The Magnus Archives - MAG Retrospective - Crew Q&A

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

The Archivist gets to know some of the crew who worked on The Magnus Archives, now that the show is over and they are no longer neede... sorry. No longer busy.Featuring: Helen Gould, Lowri Ann Davies, Jonathan Sims, Annie Fitch, Nico Vettese and Elizabeth MoffattContent warnings:Spoilers up to and including Episode 200Memory loss & loss of identityDrowningUnrealityDiscussion of: supernatural experiences (inc. mannequins), claustrophobiaMentions of: nightmares, anxiety, spiders, burning, falling, COVID-19 pandemicSFX: water sounds, grinding, high pitched sounds, windTranscripts:PDF - https://cutt.ly/BcKHa1aDOC - https://cutt.ly/ccKHlW3Thank you to all our Patrons for your continued supportIf you'd like to join them, visit www.patreon.com/rustyquill.Edited this week by Elizabeth Moffatt, Jeffrey Nils Gardner & Alexander J. NewallProduced by Lowri Ann DaviesSoundeffects this week by: Imogen Harris, themfish, nextmaking, nickrave, RICHERlandTV, speedygonzo, sturmankin, Ornitorrinco, SpliceSound, InspectorJ, d.n.audio.uk, bruno.auzet, OGsound, LoafDV, YleArkisto, dobroide & previously credited artists via freesound.org.Additional sound effect from Zapsplat.com.Music: In The Middle of July Music Loop by rhodesmas available on Freesound https://freesound.org/people/rhodesmas/sounds/323545/Check out our merchandise available at https://www.redbubble.com/people/RustyQuill/shop & https://www.teepublic.com/stores/rusty-quill.You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear.Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Oh, I've been really looking forward to this break. Me too. Spa or sauna first? Definitely the spa. Can I help? We'd like to check in, please. Certainly. Your names, then? Helen Gould. Laurie Ann Davis. Your passports, please

Thank you And I just need to know a few details before we can assign a destination Destination? Oh Could you please tell me your professions? It's for the system Right I play Laverne, Melanie's therapist in the Magnus Archives, and I'm also the

lead sensitivity editor for Rusty Quill. So I help come up with content warnings and things like that. And I am a producer at Rusty Quill for the Magnus Archives. Perfect. So, Lowry, Helen, how did you get involved with Rusty Quill?

I started working for Rusty Quill in 2017. So this is my fourth year, which is, yeah, a long time. I mean, I know it's not that long in the grand scheme of things, but it feels like a long time. And I first got involved because I started doing an improv class. And one of the people in my improv class was Bryn Monroe. And he is a performer on Rusty Quill Gaming. And I was very into podcasting and YouTube. I had a YouTube channel and a couple of podcasts I was doing with friends. And Bryn was very casual, like, oh yeah, I'm in a podcast.

It's an actual play podcast. And I was like, cool, I'll check that out. And then came back the following week to the improv class and was like, I have listened to all 60 episodes that were available. I love it. It's so great. And then I just kept visiting the Rusty Quill website until they finally posted an ad for a producer. And you?

I got involved with the Magnus Archives when I happened to arrive early to the studio for a Rusty Quill gaming recording and Alex just needed a quick voice to be Melanie's therapist. He was like, we were hoping to save you for a bigger part at some point, but you can do these two lines. I'll just pitch you up. It'll be fine, people won't recognise you.

But people who listened to Rusty Quill Gaming as well as TMA immediately clocked me because my name was in the credits. So that did not go as intended. Then I started as lead sensitivity editor around mid-September in 2020. And I got a lot more involved in behind the scenes stuff for Magnus and for Rusty Quill in general a lot more after that. I have to think I had something I had something I had oh oh hey hey what are you are you a tape recorder what are are you doing? Are you recording? Did I start recording?

Oh, there's another one? This little friend? What do you have to say? Ah, there you are. It's time for you to remember for a moment. First, who are you? Annie. Annie Fitch.

