The Magnus Archives - MAG Roundtable - Making of Season 5

Episode Date: April 1, 2021

In the first of our post-series bonuses, Community Manager Anil sits down with the writer, showrunner, producer and soundscape editor of The Magnus Archives to discuss how Season 5 came together amidst a year of some upheaval...Featuring: Anil Godigamuwe, Jonathan Sims, Alexander J. Newall, Lowri Ann Davies and Elizabeth MoffattContent warnings:Spoilers up to and including Episode 200Explicit languageDiscussion of: apocalypse & hellscapes, COVID-19 pandemicMentions of: anxiety & stress, hospitals, falling, fictional death, prisonsTranscripts:PDF - https://cutt.ly/7cp4tUvDOC - https://cutt.ly/Zcp4xQNThank you to all our Patrons for your continued supportIf you'd like to join them, visit www.patreon.com/rustyquill.Edited this week by Nico Vettese, Elizabeth Moffatt & Jeffrey Nils GardnerProduced by Lowri Ann DaviesCheck 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.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hello and welcome to this special behind-the-scenes look at the making of Season 5 of the Magnus Archives. I'm your host, Anil Gurugumur, and with me I have... It's Johnny Sims. Hello. Writer. Voice actor. Hero? Who can say? Johnny. Johnny can say i just did and alex newell hello director hero question mark no antagonist question mark yes and me lori producer

overlord maybe uh and me elizabeth um editor hopefully not a question mark at this point to be fair elizabeth the actual hero of the making of season five 100 i mean how many episodes like i think by the 89th one you can probably say that you're an editor at that stage yeah keep saying it there are few people on the planet who have edited as much audio drama as you that is probably true yeah so 200 episodes five years of audio drama the curtain has finally closed the stage has been swept how are we all feeling uh i think relief you know is broadly speaking my primary emotion like it's a bit sad because it's been so much of my life for like, yeah, the last five years, but mainly especially given how season five has been to record

and it's just a real, to have it all out there at last. I, on the other hand, would like to shatter the grand illusion and say, only one person in this room is done with magnus and it's the person who spoke first yeah it's the person who's feeling like i've still got loads to do you'll get there because there's still loads to do that is well yes but the main body of the show is done i have to say i i have a different emotion i I think I was feeling possibly partway through last year, I was like, when will this be over?

But now, because I was a fan of the show, like I am losing characters that I enjoyed, that I've just animated across a landscape. I'm like, I am losing a little bit of character family for myself that's sweet and i didn't care about them that much between seasons one season five i made their little feet go everywhere yeah that's the thing you'll have heard more of like their little tippy tap footsteps than you have like any other sound for the last year every little shrug every time martin did something like this hands up up, hands down.

Yeah, I think from doing the transcripts, it's like click and footsteps, I think, are the things I have written the most. Well, I guess it's safe to say that 2020 and Season 5 didn't quite pan out the way we'd expected. Before we talk about the production challenges, let's go back to the beginning on the writing front. And what I'm guessing are the heady, heady days of 2019. Ah, the before time. The before times. But Johnny, you've said before that Magnus Archives was planned as a five-series show. Could you talk a little bit about your overall vision and how Season 5 fitted in with that? Season 5, the final act of the Magnus Archives, Act 5 as it were, was always intended to be this post-apocalyptic, weirdmageddon odyssey to a certain degree. It was always going to culminate with the archivist's choice and taking on the power and releasing the fears sort of out into

these other worlds, largely because I am an absolute sucker for like they're so cheesy but i love your old school creepy pasta and now you too reader are doomed for you have read these words and these words are how the curse was passed and so i was like i really want to do like just five seasons leading to a really like the slowest burn one of those but the basic skeletons being in place pretty much from like about halfway through season one i'd say but obviously the exact format has changed and shifted i think originally it was going to be slightly shorter run of episodes i wanted actually initially to do a sort of kind of a fake out with the early part of season four yeah so that the apocalypse came like

i know episode like 17 just out of the blue in season five which alex pushed back on saying that it would be really hard to maintain that much of early season five when there were effectively no actual stakes and so it's it's fine you can say it what i did is i said no one wants an office romance for 10 episodes no one would enjoy that johnny it's boring so let's skip that and go straight to the misery have you actually seen the fan reactions we don't have fans this all just gets put in a filing cabinet somewhere but the the actual format of season five sort of beyond the idea of like they are traveling the apocalypse seeing these like the idea of the apocalypse and the fearscapes checking in on all these older characters in their sort of final forms effectively that was

there but as it got closer and i wanted to experiment a bit more with my writing it took on this much more odyssey format of like one end of a fear transformed british isles right down to the other in your defense as well like when you were originally talking about it you were trying not to force us to reinvent the entire series in light and we could do maybe 10 episodes post-apocalypse would that would that be okay and i was like no 40 we'll do 40 and we'll triple the soundscaping so like you were quite humble in the original like proposition i have have to give you credit as I just told you to scale it up and you rolled with it.

Did you have anything in particular that you wanted to try or achieve with the writing of this season? Broadly speaking, I wanted to experiment a bit more. The statement format of the first four seasons has evolved as the meta-plot and the interpersonal drama has developed, but it always stayed pretty grounded to one degree or another in the real world. And I was very keen to experiment a bit more with the actual format of the statements, with the writing, and use this idea of the psychoscape and these sort of personal hells to just sort of, I guess, flex my writing muscles in some different ways.

