Camp Monsters - BONUS: A BTS Chat with Weston Davis

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

Join host, Weston Davis, and Camp Monsters’ sound design magician, Nick Patri, as they dive into their favorite creatures from Season 6, reveal how Weston crafts his monster stories, and share a few behind-the-scenes surprises!Thank you to this season's sponsors: Obermeyer, Mountain House, Coleman, Columbia, Zippo, Peak Refuel, Altra, and REI Co-op.Take the Camp Monsters Listeners Survey.Listen to REI’s Wild Ideas Worth Living podcast!

REI Co-op Studios Welcome to a very special edition of the Camp Monsters Podcast. I'm Nick Patri, sound designer for the show and I'll be your host today. But I am here with the actual real life star and host and writer of Camp Monsters, Weston Davis. Just as handsome in person as I sound on the microphone, I'm sure. Can confirm. Wes, thanks for doing this. We kind of just wanted to do a wrap up to the season that was season six and maybe do a brief look ahead to what may be to come in the future. I hope so. Yeah, it was a fantastic season. So let's break it down.

I like, I think we should do this more often, you know, and we've got a lot of, we've got a lot of camp monsters history to unpack. Really. We've got, this is six seasons in the can, some longer than others, you know? So, uh, what do we have? Almost like 70 episodes out there or

something like that. That's right. Well, then we'll get our fact checkers on that. There you go. Yeah. So let's start with season six. I think just now that all eight episodes are out, maybe just doing a quick look back. If you had a favorite episode overall or favorite moments

from any given episode that you'd want to talk about. You know I had a favorite episode this season. Yes, picking favorites. Because I came in hot with La Llorona. But all you can see with your eyes is the river and the swirling color of the shore so, so far away. And all you can see in your mind is the face of the thing that lured you close to the water.

Lured you, and then pulled all of you in. And as it pulled pulled you watched that face that had been human change horribly. Change into something pale tinged blue. Blackness in its mouth. No iris in its black eyes. Eyes black all over. Black is the darkness at the bottom of the dirty river. And in that moment, before the river took you, you realized who this was. Who had lured you, who had seized you. It was the creature. The witch. Myrana. I think I pitched it last year or maybe even the year before. I've been pitching it for a while and I really wanted, you know, so it was already fully formed in my mind when we came into the season. So that one just, that was one of the ones that wrote itself. I really liked writing it. I believed in it. I believed in that story.

Yeah. But I think you did a great job of both reframing it into something that was fit for camp monsters and making sure your vision of it still came through in the final product. And try to resonate with, yeah, it's got a lot of, it's a complicated story. That's why I like that, that particular creature or monster or legend is that it's,

you know, we have a lot of fun doing all kinds of monsters that when you read up on them or do any kind of background, it's pretty much like, I don't know, there's something crazy in the woods, you know, we have a lot of fun doing all kinds of monsters that when you read up on them or do any kind of background, it's pretty much like, I don't know, there's something crazy in the woods, you know, I saw it, it tried to eat me, you know, and, and that's cool. That's great. You know, you do some jump scares and get, get

some scary stuff going there, but I always love in any given season where we get to have a little fun with some thing more complex or something else happening. But yeah, a lot of your honor for this year was my very favorite. But then again, I'm looking down the list here just to remind myself what we were doing.

And, you know, uh, you know, a lot of these, I think turned out even better than I thought they were going to not to constantly pat ourselves in the back here, but by gosh, that was, you know, we had some really good, we had some really good shows and, and it runs the gamut cause we had some that I felt like were pretty cut and dried, simple, straightforward, jump scares.

You know, it is what it looks like and here we go, which I like doing and trying to keep it simple. The challenge of those is man, let's strip it down, you know, make it as straightforward as we can. Then we had some other ones that were like, Hey, we've got some space here to kind of get a little introspective.

Let's see where the audience come with us. Take the audience for a ride. And yeah, I think people do a good job of keeping up regardless of the complexity. And I think you're right. It really ran the gamut. My favorite one. And I'd love to get more of your perspective on this one was the Taos Hum episode two.

I like that. All right. So listen, really, really listen throughout this episode and keep listening, even after. And if you begin to hear that sound, that sound they call the TALS Hum, well, it may be too late. I thought it was beautifully written and the performance of course was great. And just the story overall, it obviously was like a personal connection to you, which I think just made more of the emotion come through and was a really impactful story.