And you work for Rusty Quill? Actually, I am. I'm an audio editor with Rusty Quill, working on the Magnus Archives. When and how did you get involved with Rusty Quill or the Magnus Archives? So, I first got involved with Rusty Quill in 2019. At the beginning of the year, a friend of mine had my day job. He had been trying to get me to listen to the show for over a year, and I finally caved, and we started listening to it together at work. I ended up shotgunning the whole show up to Current at the time,

which was about 130-some-odd episodes in about six weeks. At some point during Season 2, there was a baked-in ad of Ben saying that Rusty Quill was hiring, and so I thought, well, that ad is old as dirt, but hell, I will go ahead and just send in my resume to that and see what happens. And then I happened to get very lucky, and there was a hiring wave that came immediately following that. Like, about a month later, they sent out emails. Oh, can't thank you again for picking me up.

Thought I'd be stuck here forever. My pleasure. It's such a lovely day to be on the water, but I must ask, who are you? Oh, er, not a problem. I'm Nico. I work for Rusty Quill. I work in the Magnus Archives. Season 5. Vocal cut editor. Mouth sound remover extraordinaire. And how did you get involved with this rusty knife? Rusty Quill. Year's 2016. I emailed that there Rusty Quill. He's like do you want any custom music? And I'm like no don't need any custom music because we've already got music but

we're going to keep your information on file. So I kept it on file. Three years go past and Hannah came back. Did the whole interview thing. Did the audition thing. And then I was on Outliers first. Did a bit of soundscaping for Rusty Cool Gaming and then Alex was like which one of the shows do you want to do? I was like well I quite like Magnus Archives. Truth be told I chose the Magnus Archives because I had the best cover art out of all of them. Controversy I know and if it's not your favorite I'm sorry. I haven't read anything about the Magnus Archives. I had no idea what the plot was. So the first thing I actually did in the Magnus Archives was with fluff episodes. The fluff episodes are like based in season one and season two and the fan

written submissions. Non-canonical. Nice lovely loveliness. There's no spooky spooky eldritch horror doomed in it. And that gave me a very warped perception of the Magnus Archives. Like I'm talking... So you can imagine going from that into 167 which was my first episode I did, where it is season 5, Eldritch Yeah. Hello? Is there anyone here? I'm getting pretty bored. Okay, this isn't funny anymore. First one I see, I'm just going to smash this. Hey, is that a tape recorder?

And these are questions. Okay, so I answer the questions, the next thing happens, yada yada, I get up. Okay, I can do this. Right, my name. My name is Elizabeth Moffat. That's with two Ts. So professional, okay. Moffat that's with two t's so profession okay so I've been a sound editor for the Magnus Archives since the end of season two through to the end of season five and in season five I was doing the sound design side of things and how did I get involved okay so that's simple I was a fan of the show towards the end of 2016 and in 2017 when Rusty Quill started advertising for new staff I applied

and so I was part of a group that included Brock and James who were brought on and I think the other side of that is also why have I stayed. In reality that comes down to the fact that after James left to open his own business Alex really insisted that me and Brock sign a blood pact that we'd only be able to leave once the last episode of Magnus went out. And I'm pretty sure I can mention that now because it's not covered by the NDAs anymore. Have you ever had any spooky or supernatural experiences? So the only spooky or supernatural experience I can remember

was when I was very young. And I remember one night I woke up and there was just a really bright light outside the window and like shadows moving up and down. And I don't remember being that scared. I do remember saying to myself okay it's just the trees you know it's fine and then I went to sleep and it's not that I forgot about it but I didn't really think about it and it wasn't until years later that I was like hang on a minute there were no trees outside that window that window overlooked

just next door's wall like their garden really high garden wall and their house there was nothing that could move there so i don't know what that was but uh i don't like thinking about it i have had a supernatural experience uh i work at my day job, I work at a theme park as an audio engineer and an entertainment technician. And we run a major Halloween event every year where we build up a bunch of haunted houses, or haunted house-like attractions that we call mazes, all throughout the park. One of these mazes takes place in a defunct IMAX theater that we have on the property that hasn't been in operation in, I think, at least 15 years, maybe more like 20. So sort of in the space between the seats and the screen at the front, we build the indoor portion of this

maze. My first year at the park back in 2013, the maze we had in there, there was one particular room that was a series of mannequins hanging from the cross beams of the maze that we built by ropes. They were like soft foam mannequins that you had to push your way through. Very creepy stuff. Made all the more creepy by the fact that these are the most hyper-realistic mannequins you can possibly envision. They were made from a plaster cast of a person who I actually work with at the park, and these were when they were brand, brand new, fresh out of the mold, just hung in the room. They hadn't taken any damage yet, so it was very, very unnerving to be anywhere near these mannequins. So one day, I am with a smaller crew of people. We're working at the back of the theater to remove some seats that were still in the theater.