Also, it's a paradox that the more surreal the actual setting, in many ways the more real you can be with the subject matter and with the interpersonal drama. People reacting against these very externalised metaphors can lead to some really interesting character moments that weren't as possible when the world was normal. And you have to deal with, in metaphorical monsters, when the world is real, are sort of literalized in a in a very interesting

way when you take this idea of like the world becoming this inherent metaphor i mean i'd argue as well that it's kind of it's more than just you can go more real you sort of have to otherwise you're just this untethered balloon in floating around in a big pile of weird monsters are metaphors and so the more of the world that is a monster the more of the world has to be a metaphor otherwise you're just describing an untethered hell which you know is fine i guess but uh you kind of want something a bit more there what was writing like at the start of the season compared to towards the end? In many ways, not super different. Like, I think it took me a few episodes to properly settle into what we were trying to do. And I would say that the last 10 episodes, a lot of the final plot beats land, and there's a lot of long deferred conversations that need to

happen that was both harder and easier than the journey preceding it easier because a lot of these scenes were so kind of necessary and i don't want to say obvious but like i know how this scene goes because it's a scene that's been rattling around my brain for like three years now or so but at the same time there was a lot more pressure on it because it's like yeah but if this scene doesn't land this series doesn't land you know yeah so yeah i think in some ways the early bits were were easier also like pre-pandemic it was a lot easier because writing is hard in a pandemic yeah what johnny you're forced to stay at home surely that means all you do is right with no interruptions forever right wonderful yeah said every creative ever

on that point um were there any particular sticking points with the writing for season five uh i mean the last sort of i want to say 15 episodes went through quite a few chops and changes with alex like there was the exact order of scenes and the exact order of things i ended up getting a little bit shuffled around well i mean in your defense there was production pressure as well yeah which was there's no point dancing around it is that although season five was written with a sort of semi odyssey act structure built in originally it was structured for a mid-break because that's what we normally would be fine with and then and then you carry on but that was physically impossible unless i literally started feeding people to the machine to keep it going.

So as a result, we ended up splitting it harder into that three act. So it meant that you kind of needed to account for that. And it also meant that we had to factor in, like, for instance, we couldn't have Basira and Daisy periodically recurring throughout the whole season. Because from a practical point of view, frank and fay had a microphone was like we could make sure they had a microphone at any point we wanted but it wasn't as easy to say well they'll need a microphone throughout the whole deal so a lot of it was down to because me and alex and imogen for instance who plays helen because she's also in Stella Firma, there were a handful of us who had basically permanent recording setups.

A lot of the mid-season five was very much like, this is by production necessity, focused down much closer on these characters. Like, I think it was always going to be primarily John and Martin wandering through the wastes, but that sort of slightly peripatetic sectional feel like oh well these are the three four episodes with daisy and basara in the middle was i think much more of a production consequence than uh one that was initially planned but you did basically allow

us to uh mobilize with the remote recording kits by doing that so i don't actually think it's worse for it i'd say a lot of times people say the change happens and then it's you know oh you've sacrificed the original vision i'm like actually i kind of like that it fell out that way i think we've broadly speaking been quite good at like having a lot of two-way communication over the production stuff it's a lot less like you coming in and saying well these are the restraints, so make it work. And me saying, well, this is my writing demand. Make sure it works. Sat on his throne of bone. And much more like us having a proper conversation and saying, well, these are the constraints.

What can we do within the writing to make this work and to actually like capitalize on it what like what is this an opportunity for thematically that's a good way of putting it yeah conversely were there any parts that came very easily yeah by the end the martin and john dialogue it's one of those things that like after five years you know how these characters talk and communicate yeah so deeply martin and john have a heartfelt conversation about the apocalypse and martin stubbornly sits on a horrible sofa like i'm like yeah i can write that that's that's fine done i'm looking at elizabeth wince at the mention of that sofa and you're like oh yeah sitting on a sofa that's dead easy that's two seconds of writing and elizabeth's there i remember that you're so tactful i think it's just

waiting for the editing section yeah during that they're probably slightly more towards adding alex into this when did planning proper for season five begin and how did that go? From an audience point of view, it was underway by the time season four was complete because there's obviously that delay. I have a date. So I remember that we had a big meeting in December 2019 as like a debrief of season four. Yes. And I don't think you'd done the final like detailed scene plan at that point.

And you were going to do it in the next few weeks. You're right. We knew what we wanted to do genuinely around like end of season three. And it was a question of like execution. How long is it? 20 episodes in Apocalypse. Is it all in Apocalypse? Whatever.

And you're right. That was the meeting where we sat down and poor johnny had to sit in a room and just be told no for like an hour where it was just like cool i thought we could no it must have these characters it must run at this length you cannot have these characters more than this amount of time it must only have this to be fair like a lot of the meeting was you're saying oh it's gonna have this and me being like yes of course that makes sense and there was only like 30 of it was like me being like i want this one and they're like we can't we can't do that i mean that was the meeting where i said we need to plan to not have seleza yeah in case it didn't come off as an example but that said with season five much more than any other

season planning in inverted commas has gone pretty much right up to the end with all the other seasons there was the initial two or three meetings where me and alex hashed out the shape of the season then i'd go away and make my episode plan and then the main question was how do we do this how do we make this actually work whereas with season five because of pandemic concerns a few structural things that we noticed as we came towards the end there was much more of that well what do we do how are we shaping this there were much more of those conversations right throughout season five yeah yeah i'd say it had slightly more real world course corrections where it's like oh like this is going to be physically impossible to record so we'll need to you know that there was a version

as an example where like if we couldn't get decent recording setups to them so laser was behind bulletproof glass and talking through an intercom and stuff like that and it's like because that could work you know so yeah i think out of all of the seasons this is the one that's had the most reconfirming and little adjustments here and there but it's almost all been to like facilitate rather than rewrite if that makes any sense sure when did principal recording for season five start well i looked this up and our first recording for season five was on the 18th of January 2020. And it was a John Martin scene in the first episode. And on that day, we also recorded, us five recorded making of episode 158.

