The Magnus Archives - MAG S1 Q&A

Episode Date: October 26, 2016

With Season 1 complete and Season 2 in development, Jonathan Sims and Alexander J Newall take some time to answer your questions.Thank you to everyone who has listened and helped our small operation grow into the cult it has. If you haven’t already be sure to leave a review, check out our forums and spread the word of your favourite Horror podcast. Particularly with Halloween on the way.If you want to help us out and take the time to vote in the Audioverse awards you can do so here: http://www.audioverseawards.net/site/vote/ Be sure to hurry though as time is running out!Special thanks to menacingsibrow, missnash, Coil, Seanfsmith, Kitsune, Spooniermist, Kea, Seelingkat, Atlas Robson, Ghiacciato39, SwordOfBraavos, VorpalisRabbitus and everyone else who has taken the time to send us in questions. Apologies that we couldn’t get round to answering them all.Season 2 of The Magnus Archives will commence on Thursday 1st December and before then Jonathan is also appearing as a special guest in the Halloween special of our sister program, the Rusty Quill Gaming Podcast, alongside Alexander J Newall and Ben Meredith, the voices of Martin and Elias. Be sure to subscribe at www.rustyquill.com/subscribe or via the podcast app of your choice.Also, don’t forget, Rusty Quill is expanding! If you would be interested in joining our team and working with us to make new and excellent content, send us an email to [e-mail], letting us know what skills you’ve got. (Currently only accepting UK based applicants.)For more information visit www.RustyQuill.com, Tweet us at @theRustyQuill, drop us an email at [e-mail] or comment on our dedicated Forums available at the website. 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 with a small coffee, all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hi, I'm Alexander J. Newell, director of the Magus Archive podcast and voice of Martin on the show, and with me I have... Jonathan Sims, though you probably know me better as Jonathan Sims. And we are here doing a Q&A session for all of the most asked questions from the fan base and

as a way of thanking everyone as well for listening so far so in that vein thank you so I'm going to go through these questions and Johnny's never heard any of these before so we'll see uh we'll see what he makes of them number one Johnny is that your real voice? I've been asked this a lot, actually, and there are several comments around the internet I have actually stumbled across claiming that I'm putting on a bad British accent. And it is, of course, true. My real name is Earl, Earl Big Mac. I'm from Pensatucky. And no, it's my real voice. I change it a little bit.

Obviously, I do lower it a bit and go a little bit more, a little bit drier, a little bit more... Academic. Academic, yes, for Jonathan. But it is my real voice and my real accent. Funnily, no one asks if all of the other characters, their voices are real. No, apparently they sound genuine, even though we've largely conjured them out of meat. So how long have you been planning this?

Is it something you've always wanted to do? Were you actively seeking an opportunity out for a long time? Or did you have the idea more recently? That's sort of a difficult question, I guess. Because I've been, in the back of my mind, thinking of horrible things for as long as I've been writing. Most of my short stories I'd fire off or the novels I would start and get three chapters in would be horror of some sort um in terms of the Magnus archives itself uh it wasn't actually something I'd planned much until we started doing it when I started

working with Alex he very much said what do you want to write? To which my answer was horror anthology, which is how the Magnus Archives started. And then the overarching, the conceit that kept it all together, very much spiralled off into what we now know as the Magnus Archives. With that in mind, how did you specifically get into writing? And how did you craft the story? Not in a spoilery sense, but did you start with into writing and how did you craft the story not in a spoilery sense but did you start with the main event that worked backwards have you let it grow over time basically is it like all of the cork boards and string that everyone has at home i'll start with the first question which is writing has always been sort of where i feel my strength lies so

it's always been something that i've tried to do and tried to make myself do there's quite a lot of uh several years where i've done very little except tell people oh yes no i'm i'm a writer um i love the process of creating uh i hate the process of actually putting things down on the page, but it's what you've got to do. So the answer is always, really. In terms of the story itself, I started by spinning out the central conceit. Once I'd figured out I wanted this meta-narrative, most of the very early stories are ones that have been brewing for a few years, to be honest. So a lot of what has turned into the metaplot came from what themes I liked from there, spinning them out. Then I crafted the ending, as in the ending of season five.