Well, I'm glad you liked it. Yeah, no, that was a very, that was one that was deeply influenced by just my personal experiences and having been in town a couple of times. And, uh, so I just drew heavily on places I'd been and things I'd seen and, uh, and yeah, I was able to fold in a story there that I thought was interesting and different than maybe we normally did, you know? And, and it

is a challenge when you're presented with something like a hum, you know, the center of your story is gonna be a sound that some people think they hear. And not only that, you do the research, it's not even really like a threatening, you know, I mean, it's just kind of like, ah, it's really annoying.

I'm in this place and there's an annoying sound I can't explain, like, and that's your story. You know, but if you're gonna turn it into something interesting or you're gonna build a story around it, you know, you't explain, like, and that's your story. You know, but if you're going to turn it into something interesting or you're going to build a story around it, you know, you have to, you got to put some stakes behind it. Yeah.

So. And you did a great job doing that. I thought it was again, a beautifully written story and fun to do the sound design on. The hum part was challenging because I wanted it to be audible to the listener, but not be so aggravating, of course, that, you know, people would want to take their headphones off or shut the

car stereo off. Uh, so finding the right balance there, making it so it was off putting enough to, to add some juice to the story, but not so much that yeah, it was un-listenable. And on that note, one of the challenges of doing the sound design is really accounting for people listening in different environments.

So it's going to sound different to someone listening on some high-end headphones versus someone listening in their car versus listening in their living room with their family, all of which are great. I'm glad people listen in all those environments, but it's really trying to balance the sort of detail that could come through on headphones with sort of an overall aura that could come through on a kind of wider broadcast. For me, it's cheap headphones and screaming children. So, you know. A good soundtrack to any camp on.

To be fair, those are my children and they're screaming in joy, okay? I just wanna be clear. Important distinction, yes. Anything else from season six stand out to you? Like moments from any given episodes? Oh yeah, I mean, I had a lot of fun with, you know, you get down to the end of the season and

you're trying to put your best foot forward. You're trying to bring out your best material. You know, it's going to come out right around Halloween. Yeah. I always try to put a kind of a big name monster there toward the end of the Rougarou, which I know was a fairly well-known creature. And of course the Ho- the Hodag which you have correctly steered me into its many fans in Wisconsin.

But there was something else. Gene bent low over the windowsill, shuffling to one side so that more light fell on it. When he was sure of what he saw, he instinctively turned and looked back toward the empty hoedag display. Well, but now there couldn't really be any connection between the two. It didn't make sense that there could be any connection between the stolen hoedag and the deep jagged gouges lined up on the window sill. Gouges like a set of long sharp claws might make as some wild creature leapt out through the open window.

You know, so we try to put some good meat and potatoes kind of monsters there at the end of the season. And I think I was happy with the way both those episodes came together. Yeah. And we're very different than La Llorona and the hum and that they were, you know, they feel more

back to, back to basics. Yeah. We have a sort of tangible creature that's, you know, stalking the woods or the swamps or whatever. Um, yeah, I really liked them. We were able to do it again, from interesting perspectives and both of them though, where we're like, you know, we're still, we're

telling straightforward stories, but hey, we've got some characters maybe you can get behind and, you know, and, uh, a different perspective to kind of approach things from. And both diving into history, right? Exactly. Yeah. That was a strong element in both of them,

which I loved. I loved that about the Hodag, which we've mentioned it before on the show, but I'm from Wisconsin originally and have always heard of the Hodag growing up. Never saw it though. Well, as far as I know. Yeah.