Because I remember coming to the recording for the making of 158 and Mike was just leaving. I think that might have been the, oh no that was might have been the oh no it would have been the first scene right yeah because he's in the tape recording at the beginning of season five oh my god i forgot that's how season five starts yeah yeah i had as well oh i forgot that was so much fun to plan yeah just to be arbitrarily cruel in that way oh god i walked up to your front door it opened mike walked out it's like oh i didn't know you were here today i think that may have also been the day of our staff party as well like the last party where we were all together yeah it was yeah yeah before shutdown principal recording started in january before we knew anything about uh really about how how

things were going so how did the plan for season five change as the year progressed uh through a couple of like emergency meetings when we first went into lockdown followed by weekly updates and discussions and all this sort of thing i'll be be honest, at this point, I've been doing the, like, revised and changed, I couldn't tell you, oh, it was going to be X or Y, and then it changed in this or that way, but certainly the initial plan was much more sort of, I think, interweaving with other characters' stories, rather than compartmentalizing them in the way that it ended up being also just like the way that dialogue worked I had to be a lot more careful to not write too much crosstalk at least in the earlier parts of the pandemic when everyone was still getting used to their remote recording setups by the end me

and Alex even with a video delay we could cross talk acted off each other without any problem oh yeah that's that's a that's a fun insight there are a few scenes that i've recorded as martin where due to internet issues johnny at the other end to what i'm hearing it's like hello john how are you hello i'm fine how are you and then you're just like okay i'll just i know how you probably would have said that yeah like the thing is like at a certain point we've been acting these characters off each other for long enough that i'm just like okay well i've no idea what alex just said but the timing he would usually use is this so let's just go i believe my timing consists of awkward pause. When was the decision taken to move to fully remote recording?

And was there any consideration given to delaying production or the launch of season five? I have come to this with a list of dates to help jog memories because I couldn't remember. Excellent. But our last studio recording day was the 14th of March and it was with Hannah Walker recording Jude Perry. The Towering Inferno episode. So that was almost exactly a year ago today. Like we were already well underway in setting up for remote recording at that point. Yeah. We were quite lucky, I think. Well, from my point of view, I don't know how much

things would change. I don't remember these scenes being changed, but I think we had a bunch of John Martin scenes coming up and you both, I think Johnny was, am I right, prioritised or had a recording kit at that time? recording until Pandemic hit and my government company started doing streaming, at which point we bought our own recording kit. That ended up being supplemented a couple of places by what Rusty Quill was sending out. Fundamentally, Alex, very wisely, yeah, this is not going to be a short thing. We need to make sure that we are in a position to keep recording if it ends up being months or years yeah i'm a little bit of a pandemic paranoia person as being forced as a child to read the hot zone by my mother who was like this is a thing that you'll need to deal with in your lifetime so as a result i may have been slightly primed to the point where i think during that hannah walker we'd already made the call that we basically were going to be in remote recording till...

I think we might have even given out the company message like, we're assuming we're going to be doing remote recording till end of 2021 unless a miracle happens or something. We basically have had swapped by April to just, we will be doing this permanently until further notice. So yeah, i think we were quite lucky in a way that i don't often concede in that we had a bunch of john martin we could be doing so that we did not have to completely tank season five start from a business perspective

i pushed quite hard because pandemic was going to shut down a lot of shows especially in the podcast space and sustaining launch would be a big deal would be an achievement in and of itself even if it meant that we swapped to the three-act structure so i think a lot of it was a lot of people putting a lot of extra effort but a lot of the people who were like saving it inverted commas on here april somner hannah brankin actually a few of the editors who helped like generating suggestions on tech including you elizabeth i think where it was effectively coming up with what the recording stuff was that was logistically massive that was enormous but we were quite lucky that we could just record a bunch of john martin whilst mobilizing you know 20 30 remote recording kits and you bought every microphone

left in england oh i did yes i did oh there's your fun anecdote yeah i may have gone hang on every single person on the planet is going to want to make a podcast because they're going to be aboard at home and i need to have this specific equipment if it's going to sound good so because they hadn't stocked up yet i did temporarily purchase every single type of this microphone that was available in this country for like a couple of weeks and it was just because they normally stock you know like two and every single shop i was like i'll take 30 and so we had to like clean out like genuinely like 10 separate suppliers or something so then for two weeks that just this microphone wasn't available in the uk and it was my fault i forgot about that you'd see all these advice forums being like hi

i'm trying to start a podcast during pandemic but i can't find this microphone it's just sat there watching comments of people going yeah it's weird there used to be loads and now there's none i don't know what's happening there in your defense like the issue was that there weren't a lot of these microphones stockpiled in any given supplier oh yeah they haven't stopped hard like anything and then demand they would have vanished anyway but at the same time they vanished because of you it's similar to um the streaming situation because like stocks of certain like logitech cameras particularly the c920 ran out so lori when alex told you we were going to move to fully remote what were your initial thoughts i think my first thoughts went to all of the recordings and the guests we had booked and just, you know,