I hate series that don't have an end goal. I'm 100% about closed arcs and there's no way i was going to sit down and write a sprawling epic meta plot unless i knew where it was finishing yeah and since then aspects of the end have shifted slightly with the writing because they always do but i still know where it's going. Yeah, like there's a fixed end point for this, which is always the goal. Okay, another question for you. Do you know exactly where everything will end up in the story, or have you introduced a few threads where you're not sure how they're going to resolve, and just have it as a throwaway thing that you might use later? The answer to that question largely depends on when in season one you're asking it, to be honest.

Right at the beginning, most things were to one degree or another casting a line out. I would have a story. There would be a few aspects of it that I quite liked and planned to revisit later. progressed. Linking some of those up gave me the structure to spin out into, I now have virtually the entire story and the entire world planned to one degree or another. Yeah. How did you start to work with Rusty Quill? A lot of people don't really know how the organisation works. Were you just friendly beforehand, things like that? How did you end up working with us? There was a car boot sale down my road some two years ago and i mean i'd never considered myself the sort of person that would buy a ouija board um but um i perform with a somewhat lunatic um stage show uh called the mechanisms which is a mythic space pirate musical cabaret.

And most years we do the Edinburgh Fringe. So about two years ago now? Yeah, it was about two years. Alex, who I sort of knew through a few people vaguely, ended up coming to one of our shows and saw it and really liked it. Yep. So when Alex started up Rusty Qu quill he messaged us and said basically with a open offer would you like to work with rusty quill at all uh the band as a whole largely because there's no way to produce the sort of thing we do at speed enough to be useful in a

podcast sense you could get one episode every six months maybe um but uh i said oh i've been thinking of starting up a horror podcast for a while and alex said great it'll need a meta plot and here we are pretty much how far in advance do you write the podcasts there's obviously an overarching plot but when do you flesh it out do you just churn them out at a time? Do you have bits of episodes floating around and put them together? How do you assemble them? For season one, any given episode will probably have been written somewhere between four to eight weeks before you actually hear it. That sounds about right. With season two, I've actually sat down and planned it all out in a lot more detail. So I now know what the actual episodes are going to be about.

Well, ultimately as well, from a production standpoint, I mean, season one was entirely new territory. It was completely exploratory. We didn't know if people were going to like it. So ultimately there was an element of seeing what worked, I think. Also for season two, I've been writing a lot more stuff down. seeing what worked, I think. Also for season two, I've been writing a lot more stuff down. Season one was incredibly intricate, but also largely lived entirely inside my head. A couple of the episodes which are dreamlike in tone, because they were written to be dreamlike.

Others are a bit dreamlike in tone because it was very late at night when they were written. So this is a follow on question. How long does it take you to write one story, would you say, end to end? In terms of just keyboard time, maybe five to six hours for a first draft and then two hours to edit it and go over. In terms of actual planning, I will generally have an idea and then be constantly churning it over in the back of my mind for about a week. So that when I finally come to write it, I have a much more complete idea of what's going on and how it's going to shape up. So another question here. How do you prepare to record an episode? Alex directs, but what does that involve? They're interested in the technical and the performing aspects of this. So before we get into the technical, on to your side, we are about to record an episode. To be honest, largely it involves just sitting there

and reading the first few paragraphs in the archivist voice to get my head in the right space for actually reading it. So from my perspective, obviously there's an element of setup involved. We use various amounts of equipment I won't go into here. But once all of the mics and equipment are set up what we'll tend to do is we'll sit down and we'll just run through the episode very quickly and decide if anything unusual has to happen in performance and we'll address how that's happened so changes in voice pitch things like that if there's any soundscaping

soundscaping yeah and then beyond that the only other thing that really takes a lot of time with prep is when you have a multi-cast recording because that that slows that process down a lot because then you have to sort of go line by line make sure people understand the intent of the lines how do you say that how do you project that and then we're into more sort of basically the the nuances of it rather than just the sort of get it down get it recorded yeah the um last episodes of the first season were easily the most complicated. Oh, yeah.

