The Magnus Archives - MAG Season 5 Q&A - Part 1

Episode Date: April 29, 2021

We embark on the grand asking of questions from the Season 5 mailbag in the first of a 3-part Q&A session. This week, Jonny & Alex are also joined by Elizabeth Moffatt to talk some more about the soundscaping side of things!Featuring: Elizabeth Moffatt, Jonathan Sims & Alexander J. NewallContent warnings:Spoilers for all of The Magnus Archives (inc. finale)FoodHospitalsVocalised kissing noisesDiscussions of: gore & body horror, vocalised sufferingMentions of: physical violence, death, apocalypse, surgeryTranscripts:PDF - https://cutt.ly/dbdvIfpDOC - https://cutt.ly/ybdv1NgThank 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 & Alexander J. NewallProduced 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 with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hello everyone, welcome to the Season 5 Q&A. I'm here, Alexander Newell, Director and Professional Tagalong. And with me today I have two people. Do please introduce yourselves, we haven't established an order so it'll be fun to watch who fights for it i'll introduce myself then uh elizabeth moffat

other professional tag alonger for season five doing the sound design for that season so there we go and i'm johnny uh jonathan sims and i am apparently the only one who's meant to be here everyone else is just tagging along behind me. We're changing things up a little bit for these final set of Q&As in that there's a decent number of sound design ones and it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to have claimed to have done everything because I didn't. Not even a little bit. That'd be nonsense. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be splitting out a little bit where in this first Q&A we're going to be answering a lot of the questions that Elizabeth's going to be better placed to answer because they're highly technical, require perfect wording

in the responses and just generally sound like a lot of work and if there's one thing I've learned over the years it's Elizabeth is the best person for me to give all the difficult work to because I'm rubbish at that. Oh thanks Alex. Sorry Alex are you saying that I'm not going to be able to talk about how I soundscaped everything? Oh no you can but we're just going to have to you know let people conclude whether anything that you or i say has any truth to it whatsoever what i did was i combined the tracks with high pass filter you're actually doing okay so far you're're not doing bad. The thing you've got to remember is if the spectrograph is too wet. Wet. It wasn't great.

Then the audio sound will be bad. You know what? In fairness, that wasn't complete gibberish. And I'll leave it at that. Okay, cool. I'm going to go ahead and jump into the questions at this point. As always, we have an enormous, just frankly ludicrous amount of questions.

We will get through whatever we can, but people need to be aware we aren't going to get through everything. It's just, it's not physically possible. So with that in mind, I'm going to start with a nice kind of fluffy one to get people going from Anonymous. Now that it's over, what will you miss most about your time working on Magnus?

I think what I will miss most is having a regular excuse to do a project with some really cool people, a lot of whom are very good friends of mine. I mean, I still see Alex a little bit, but fundamentally he's very busy and you know so am i and so is this but then like we're all very busy on all sorts of other stuff and like having that time every couple of weeks to just you know and it's only like 10-15 minutes catch up before you dive into the actual recording but it's a really nice way to hang out with really cool people for me I think it's yeah hanging out with people doing something very creative and because I just really you know once again I was a fan of the show so having something

that I was very passionate about during the process of it right so like finding those projects that you really just want to be involved in that you love on all the different levels is really quite a special thing to have so i think for me it's that so for me i think the thing i'll miss most about magnus is i've never felt such profound relief as when something comes out and it's good and i know that sounds odd that's not like a pure joy moment but it's the idea of you made the thing and it's out and then it's not what you feared. It actually is being received well. And it's just this little thing that's out in the world on its own, doing its own thing. That is a very specific experience that you can't really replicate anywhere else.