right, what do we do here? And the next recording we had booked that, you know, would have gone ahead had we not had to go remote, was with Chioma, who plays Annabelle, which we were unlucky in a way because this was our first recording with her ever. So, you know, we hadn't met her and we were supposed to be meeting her for the first time this day. But we were lucky because what she was recording was a phone call. Oh, yeah. Literally, we were like, you know what what i think we can get away with her recording on her phone because she didn't have a kit and we couldn't have got it to her in time because i don't think we had them at that point this is a real insight into just how pathetic i am do you

not remember our fun character cascade algorithm we had to work on? Yeah. It was this fun thing where it was like, right, you can only have so many people in a call, otherwise the call collapses. Therefore, you can split it out. But we need to batch people because some people can't have a, you can't give a full resorting set to every single character to keep for 12 months. They've got to move around.

It was one of those maths problems where it's, you know, like a train leaves London at 20 miles an hour and another leaves Timbuktu because what was the minimum number of transfers and stuff of equipment super dorky spreadsheet you showed me once yeah i just gave a bunch of parameters to lori went you're a mathematician figure it out so just swapping back a little bit so you said there wasn't really a decision to delay or push back the launch of Season 5. So we recorded a message from you that went out before the start of the season. But I have to ask, Johnny, what was it like feeling so prescient about the apocalypse? Particularly with things like the Thick Village.

Oh, that episode hurt me physically. I remember for a fair part of that early season, we made sure to preface things with cautions about the content. Like, something like the first five, six episodes all went out with warnings. Being isolated in a cabin, followed by you go outside and there's nothing but sickness. Yeah. God. It was a weird one, because at some points in season five,

season five is diving into like much more real world fears and like real world experiences like there have been some heavy episodes that this one's a lot but there is a real difference in going into an episode saying okay well this is this is engaging with something pretty raw pretty personal to me versus just putting out an episode that's like yeah this is a meditation on this thing and by the time it comes out it's suddenly massively directly applicable to everyone listening i don't have any other good words to say except it's really weird not great i would much rather those episodes had not been prescient and everyone had just been, ah, that's an okay episode. Let's not remember it.

But look at it another way. What if you'd have done an episode of them trapped in the cabinet and they go outside and it's nothing but clowns? 2020 would have been a very different year for the world. The clowndemic. year for the world the clown-demic well we're not going to talk about clowncore on this episode despite its relevance to the magnus archives but uh so lori what were the challenges you faced in getting the rest of the season recorded as producer well first it's that adjustment and the mental switch of okay everything's completely different all the prep I've done means nothing um but I think we're probably getting into kind of the sound and the

editing side of things now because one of the biggest challenges is of course that everyone's setup is different you know we're not in a studio everyone's atmosphere is different and you have to try and match that trying to think of ways to mitigate those differences I mean obviously it wasn't me who was coming up with those solutions and I think for me I felt like there was a sense of going into the unknown, like we didn't know what we didn't know yet. So, you know, for example, we'd be recording things, you know, it's a remote recording setup and, you know, everyone's in different places and you'd think, oh, okay, this is a thing that we hadn't considered that will affect us and we should probably think about beforehand

in the future. It added a few extra steps to production as well. So things like, oh, we need to be getting test audio from people and we need to be getting it a week before their recording so that if there are any issues with their setup and their atmosphere and their audio we can solve those before the recording day and then you're explaining to actors no you've got to use the actual setup you're going to use don't give us a test recording just on your phone and then use a different setup and stuff like that. Teaching actors how to soundproof their own rooms. No, no, it's not that. It's just that you now have to...

Hi, this is a casting call. Cool. Are you a performer? Yes, great. Are you an audio technician? What? No. Learn!

And also explaining, yes, you've sent us test audio using the mic that we sent you, but we need you to be literally recording in the space you're going to be recording in with it set up as it's going to be on the day, because that affects the quality so much, almost as much as the quality of the microphone. I had to learn a lot about acoustics. It's not like a bad thing. It's not like, oh, I can't believe I had to learn about acoustics.

But it was definitely uh also like the idea of checking a spectrograph never crossed my mind and then we lost like a literal day's worth of recording on my end because there was some problem that would have shown up if i checked the spectrograph but we didn't so just did the whole recording being like yes this is fine really the whole recording. We're like, yes, this is fine. Really enjoying this recording. And then it's like, this is, Johnny, this is completely unusable. Sounds like you're underwater. And then the awful one where everyone did a fantastic job,

but the audio equipment reset. So they just recorded to the wrong microphone. So they've got the brilliant microphone set up. Everything looks like it's working fine. And they've recorded via their like three pound webcam. And you're like oh no god well i mean because everyone has you know we can send out the certain recording equipment but most people are recording into their own laptop or device right so and we don't have control over that

we have tested every iteration of every like setup we possibly could before we came to this and this was the one that was a combination of the easiest to get someone to learn combined with least likely to create audio errors and crashes and stuff but it took a long time and johnny's right to be annoyed because it's been the bane of my life the amount of experimentation it took to locate the exact right things to turn off so that skype wasn't just gradually increasing my recording volume throughout the whole recording was a lot but at the same time yeah like all the like the more specialist tools out there are a lot harder for like if you're just getting an actor and to

like do an episode it's a lot more upfront to sort of unload onto them and at a certain point you just have to be like do you have skype uh i think so great it's over skype plus to be honest when we started teams and zoom weren't as big as they are now yeah actually that is another big thing so you're recording usually you know alex is there and you know he's acting as the sound engineer so you're pretty confident i mean obviously there are exceptions things can go wrong but usually once the audio is recorded it's done it's you know it's there and you can rely on that yeah but then recording remotely and you know waiting for everyone to send their audio in not that like anyone was late or you know, waiting for everyone to send their audio in. Not that like anyone was late or, you know, slow sending stuff in, but you can't just tick that off as being done.