I mean, we were doing an actual audio drama rather than an audio drama-esque anthology series. Yeah. Following on, I feel we've already addressed this a bit. Are there any Magnus bloopers? Has Jonathan Sims ever laughed? Ever? No.

No. No. I laugh a lot. Abhoriously. Some might say that I laugh too much. Not many? No, no. I've never actually heard it. And they don't know?

I assume they say it. But in all seriousness, from the production side, we do have a few recorded gaffes, but we're not intending to release them anytime soon, mainly because it's a bit of a mood killer. Also, I'm very sweary in real life. That sounds like a joke because I'm a relatively deadpan person, but it's not.

I'm very sweary. And this is meant to have a brackets clean rating on iTunes. So no rude words. I could say bums, maybe. But I won't. So again, discussing some more of the production side. When putting together an episode like Hive, how do we get the SFX? What goes into making those SFX?

So a lot of our sound effects will come from online archives, I can't recommend enough things like freesound.org, and there's a few other sites similar to that. Sometimes if you require a really specific sound, you know, something that you just can't find elsewhere, you go out and you do some foley. Truth be told, that happens less often than you'd think. Like I said, those archives are quite good, and you can get quite good at taking a sound and turning it into something that it's not. For instance, I won't tell people how we make the worm sounds, but it just involves a lot of pasta. Lots and lots of pasta.

Delicious screaming pasta. In fact, following on from that, have you ever considered your fixation with invasive worms from a Freudian perspective? I'm sure I don't know what you mean. The idea of pulsating, writhing, elongating worms, tunnelling into flesh is... I mean, it's just good horror, really. I don't know... I don't know what you mean. We'll skip past that one. I really know what the game is.

It's nonsense, really. What are your fears? Well, quite a lot, to be honest. I feel that it's very hard to write good horror unless you're writing something that to one degree or another scares you a bit. Absolutely. If you yourself don't have just a little tingle of fear at the back of your mind when you're writing it, it's probably not as scary as it could be. So a lot of these do come from, they might not be huge fears of mine, but they are things that freak me out to one degree or another. Trypophobia, obviously, is quite a significant one. That's the one that we share um which is where a lot of jane prentice comes from i'd say certainly the episodes that are grabbing people the most it seems

online are the ones that tend to be quite universal and honestly quite simple so it'd be things like fear of falling yep um fear of darkness fear of No, exactly. So a lot of these are, it's marrying as universal a fear as you can with the specifics of what scares you. So taking your own fear and making it transferable. Yeah. So you listen to any episode and you can probably glean a nugget of what scares me. It's been confirmed that you like M.R. James.

So with that in mind, what's your favourite story of his and do you have any other literary inspirations? I mean, it's called The Magnus Archives. The show is called The Magnus Archives. It's Count Magnus. That's why the show is called The Magnus Archives. To be fair fair there are others that i'm very fond of from mr james weirdly enough i have a really specific soft spot for a school

story because it is possibly the most minimalist ghost story uh i've encountered that's managed to have a really significant effect on me so inspir, inspirations other than M.R. James? I've got a real soft spot for old school creepypasta. Who doesn't? When I used to work nights, there'd be some weeks where I didn't fully adjust to the daytime and I'd spend almost a whole week in the dark listening to creepypasta or reading weird blogs or just going through creepy pictures and just working myself into a real state. I mean, interestingly, I remember the first time you pitched the Magnus Archives to us and you described it as M.R. James meets Creepypasta for a start

and you also referenced ionised yeast. Oh, that's because's because i again when i was working night shifts i lived off the the generation of horror podcasting before ours so pseudopod who are still going strong and the early seasons of no sleep knife point horror and also i used to delve into radio archives. And one of them from the 1940s was a show called Lights Out. And it was very much of the time, but it was mostly sponsored by ionised yeast. And every episode, there'd be like a minute long unique ionised yeast advert

about how if you're only feeling half alive and you were too old and tired for your job at the war factory, I sure am discouraged. So there you have it, then. The primary influence of the Magnus Archives is wartime horror. It's ionised yeast. I mean, I'll be honest, Alex,

