things cropping up, the show seems to be on track. 

Looking at the length of the scripts, Pendant is labelling this as an Original Feature, rather than a mini-series. It makes more sense as it is more of a 4-part arc than an episodic show. Also, I think Original Feature sounds rather cool.

The episodes look as if they'll end up at about 30 minutes long. It's hard to tell exactly, as I'm going to be trying for fairly tight dialogue mixing, but want to give some space for the atmosphere, too. I know in my head how I'd like it to sound, but whether that's going to be easy to translate into audio, I guess I'll soon discover. Looking forward to trying anyhow.

Anyway, all lines are in for episodes 1&2, bar a couple of redos, and so I'm hoping, if at all possible, to have finished all episodes before mid-July.

The one absolutely essential sound effect for setting is some seagulls, it being a seaside town. Obviously, all effects and music have to be royalty free creative commons, and I looked high and low for the kind of background seagulls that just do a few cries and set the scene.  It was a trickier hunt than I'd thought. There's a real dearth of good quality seagull 'extras' out there. The only ones I could find sounded like they were tearing each others' heads off - really hamming it up.

In the end, I had to actually buy a set of seagulls' cries (pretty cheaply - and they'll get extremely good use). They may have charged a nominal fee, but these ones were proper pros, giving a much more subtle performance which is just ideal.

Birds! Hah! Never again... :-P

_Posted on January 24, 2009 at 8:20 AM
Fantastic news - the show is going to be released by Pendant Productions

First, to explain about Pendant, and then what it'll mean for the show.
I've been involved with Pendant for oooh, must be coming up for two and a half years now. I've done and still do some acting there; they trained me in audio directing and I directed 15 monthly episodes of Wonder Woman, Champion of Themyscira.

Pendant is a well-run, friendly group who release monthly shows to a regular schedule. They produce or have produced 7 original shows to date, and 11 fan-based ones, with several others in the pipeline. They have an established listenership and good reputation.

In terms of Red Sands Investigations, I will still be directing (mixing) it. When all four episodes are completed and mixed and approved by Pendant, they will then be released to schedule.
I intend mixing it at the same pace as any other Pendant production: giving actors 3-4 weeks for each episode's script, and mixing the episode within a month of receiving lines.

So, in summary, this means that there will be almost no change at all for the actors in the actual pacing of the putting together of the show, but it will benefit from the support, experience, advertising and established listenership that'll come from being under the Pendant umbrella.

_Posted on October 24, 2008 at 1:21 PM 
Due to time - and also plot, I've decided to shorten the series to four parts.

Once I started thinking about how to do that, it actually seemed to suit the characters better that way. It meant rewriting the third episode, and a small part of the second, but in fact it means it'll hopefully be about as lean as it can be. I hope the timing works out, but then, I've been thinking about some of my favourite OTR shows and films, many of which have almost no 'down time', so I'm hoping it'll benefit from being pruned a little.

As (once cast) that will take four months to produce now, rather than five, I'm also going to make sure that the fourth episode is complete in a first draft before going to the casting stage. It'll go through rewrites again later, but at least it means the whole project is pretty much ready to go, then.

I've been collecting sound effects in quiet moments, so that side's coming together, too. It'll just be a question of getting actors interested. So far, there appear to be a total of fifteen characters in the series, most of them smaller parts, but with a core of three: Carla & Tiff, Nick and then Jim, too. Apart from the final episode, there are about another 4 characters in each episode.

It's not an enormous cast for what'll be about 2 hours in total, but it is in terms of getting that many actors. Well, we'll see... Casting calls hopefully in a couple of weeks.