You have to wait, you know, so that it's being checked and maybe gone through a few editors so that all the different ways that it could have gone wrong have, you know, been eliminated. And it's like, okay, after all all this time it sounds like that audio was okay i can take that as being done were there any actual positives from a production perspective that came out of this like any benefits or unexpected wins that came from like this new normal of remote recording uh studio's never been cleaner

you're all just animals and every time you come into a room you leave it and it's like a whirlwind of muddy footprints. This is glorious. Well you've turned the studio into your actual office now. Yeah, it's my sterile soundproof bubble. I just figured it was having a cast and crew who are now trapped at home and had no excuses. You're available right i had this thing no you don't i technically got to sleep a bit later on a recording day the trouble is that actually that works worse because before i was having to like

crawl out of bed at seven and take a two-hour train and bus ride over to alex's and the thing is that two-hour train and bus ride like i'd get myself a coffee and like a bacon sandwich i'd listen to sonic the comic the podcast and just like take that time to wake up and so by the time i arrived at alex's i was like yeah ready to record whereas in pandemic i've much more been like just blearily eyed like trying to set up a microphone at like five past nine. Yeah, I don't need to. It's fine. I'm already in the room I record in. It's fine. And being like, I'm here. Yeah, actually thinking about it, early Pandemic was the big one for that because we were worried that we weren't going to be able to catch up.

People are busy dealing with Pandemic. And instead it was every single person on the planet's plans have been cancelled which means that every single person it's like yeah i guess i'm free like i'm not going to that opera or whatever so it weirdly made it feasible to catch up more than i actually thought we'd be able to in the first stages i mean it was harder in the sense as well that we had to get mics to people and also coordinate with other shows as well. Yeah, yeah. Another win, I'd say, is that it opened up the casting for us. I had been looking since January 2020 for an actor of Samoan descent that lived in London or who could feasibly get to London and I'd just been having no luck and I can't remember exactly when but I remember one day

during the lockdown I woke up and was like we don't need we we don't need someone who's in London we can cast anywhere even Australia which Alex agreed to and to clarify Australia specifically because I had an Australian director friend who had worked with a few Samoan actors who live in Australia. So I reached out to them and their agents and that's actually how we ended up casting Selesa. And Ray was wonderful to work with. He was a ray of light. International shipping is not fun. Once it's's there moving around within country it's fine

getting things to countries can sometimes be tricky let's leave it at that i will say the fans very definitely uh reacted well to race casting as the later he was very very popular how about you elizabeth i'm assuming that from your end, it's basically all been positive with remote recording with no negatives at all, right? Yeah, no, it's been a, it was a dream. It's great, great fun. We all learned lots. Because I'd come from seasons two, three and four, where it was all recorded in the studio. And so I'd just grown up on this beautiful audio that just never needed anything. You know, it just needed to adjust the levels. Didn't need to EQ it other than running it through

the telephone filter that we use. To, yeah, having to deal with this audio that was coming in where I think it stumped a lot of the editing team to really shape some of that so that it sounded as good as possible. There were a few exterior scenes that ended up interior by the end, but I think it worked. team to like really you know shape some of that so that it sounded as good as possible there were a few exterior scenes that ended up interior by the end but uh i think it worked moving now to the editing side uh elizabeth uh speaking as an editor or for the editing team what are the main

differences in handling audio that is coming from multiple locations compared to it all being nicely in situ in studio so i mean you've got i think the two main things are obviously the fact that the audio is not going to sound the same because of the the reverberance that each room has you know every space has some kind of reverberance and then the other thing is working with audio where the there was i think for annie and and Nico who did most of those edits this year they probably had to do a lot more of the franken voicing where it's taking two records where potentially those people weren't actually recording at the same time and of course dealing with lag those I think are the two main differences from the studio like the studio obviously does still have nice padding on it so you don't get yeah looking good um whereas yeah there's there's only so much that most people can

do in their bedroom or their lounge to reduce the amount of reflection um that their walls are going to give to the sound so but there's a beautiful narrative closure there that Magnus started in a blanket fort and it ended not in a big fancy studio, but just in a lot of blanket forts. More like a blanket community. A blanket hamlet. Oh, it's fine. I'm happy. I love the completion of a mountain of art. Indeed you do. Elizabeth, you moved from being the vocal cut editor to principally doing the soundscaping for season five. So how did that feel? was always something that I was I've been passionate about but the amount of audience hadn't really sunk in and so I remember Callum oh we've got this many downloads a month and I was

like holy shit I feel very responsible at this point um so because also the vocal cuts you know cutting the dialogue for something I I mean, it doesn't disappear, but you know, when it's done well, you're not paying attention to that, right? That's just something that feels seamless. And you've just, you're the invisible presence that made that come off fine. I think with the soundscaping, you're telling people a lot more about, well, you're telling people everything about the environment if you start adding soundscaping in, right? So you're saying, well, you know, we've got this got this hospital well what sort of hospital is it like what sort of