I've always said that you look remarkably low on vitamin B and iron. You could put on 8, 10 or more pounds of good new flesh moving on okay these are some more questions to do with the actual story itself why narratively rather than canonically does the magnus institute only collate information and not engage with their learnings beyond supplementary clarification investigation it's largely because the sort of horror stories i want to tell are standalone they are the experiences of an individual when confronted with something sinister and inexplicable to actively follow up with the encounters would turn it into i mean it would turn it into something that's more

along the lines of the x files yes um which is a very valid and excellent form of horror but not the one that i'm trying to write also it's useful from an audience point of view to not need to say go back and listen to everything or you just won't understand what's going on. Oh, yeah. Another question. Same kind of lines. How large is the Magnus Institute as an organisation? There are between 80 and 100 staff in total. Very few of them are focused on the archives. I think probably the core staff is maybe 40. Okay, now this is a bit of a specific one we're going to have to drill down to.

So, you've been very specific in the magnus archives about the reasons that sims is recording on tape but how does the sound play into this it's an interesting idea that some things are so fundamentally unnatural that they would cause corruption to recordings of it but what about the music that plays for the atmosphere is that an actual thing that's on the tapes and thus canonical or is it just something for the listeners now that's something i might jump in on? Or is it just something for the listeners? Now, that's something that I might jump in on a little bit. Please do.

When Johnny originally pitched the Magnus archives to me, there was a period of testing where we actually ran a few episodes that we'll never see the light of day. And what we were doing is seeing what sounded right. And part of that was to do with the sound of it. So we did versions of the archives without the tape deck just to test i didn't like it i think that it's got a sort of lo-fi charm and then we tried doing them with the music and we found that the music added something ultimately from sort of the directorial standpoint i've always had it that the music is

not part of the actual recordings however the tape deck the distortions the sound effects of things actually happening the voices of the people within there are part of the actual files the only thing that was added is music and the main reason for that is it needed something to fill out that sound a little bit and just give it a little bit of pop everything that you hear is on the actual tape within the world of the magnus archives except the music yeah yeah um oh and just to say we do not mean to say that there are lost episodes of magnus out there it was largely the first the first few episodes we just did over and over again in various formats. Yeah, we just did multiple permutations. So you've not missed anything, I'm afraid.

Okay, now we're heading a bit more into the sort of fanbase-y kind of questions. Sure, sure. So with that in mind, what's it like having the ability to interact so closely with your fanbase? Would you do it again? It's fascinating, gratifying, and it holds me to account. I don't think it's even a question of would I do it again? I mean, the answer is yes. But moreover, the way that content is created these days, I don't think a creator has an option but to engage with the community that builds up around what you do

unless you deliberately remove yourself i mean certainly you've said this to me before which is that an element of the magnus archives was tying yourself to a rock and then throwing that rock off a cliff and you've just got to keep riding rope yeah exactly um and the the fans in the community are a big part of that and i don't want any of that to sound like I don't love the community massively it's really gratifying to see that something you've created has hooked people well absolutely there's there's an element though that um once you're accountable to those fans it does help keep getting that pen to the paper doesn't it exactly because it's not just me I'm responsible to also it is very useful in terms

of writing a story like this to see which bits of the mystery which sort of threads are picked up there are i won't say who but there are a couple of people on the various sites and message boards that i keep an eye on because i feel that if i write something and they don't spot it it's possibly a bit too subtle. Maybe I need to make it a bit more overt in a future episode. And others where I'll keep an eye on them in case I've made a mistake somewhere because they will let me know. Following on from that, another question to do with something similar. How do you feel about the level of scrutiny that your work gets from listeners? Does all of the checking and fact checking and so on outweigh the positivity of