We're unbolting them from the ground and bringing them over to another maze to use as a prop. So my co-workers leave because the truck that we're carrying the stuff in only has so many seats. So I end up being the odd one out. And I'm like, cool, whatever, free break, you know. So I hang back at the theater while they go to unload those seats. And I'm standing at the back, and I look over at the hanging bodies room. Now, bear in mind, this is the middle of summer in California. It's like 90-some-odd degrees, no wind.

I'm looking down there, and all of a sudden, all the mannequins, they start to just sort of gently sway a little bit. And as I said, I don't believe there was any breeze. And they're just kind of swaying there. And there's this one particular mannequin that's facing almost directly away from me. And then as all these mannequins start to sway together, as though in a breeze, even though I felt no breeze, the one that's facing away from me begins to slowly rotate counterclockwise. And it turns and it turns and it turns about 100 to 120 degrees around until it's facing directly at where I'm standing,

and then all at once they all just stop moving. They all stop swaying in the breeze. So I said, nope, okay, point taken. I'll go stand outside. And I did. I went and I waited outside for my coworkers to show back up, and to this day I do everything in my power to avoid going in that building by myself. There have been other things that have happened in that building, both to me and other people.

So I just try not to go there. So I haven't had any supernatural experiences myself, but I have been around them when they've happened to other people. I went on a ghost hunt with two friends, Erica and Maria, not their real names, and we were in a boarding school, quite an old one, which had a history of hauntings. And I know Maria felt in one room that there was something touching her leg, sort of climbing up her leg in some way. there was something touching her leg, sort of climbing up her leg in some way. Meanwhile, in another room in the basement, Erica felt this draft against her neck and her face, which wasn't coming from anywhere natural like a door or a window.

I personally didn't experience anything supernatural, and that's really because I was the one doing those things to the other two. So, yeah, I wasn't going to. I guess I'm more of a supernatural causer than a supernatural receiver in that sense. Do you engage with horror as a genre? You know, I do engage with horror as a genre. Like, I've platinum troph Trophy's Bloodborne. I played half of the first Resident Evil.

Didn't even bother a two or three. That was a bit too scary for me back in the day. So yeah, I'd say I proper do engage with horror as a genre. Do I engage with horror as a genre? So, honestly, no. And the reason for that is I'm just a big scaredy cat. The actual watching of the thing or the reading or the listening to the horror, I do enjoy that.

Like, I enjoy the whole, the dread and all of that. But I get horrific nightmares. really really terrible it's almost like lucid dreaming sleep paralysis nightmares triggered by scary things unsurprisingly and yeah when I get into those cycles it just it just has a really negative impact on my life so yeah I tend not to really engage with horror which was a bit tricky for Magnus. I love horror it's my favourite genre to engage with regardless of quality I will never watch a badly reviewed rom-com but I will happily sit down for like a one-star horror movie. One of my favorite things to do as a treat was get dinner at Nando's and then go and watch an awful horror movie. It helps me to manage my anxiety to be able to focus on fictional scary things rather than real scary things and on on a genuine intellectual level,

I think that horror is one of the most interesting genres that you can work in. You can do a hell of a lot of complex stuff with it, and I really enjoy that variety. So I think it's very hard not to engage with horror if you read or watch or listen to anything particularly interesting because even if you're not engaging with just pure horror other genres always tend to use it in some element I think most of my engagement has been with books I really remember as a kid being with my friend on my brother's bed

while we read his copy of the Osborne World of the Unknown book about ghosts and really just screaming our heads off when the cat jumped on the bed. I also really remember the public library that I used to go to when I was a kid. It had a kid's wing and then it had the adult's wing. But they just let you use your library card in either so I used to go over and find the books and apparently the post-apocalyptic section and read a lot of stuff which nowadays I think probably was more scarring than anything else and one of those books was I have no mouth but I must scream and that was

probably when I was about 10, and that was the thing. It was like I wasn't searching for horror, but there was always content that you read. If you read enough, there's always going to be horror inside of it. I tend to only engage with horror as a genre in very specific ways. I don't like horror movies. There are very, very few horror movies I actually like,