environment do we have here so and then of course once you're adding that soundscape layer as well it's got to be believable enough if you have everyone thumping around not sounding realistic you're just going to take everyone out of that environment i would actually prefer if i was listening to a podcast something that had less soundscaping if they weren't going to do it well enough for it to be believable because to me like the story is the most important thing and what i'd hate to do is distract from you know the narratives that johnny was telling you say that but like as you say the soundscaping is so important for the environment and because so much of season five is about the environment oh and i say oh like season five elizabeth is 100 the third author it's literally the fact that like a lot of the decisions that you take in the soundscaping

have these sort of very significant and transformative impacts on the episodes and it's been wonderful to like come to some of them and be like oh wow that's not what i wrote because that's better you know no all you ever wrote was just there's the sounds of tens of thousands of people screaming yeah and it's real difficult to keep that fresh it's not so much that it's not what i wrote in the sense that like that is different from what i wrote it's like well what i wrote was like a line of description what elizabeth has come back with is so transformative to it and often occasionally people have been like oh yeah like this particular thing in the episode that really spoke to me i was like i don't recall writing that in and i go back to listen i'd, oh, that's just a really cool sound effect

that was dropped in there. But that draws attention so much too. And this is biggest in audio drama, actually. There is far more directorial action that happens at the sound effect, soundscaping layer than people give credit for. This isn't even talking like from a procedures point. It's talking about like from the nature of how you consume this, right?

Body language is a thing, okay? In audio drama, inferred body language is a thing. There's a very big difference between a character who says, yes, I agree, and someone who says, yes, I agree, then fidgets uncomfortably. Those are different scenes. fidgets uncomfortably those are different scenes so as a result a lot of that is elizabeth's readings of scripts where sometimes it's codified but even if it's not codified elizabeth doesn't have the luxury of just leaving it blank people don't just sit perfectly still in a void so as a

result you can imply a lot and i think it's probably the thing that's the least appreciated and thing that you smashed with season five and it's stuff like rowing the boat where it's the thing of when they choose to stop rowing the boat when they start again how does that interact and things like that you learn a lot about the characters just by that and it's the bit that no one really pays attention to but it's the thing that when it's missing they'll say oh it just feels like talking heads and it's because it's missing an entire layer of sound design which is what you are very good at like really really good at to be fair it's not always been purely elizabeth's interpretation sometimes she has dropped me messages on teams being like

hey what do you mean by this i'll go back to script and then i'll say i don't care but i will say this definitively if the sound design is coherent in any way in season five it's because elizabeth has agonized in a way that i have personally breezed past before what are the rules for this thing i don't know does it sound scary well no that doesn't make sense it has to make sense and then and now we have entire systems in place where elizabeth's been like i will make this coherent and wonderful yeah the soundscapes are good despite myself and alex but not because of dubbing a little bit deeper on that elizabeth how do you set about soundscaping an apocalypse i mean obviously you've got just i suppose the general rules of sound design that

you'd have which is like you're going to have an environment which is your background sounds and your maybe your some mid ground sounds and then you've got your character movement so basically for this show particularly we needed to think of it in advance for quite a bit. I needed to get from Johnny and Alex an idea of where everything was going to be set so that I'd have enough forewarning about whether there was going to be environments which were the same. So the hospitals actually came up three times in different ways. And I needed to be able to create environments which were going to sound separate from one another. Needing to map out like, okay, were there going to be conflicts?

And I think the hospital was the big one where to give like depth to the first one, which is the psychiatric hospital, it still needed that kind of NHS psychiatric hospital rather than like creepy house psychiatric hospital, because it's very hard to like do that in an audio way but that meant I really went hard to the second hospital with the much more violent kind of surgery feel to it especially with the EQ range that we're working in like there's certain things if you went organic you can do like the knuckle popping kind of sound but actually that gets really lost in our EQ. Anytime someone got hit in the head or smashed by something, it was normally about seven

layers of sound just to give it enough deaths because the EQ that we have, it just makes everything sound quite small. I think the other thing was we never really super talked about how we all envisioned the world working and my vision of it is subtly different i think from your guys the way that i built the worlds particularly when we dove into doing the statements with them quite soundscaped my world was that you know like john and martin would enter these domains and they would be seeing the framework for other people's fear. So they would be in a domain. They would be in the prison domain.

You sort of hear a couple of people murmuring or something. But for those people who are murmuring or who are crying, they're hearing or they're experiencing their own facet of that. Personal, yeah, yeah. Everyone's in their own fear bubble, which also explains why if they interact with John and Martin, they can't remember their name they can't all that sort of stuff my idea was that the fears were warping around each person but yeah so when john and martin walk into something they just experience the kind of framework that allows a domain to

exist i think as well like it's the best example of scope creep in season five is entering into season five i'll be honest the original plan was when it comes to the monologues we'll put them in a static environment that is being on stage for someone else's fear but not necessarily like in their fear and then we can allude to it here or there whatever and it became very apparent as it carried on that the intimacy of the statements precluded that perspective because they were landing a little flat if you don't have it but that meant that suddenly it has gone from these are some monologues with a nice kind of generic environment around them to narrative journeys which is if you actually compare stylistically a a complete