listening to people on the forums going into their own theories in depth? I mean, that makes it sound like having that level of scrutiny and being called to account when I make a mistake isn't a positive. I mean, it feels a lot like if you're writing a final exam, for instance, and you have somebody standing over your shoulder pointing out whenever you make a mistake. You might give them a look and be startled or even annoyed. But it's good because it means that you're not writing unintelligible nonsense. And moreover, especially with a show like the Magnus Archives where everything is very intricate and everything needs to be internally consistent yeah I can't be allowed to make mistakes because that's not fair

it's straight up not fair to ask people to try to figure out a mystery I'm spinning out and then constantly make mistakes get dates, or feed people false information. Do you have any plans to break the mould of your current narrative style? It seems like there would be some difficulty in telling the current arc without more live-action style narrative sequences. Yeah, I mean, obviously that question came in before the finale of season one came out. Generally, as the series goes on, there will be more of that. At its core, it will still remain one episode, one statement, one story. Yeah. And the last question we've got, actually, let's try and avoid spoilers. What would you say is the biggest challenge that is facing you in season two?

Balancing horror and mystery. Oh, yes. season two balancing horror and mystery oh yes um because fundamentally you see a lot of horror mystery series that start off extremely strong and peter out a bit because at the beginning horror and mystery are fantastically good together oh yeah because they both rely on the unknown so heavily and so the unknown feeds the horror and entices the mystery. But as it goes on, the mystery needs to get answers. Otherwise you feel cheated.

Whereas the horror needs to stay unknown because if you get all the answers to what the horror is, it's no longer scary. And if everything stays unknown and horrific, then you don't get any answers to the mystery. So I would say the biggest challenge is trying to keep everything unknown and scary while at the same time providing enough answers to the mystery that people are willing to stay around and learn more. And there are answers. You won't learn the answers to everything.

There are some small mysteries that will never be known. But a lot of the why, the what, the who, they will, in time, come to light. So I think that about wraps us up here. Thanks again, Johnny, for all of your time. If you'll just go back into the hole, you can carry on writing all the rest of season two. I just want to go to sleep, Alex. No, not for you. But thanks to everyone who's been listening so far.

It's completely blown us away, the response that we've had from everyone. We weren't expecting this kind of following. Not even remotely. It's an amazing thing to happen. But if people are able to, please do leave reviews on iTunes and podcast services. Write reviews yourselves. That kind of content makes a massive difference to a smaller operation like us. Be sure to check us out on Facebook, Twitter, at facebook twitter at the rusty quill the subreddits our forums at the website

oh we're also nominated at the moment for a couple of the categories in the audio verse awards which are voting is open till the 6th november for the semi-finals i believe so if you if you get a chance to pop on there and give us a vote that would be massively appreciated. Again the response we've had from fans has been amazing and anything that you're able to do in that would be a huge help to us and if you cannot wait if you cannot hold on, if you cannot last

without Johnny's sultry tones until the beginning of season 2 you have actually recorded something with us to stay people over until the end It is the Halloween special have actually recorded something with us to stay people over and tell them how you're doing. It is the Halloween special for the gaming podcast. I'm running Deadlands, which is a horror western setting,

which I'm very fond of. It's a lot of fun. And yeah, go over there and listen to it. Do it now. You can find that on all the podcast services that you normally use for Mangus Archives, just like Rusty Quill Gaming Podcast. And I think that about wraps us up.

So thanks again. And we look forward to seeing you again for season two. See you then. To be continued... chilling and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need. Audible is the leader in audiobooks, so you'll always find the best and freshest selection of mysteries and thrillers to choose from. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a classic whodunit, and sometimes you want to get wrapped up in a twisted new mystery where the tension is high and you just can't stop listening until you find out what happens next. Audible can take you places only you can imagine and whenever you want. On a run,

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