either because they're not scary to me or they're just gross. I really, really enjoy audio horror and written horror because I find horror is most effective, it's scariest, and it's most interesting, and it makes you think the most when an author can allow you as the reader or the listener as the audience to fill in the blanks with the scariest version of the thing that they're describing for you take their parameters and fill in the blanks with what scares you most What's your personal fear or nightmare? I have lots and lots of different personal fears, and I often have very vivid dreams, so this question is very difficult to answer succinctly. My biggest personal fear on a realistic level

is watching somebody I love slowly lose their memories and lucidity and my biggest personal fear on like a silly unrealistic level is being put in a metal box and then the metal box being put on a fire um the last nightmare that I had that I really remember was uh I was just trying to get on with my normal life, but there were spiders just jumping at me constantly for no reason. Like my brain gave me literal jump scares because it likes to do these things to me. I don't think claustrophobia is the right word, but I really, really hate being restrained. And I mean, actually, yeah, being like, you know,

the thought of being buried alive is just, oh my gosh, so awful. I think it also comes down a bit to lack of control. I don't like not having control. My biggest fear, my personal biggest fear, is actually quite well covered by the show it's episode 170 um because my greatest fear is sort of the oblivion of the self is forgetting who you are forgetting loved ones forgetting friends just sort of fading away and not remembering who you are and that that also includes the idea of the finality of death like nothing being afterwards.

No continuation of consciousness, no afterlife, no reincarnation, no nothing. The idea that when we die, that's it, there's nothing else there, that is paralyzingly terrifying to me. So episode 170 kind of covers all of that. Just the loss of one's self easily my biggest nightmare so i think i'm like a lot of people i have a lot of rational fears and then a couple of pretty irrational ones and the top of those is a strong fear of accidentally teleporting myself to a planet and in particular

teleporting myself to Jupiter and plummeting through a cloud of like oxygen until I hit something else like ammonia or I get completely crushed by gravity. So my upbringing is to blame for this because we had a lot of astronomy books in our house and we had a book which had all these full color images from the Voyager missions which included like close-ups of Jupiter and the red storm. The weird thing is I suppose that I still really like things to do with astronomy so I'll often go to a planetarium and then halfway through whatever we're watching kind of break out into a cold sweat because I'm at the point where I think I'm going to accidentally transport myself to whatever black hole they're talking about. But I still want to be there to watch it all.

I have a fear of drowning. Especially in video games. You laugh. I can hear you laughing but it's true. When you play Fallout, when you have to go in the underwater bit to find the submarine, or when you play in Subnautica, not so much the water levels in Zelda, because that's a bit cartoony and whatnot, but for me, I can physically feel it. The murkiness and the... It's like how people talk about the soundscapes in the buried episodes and make them feel very claustrophobic, like it physically hits them. That's how I feel when I do water levels in video games.

What's your favourite or a funny memory of being involved in Magnus? The dozens of times I've been like, OK, we need a warning for apocalypse, for murder, mass suffering, body horror, including sound including sound effects oh and strong language with the skype recordings i would sit in on the skype recordings to like make sure everyone got there and like sometimes we'd record the the skype video and things like that and it was so lovely just watching everyone work i guess and also something that's been really really lovely is this is so like sappy but I've really enjoyed our weekly meetings like me Johnny Elizabeth and

sometimes Alex because he's a very busy man would have you know just meetings to check that everything's going right check in with each other to see if there are any problems or things that we need to address. And yeah, that was just real nice. It was real nice. Definitely getting to work with Laurie and Johnny on Season 5 has been great. And also that other one that sometimes attends the meetings. Can't remember his name. And because in 2020 we were all basically trapped inside we socialized through gaming so I think my favorite memory there is just Helen pushing

me into a ravine to my death accidentally she reckons one time very early on in my editing there was a time where Alex and Johnny were talking out of character about something, and basically they were making some kind of joke at the vocal editor's expense, some kind of F.U. thing, just like in a lighthearted and jokey way, obviously. And then Alex goes, oh, actually, hang on, I think, I don't know who's editing this one, I think it might be Annie. I don't know how she feels about being talked to like that and everything, but of course here I am on the other end of receiving this recording

editing it, absolutely losing it, just cracking up My favourite memory of the Magnus Archives is 186 186 is the quiet episode where it's Martin and other Martin it was about two and a half hours of raw recording of Alex going from very confident and self-assured and very I'm going to be able to do this whack it out one thing and it was this slow descent into madness. There's one point in it about