genre shift of the show between season four and season five and b is a completely different technical undertaking which means that poor elizabeth entered with like what's the soundscaping for this it's like a five and then like within three episodes like what's the soundscaping for this it's like a five and then like within three episodes like what's the soundscaping for this 10 till the end of the season what would you say is the strangest or the most fun foley or sound effect you had to create for season five the process for editing is normally that for the sound effects that you download a lot of them from different sites or from you know you can get sound effects packs because obviously if you're doing something which is like 40 episodes and you've got 50 weeks to do it and like it's you're not going to do a lot of your own foley like especially when you're trapped in the

house uh so i recorded the trains outside my house for my show also having trains outside your house isn't very good for folly either. But there is a couple of spots. One is being under my duvet, drinking a glass of water poorly so that I would sound like I was choking a little bit. Whatever the one is where you can hear someone like choking and sort of gasping. That's me. The vast episode across the lake. I figured that had to be you because there's no way you

found a sample that clean of that no way that's me gasping away but i think the the one which is oh it's just the saddest one one nine nine where martin is comforting john and it's like there's like just a fabric noise of like hand padding across I just knew exactly this right sort of sound so I was just sitting in my bedroom alone gently comforting myself I'm like it's been a year I'm just gonna pat myself for audio and pretend that that someone's here to care about my feelings. That's brilliant. So, yeah. Oh, God.

On behalf of the fans, I'm going to ask, are you willing to tell us how you created Fabric Russells? Oh, Fabric Russells? Not by myself. I will have you guys know as well, there's at least one hug in that series, which Johnny did not write. Well, that's plenty. Please be giving me all the love for the

fabric russells it is just literally clothing movements i'm pretty sure that fabric russells is not my stage direction like i'm pretty sure i will write in like they hug or they embrace yeah i think that came out of like following on from the talk that we had with Making of 158, where it was like with Alex being vehement about kissing, or like the talks that we've had about soundscaping kissing and how to actually have affection show up on audio. You can have like one, maybe two, but if it's any more than that, it's not a pleasant listening experience i'm sorry

that is a reality of it so you've got to pick your moments that's all it is so lizabeth what soundscape or episode are you proudest of uh 188 actually which is a woman who sort of she leaves she goes to a therapist and she comes back home i quite like the transitions that i got to do in those um and i quite like the eye monster noise behind the wall like the pulsing eye monster noise oh that was very visceral yeah so there's been other editors involved like maddie and tessa who've helped build some of the samples and things for the soundscapes and so you know like parts of london uh like the little camera chorus as it's referred to which is like the little cameras build some of the samples and things for the soundscapes and so you know like parts of London like the little camera chorus as it's referred to which is like the little cameras everywhere

is something that Tessa built out for me so that's been very helpful. I think I was just very glad when I got past the stage of like having to turn to Alex and be like I don't know how to do this thing and just be just pushing the files and be like I I did my best. And I know it's not good enough. That was a big gear shift with you from I'm not sure if this is right to Alex, this is right. This is right. I don't care. You're wrong. This is right. And you were correct. And you were right to make that gear change. So are there any parts of the soundscaping that you would change looking back on it? I mean, I think everybody who creates would probably say yes, you would go back and change all the episodes. But I think you can't. If I got to work on each episode for two weeks or three weeks or a month, they would be slightly better, like ever so slightly better.

Or maybe I would have found a bit of a better sample to do this explosion with or or something yeah i think just like every other creator you would love to go back and change it but also you know it would be just a time sink how does making season five compare practically and emotionally from either season one or your first season working on the show season five for me is simultaneously closer to season one than i would have expected maybe emotionally on the making side even if practically it was wildly different because for season one we had to invent a bunch of processes in order to get anything out the other end and then for season five we've had to invent a bunch of processes in order to get anything out the other end so that feels like i weirdly went full circle however the problems have gone from how do i plug in this microphone

so that it doesn't explode and have become how do i negotiate international shipping agreements with Brexit trade negotiations ongoing? It's still just a series of very quick solutions to problems. For me, kind of similar in the sense that seasons three and four felt very professional. We knew what we were doing. We had the processes pretty much down. There was a lot of running back and forth, but fundamentally it felt like, season four especially because season five i was

like it was a lot more making do and figuring out it did feel a bit more like season one in that sort of sense the the big difference between it for me is like season one it's like oh i'm writing writing my first proper horror thing putting out the word i hope people like it in season five was like oh no people like it go away oh god i hope people look at this versus people stop looking at this okay everyone's looking at it this is this is a lot this is a lot yeah it goes from look at me to look at me between these hours for a small amount and only with one eye.

Just look away a bit. Look away for a while now, please. What lessons would each of you say that you have learned from season five? I think I have learned a lot practically about writing. I think I've developed certain styles. I think I've gotten better at writing a lot of stuff. certain styles like i think i've gotten better at writing a lot of stuff in terms of the overall plotting i don't know if there is much i would say i've learned like most of the stuff that i'm coming away from is also stuff that i kind of knew going into it you go into this sort of thing

being like well landing a 200 episode season you make some narrative compromises like you're not going to be able to type everything you want to like and it's slightly different to actually experience that and have to make those calls they're like yes intellectually i know that this is coming but at the same time i wouldn't say that like there's any single glaring lesson that i'm like i did not realize this going into season five. And I do now. I think for me as well, there's been a lot of small things. I don't think there's any one particular huge thing. Apart from you just don't have as much time as you think you have.

Or I suppose you will fill that time. Like, I don't know about you but that I feel like that's a lesson that I just keep relearning through life well I came in with the show with limited kind of soundscaping experience so obviously there was a learning curve in terms of just getting those skills up to the level that Alex wanted. And, I mean, I wanted. I've learned to please one man. There we go.