There's still time. But you going to the sort of the originator of the Hodag as part of the story was great. Yeah. Real guy. I don't know whether I reflected him in a true manner, but you know, he was a real guy. And it's never good and there's things that

we didn't even get a chance to talk about. Like, you know, that I almost wanted to work in, but didn't have a chance to. Like the traditional Rhinelander versus Antigo rivalry high school game, they, I think they call it the bell game or something like that. Okay. And it's played for bragging rights and for

the, for this bell, which came off of like a paddle wheel schooner that was built by Jean Shepherd of Hodag fame. And he tootled it around. He built it to kind of go down a river, but then once he built it, it was too big to get down the river. So then he had to just keep it on this lake for

a while and eventually beached it. And it just kind of sat there and people played on it for a generation or two. And then before it burned down or after it burned or something, they snagged the bell off of it. And then they started trading it back and forth between the towns. The winner of the football game. That's very fun. Yeah. I wrote that in at some point that it just got to, it was like, well,

okay, we're going, we're going, we're going too far afield here, but you know, there's little things you discover as you're digging around for these things. The introduction to this next section got a little lost in the weeds of our original recording. So I just want to set it up by saying, here's Weston talking about the live event that he did in Denver at the flagship REI store there back in September of this year. Enjoy. at the flagship REI store there back in September of this year. Enjoy. Denver was excellent. I hope we get a chance to do it again next year. It seemed like we had a really great turnout and really great time this year. So all the talk was positive about being

able to do it again next year. The first year we did it on right around Halloween, like the weekend of Halloween, but it also was a huge blizzard in Denver. Uh, so that hurt attendance. Yeah, a little bit. And plus we were just coming out of COVID at the time. So it was like, it was like their first in person event that they'd done in two years.

And it was a blizzard, you know? So, uh, but the people who showed up had a great time, we had a lot of raffle prizes. So everybody walked out of there with something, you know, and, uh, and we turned it into a great episode. That was the Algarino episode. That's right. You worked with the live audio, Nick here,

pulled a rabbit out of the hat and worked with the live recording of that episode. Yeah. The team on site did a great job of getting it. And, um, yeah, I was really glad that we could put that on the main feed as well. What, what story did you tell this year? This year, I wrote another one.

I'm going to try to get it in for next season. Okay, cool. Because I think it turned out pretty well, but I actually riffed on that idea of, because when I was there for the first one, the Blizzard year, you know, the people, it's the REI flagship store there is in this great, big, beautiful building right down by the Platte

river that, you know, it's been there for 120 years or something like that. And it was originally a big powerhouse for the trolley car company in town. And, and there's like catacombs underneath it where they used to throw stuff in the river. I don't know, you know, coal was stored and all this kind of great stuff.

So they all have stories about being in the building late and weird stuff happening. So I, you know, I used the names of a couple of the managers there that were, are really great and help us to set up these events. And I told a story like we'd been snowed in the year before in the blizzard. And then I woke up in the middle of the night and had crazy adventures in this old REI building. Oh, that's great. So yeah, so it was well received and I think, uh, I mean, the audience certainly seemed to hang with it.

You know, that's great. I got to see a couple of pictures from it and it looked like a really fun time. And, uh, one last thing we should mention about the fan base is the cool letters and like video messages and emails and stuff that we get from younger listeners, particularly all listeners, of course, really appreciate it from everybody,

but there's something particularly special about getting monster drawings from kids or little videos about how much they like what they're watching or what they're listening to and all that kind of thing. It's a lot of fun. So anyway, just thank you. You know who you are. All you wonderful fans that have contributed in that way. It's really special and we really really enjoy it.

The whole team does. So keep it coming. Weston, thank you for doing this. My pleasure. I'm just glad to be here. Thank you for making me sound so good. And I trust you to edit out all the stuff I said here tonight. As you really get weird. No, thank you for doing this, and thank you to Jenny Barber as well. Yeah, Jenny Barber, Hannah Boyd, Paula Modula, Joe Crosby.

That's right. You know, the whole team, and also all the alumni, Lucy Brooks, Chelsea Davis. Yes. You know, those of us who, yeah. Yeah. Exactly, back in the day, helping us out.

So, and there are others. The list goes on and on, but yeah, we have a lot of fun doing this. I hope to keep doing it for many years in the future. Thank you, Camp Monsters fans and faithful. Hope to see you soon for season seven back there on the campfire. Thank you for listening to this recap episode

of season six of Camp Monsters. A shout out to all our sponsors from this season that made things possible. We had Ultra, Peak Refuel, Zippo, Columbia, Coleman, Mountain House, Obermeyer, and REI Co-op. If you have any feedback or comments you'd like to share, feel free to send them over to podcasts at REi.com. And you can help us out by filling out the listener survey that we have linked in the show notes. Thanks, we'll talk to you soon.