two hours in where he needs to have a rest but he's not because he's ploughing through when he needs to get a drink of water and he has for some odd reason he's got a screwdriver in the recording room like a drill and he realises it makes a sound. And then it's just him going, I am a robot. And then he cracks on straight into being Martin again. Doing one of the most dramatic speeches Martin's ever done about hating his mother. And it's like, wow, the whiplash. What is something

you wish everyone knew about working on the Magnus Archives there's probably like about 10 people involved in every single episode and that's not really including the actors because you've got Alex and Johnny and like three different layers of audio editors

and then you've got me and the comms assistant listening to it, and then you also have Anna listening to it, and then you've got like all the different management stuff, like the admin stuff that needs to happen, so like people to be told what's going on, so like there's just a ton of people involved, and they all really do their best and I love them all very much so I just want people to know how well Laurie and April and Alex and everyone else in the company did just pivoting when we had COVID hit not just for the Magnus Archives, but obviously we had Stella Firma and Rusty Quill Gaming. And a huge part of that is really because we just have so much fan support, which I can't thank the fans enough for. And also, I absolutely adore all the fan art. Just keep it coming for the rest of time. Everybody who worked on it would just kind of go off on one in between takes.

All the weird conversations, all the rants. So just a couple examples off the top of my head. Johnny used to have one-sided conversations with the editors. Whenever Alex would leave the room, whenever he would be the only one on mic, he would be like, Oh, how's your day going? Yeah, you know, I'm hanging in there. On one of these occasions, he offered me an in on his sock-based pyramid scheme.

Another time, Johnny Alex and a guest spent an incredibly long time talking about memes and trying to explain memes to each other that they felt they were too old to understand. And then somehow they got on the subject of Waluigi. And then from there it devolved into the three of them and I kid you not, making a fancast of the musical Le Miserable using entirely Muppets and Mario characters. It was a really, really weird experience

but it was a great, great way to spend a break during an edit. Oh hype! Hype is something I want people to know about the Magnus Archives because it trickles down. Think about you got Johnny writing the scripts, Alex looks at it, he changes edits you know what have you and then they're the only people i know then it gets trickled down to upper management upper like head producer lobby producer you know and then it gets released to those editors and then we're just like losing their minds because it's like new scripts are being released and we're frantically reading these scripts and then because we barely know anyone else who also knows it because you know we can't just sort

of get barbara down the street and just chat to her about it because of ndas and whatnot plus you don't want to ruin the magnus archives for barbara so it's just me screaming to annie and annie screaming to me and it's like that for a while whilst we're producing the episode and then there's a long wait and then the episode gets released and it's just a whole circle of hype. You don't say. Well, this has been an enjoyable conversation but I'm afraid this is actually your destination. Wait, what? But this is the middle of the ocean.

Oh, I know. But time for you to leave. No, no, no, no, no. Wait, please, no, no. Bon voyage. Is that all you need to know? Yeah, we'd really like to get to our rooms. Yes, that's quite enough.

If you just take the door to the left there. Could we get our passports back now? What passports? Helen and my... Where did my friend go? What friend? Helen. She was standing right here.

Oh, Helen. Don't worry. Helen's just through the door to your left. Hello? Helen? Wait. Who are you? Right, well, that's all the questions. So, please, yeah, please let me out.

Someone come. Whoa, hey, do I, do I know? Time to get you out of here. Oh, uh. Jupiter, you say? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Good luck with that. You've remembered quite a lot, Annie.

That's no good. Time to practice your forgetting. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I don't want to, I don't, I don't, I don't... I, I, I... Oh, God, I was just saying, I was... What was I... Uh... Oh, oh, I was just saying... I was... What was I... Uh... Oh, oh, hey! Hey! Hello, it's Kareem, the voice of Simon Fairchard from the Magnus Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible. For fans of heart-racing, bone-chilling and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need.

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Terms and conditions apply. Is this a tape recorder? Oh, and what are you, you're recording? Did I start recording? There's another one. You have a little friend here? What about you? Ah, there you are.

It's time for you to remember for a moment. First, who are you? Well, my name is... My name is Annie. Annie, uh... Annie... This episode is distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial Sharealike 4.0 International License.

For more information, visit RustyQuill.com, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook or email us at mail at RustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening. you