Every woman's dream. I'm a child of my time. I just can't help it. And that's all that matters. Oh, God. Yikes. I always remember when i did broadcasting school like one of our teachers was like everything you do will be twice as hard and sound half as good as what you want it to be and so like that just if you're listening out there gentle listener

it takes a lot of effort to do one of these things like way more than you'd expect excuse me excuse me anil what have you learned yeah what have you learned anil yeah i have learned that trying to pull all of these disparate parts together and communicate this to people to the listening public is a lot harder than i had expected it to be, particularly because when the pandemic hit, or when the notions of lockdown started coming, I was not in the UK. I was abroad in Sri Lanka, because I went to see my grandmother with my family at the beginning of March. And as the holiday progressed, and we were getting updates about how the world situation was going it's like am i going to be able to get back i was having chats like five and a half hours delayed between like alex and hannah

and and johnny's about like what we are going to do and how we can communicate things because at this point i didn't have any assistance so all comms was running through me and how we were going to work this if i was stuck abroad for two weeks an extra month or so so it's like learning how to communicate in a crisis is very much something i have learned through all of this and it's been weirdly fun in places uh with magnus uh. Always misery, never fun. No, no, no. That chocolate torte is still going to be tasty because it's chocolate. I don't know what any of you are talking about.

I am a joy. Indeed. I've got one last question before we finish all of this up. What would you say is your favourite episode or scene from season five? It's a very, very recent one and it's going to be praising Elizabeth again.

It's 198 Precipice where they push themselves off the cliff. I had genuinely like a shock, shiver, visceral reaction with everyone that pushed themselves off the cliff. Like not just when Martin went, but like basira and the archivist each one oh i just felt it i was oh it was like i felt that i was on that cliff and i didn't like it but i loved it 198 probably as well specifically for the dialogue banter throughout that episode it's one of the few episodes in the entire season that has like legit banter where it is just like

we're on our journey there might be stuff to discuss or whatever but like once you get past that initial like couple of minutes there's a lot of back and forth and that's very rare in this season because 197 is the one where like it drops the like these are the stakes this is the final decision this is what this ending is about 198 is this slight breather episode taking a breath before diving into those last two and so yeah like we did allow ourselves to be a lot just to let the characters be funny in the way that they can be funny you know i remember um you chatting about that and you were talking about how you're going to end it or how you're going to script it with me and lori and we were like just ended up being like ha ha ha why

don't they jump off the ladder ha ha ha and you're like oh i'll use that to be fair i think i actually had the ladder episode in a completely different place and i had like 198 was always going to be that slight breather episode i think the ladder was from somewhere else but i'd forgotten and i was like 198 that was uh that was the the ladder i think and you and i were like what ladder are you talking about johnny and i was like i think you know they were on a ladder i'm pretty sure and you were like not according to the plan i was like well they're gonna be on a ladder now i think and that's what working with johnny is like quote now they're on a ladder this was like eight or so weeks before like that's not as big an excuse as you think it is

there's plenty of lead time plenty of lead time yeah i guess for me um 170 or 171 one where martin is basically got like a symptoms of dementia and that's just because i think it's it's just so well acted which means that it's also got great writing johnny because like you know good acting has to go with great oh it wasn't actually like dementia wasn't actually a deliberate touchstone on that. Actually, thinking about it, I would say that the Reign conversation with himself is maybe one of my favourite episodes to have written, just because it's the sort of conversation that, like, it's just the whole situation

and, like, having the weight of, like, 180 episodes of character development behind it. Nice kind of dialogue and, and like a lot of different ideas and like you don't need to worry about setting stuff up it can all just be this slow thoughtful discussion like it felt like a real payoff to me writing it at least i'm going to be horrendously biased here with uh my favorite scene and it comes from 191 where thank you i got to have a cameo and the scene where aaron is snarking at martin where we just got to be really like fractious people think oh well what will happen when two poets meet and it's like

why wonder the problem is that mart's really, really good at poetry and he doesn't suffer fools. That's the problem. Yes, that's exactly how I'm describing it when I'm talking about his... I also like that actually, from the poetry side, you are both of us. Yes, exactly.

It's weird because I have actually written the poetry profiles for both of them, and we have discussed this. So, yes, there is Aaron poetry coming as well. So what I'm hearing, Anna, is that your favourite scene really is the scene where you played against yourself. Which I can sympathise with, don't get me wrong but uh but yeah i mean the editors love it when there's a scene where the same person plays two roles oh i feel so bad i think it was nico that did the vocal cut for that one oh i feel so bad for them

so bad having to work from that i've done that before i've edited other people doing that as well and things like that so the only solution you can do is over record but that does mean that you go to someone like cool here's a 15 minute segment here is six hours of audio i kept getting messages from him when he was working on it like can i like there's there's quite a lot can i get a few more hours and i was like yeah n Nico. Yeah, that's fine. And then another message being like, yeah, no,

there's a lot. I'm going to need more time. Yeah. Well, thank you everyone. That has been most enlightening. I hope you're listening at home. I've also found that very interesting.

Thank you very much to everyone. Stay tuned for more from the wrap up of season five. So bye. Bye everyone. Thank you, Anil. Bye. This episode is distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons attribution,

non-commercial share alike 4.0 international license. For more information, visit rustyquill.com. Tweet us at the RustyQuill.com, tweet us at TheRustyQuill, visit us on Facebook, or email us at MailAtRustyQuill.com. Thanks for listening. Hello, it's

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