So I think I'm probably going to miss that the most. And fundamentally, like, it's really nice to have it complete that's the thing like this question implies like oh i bet you're really really really sad that it's over it sort of implies that a little bit and i'm honestly i'm not sad it's over because it's rare that you get the chance to complete like put a nice bow on something yeah so i struggle to put myself in the headspace of nostalgia because it's like look it happened it's like doing a big painting yeah yeah what do you miss most about doing the painting and i'm like not a lot look at it it's finished exactly yeah here's one i can dive into this is a lot more me rebecca what will you not miss about working on the show i would say getting up on a Saturday morning to record but given that I overslept by a half hour

today right before this exact recording I haven't been fully released from that one yet for me it's yeah it's the late nights it's the life tax it's what I call the blood debt that you pay to your creative project which is just you put the time in and you got to because otherwise it won't exist that is true for all shows but it's nice to have completed one and remove one blood debt from my long infernal contract i think for me it would be i think this would be true of any project that you worked on in this way but it's that anxiety of having done some work and you think it's good but then you've got to wait until you find out whether anybody else thinks that it's any good, right? I think there's always that thing, right? When you create something,

be it an individual thing or something that's in a group. I think at least the group thing, you've got more of a sense that it's good as you're going through it. Whereas when you're just doing something by yourself, you've got to have a lot of faith in yourself, I think, to create something and be, yeah, that was fantastic. It's going to be so well received.

You've always got that anxiety, I think. It must have been really rough for you at the very, very start of season five because we were just inventing the new style like no precedence no real rules beyond it's gotta be good that must have been very tough and an author who was pathologically unhelpful when you were asking questions just profoundly profoundly antagonistic in the stage directions i wasn't antagonistic i was unhelpful there's a difference it goes weird full stop i think

it's different there are different parts of it i think whenever i started to do a deviation where i'm like i haven't talked about this with alex but i'm gonna do this and i really hope that he's not gonna hate it because if not i've just burned a lot of hours doing this specific thing like even episode 200 where i'm like i'm gonna make a dark ambient album i really hope alex doesn't mind and you did but luckily it turns out alex is well into dark ambience as a thing so uh perfection oh no it's great mate now we've got a couple of fluffs out the way onto some more specific crunchy questions. From many, many people, how did you create the kissing sound effect in Mag 200?

So effectively, there is a way of doing it which helps mitigate a lot of problems, which is basically you snog your hand. You snog your hands on either end of a digital call. a digital call however i have a confession that i need to make here which is uh and i don't know how much of this is just myself and how much of this was already prefaced by elizabeth which is johnny i gotta confess i cut for if there was anything that wasn't my part of the kiss well i was gonna say i don't think i actually did the hand kiss i don't i don't recall you did a little one and it was all teeth and tongue, Johnny It was all teeth and tongue Oh well It was like you were eating a watermelon

It just didn't work Fair enough, I'll be honest, I have no memory of it From my perspective, I know it ended up being mostly just me snogging my hand But Elizabeth, I know that you were the poor unfortunate soul Who was forced to listen to us macking and then make it work i wasn't nico was the one who edited it oh is it nico my mistake my mistake yeah yeah yeah how did nico construct the kiss don't take away his vocal cut editing my friends that's he was the man in charge of that specific kiss noise in nico's defense i heard that and went that's actually all right. Question being, are kisses vocal?

Okay, it depends on the kiss, right? It's a very different kiss. It's like you've got your... You know what? I'm just going to do it down here. If you don't like specific noises, by the way, obviously stop listening. There's a difference between your gentle...

Yeah, because if you're kissing and you're like... There's a difference between your little gentle... You sort of... And your... Yeah, there's a difference between your little gentle, you sort of... And your... Yeah, there's a vocal kiss. That's a kiss that falls under the purview of the vocal cut. Like, those are different kisses. I like to think that the John Martin kiss,

it was a little bit rushed because the world was ending, so it might have been a little bit, you know, slightly less vocal in the cut, but don't hold me to that. But I've got to give my kudos to nico kisses is difficult to edit he picked a good one he did i think he picked the only good one but he did it because it wasn't too gross it wasn't graphically gross it was fine it was okay it was all right i will say that i'll always try and bury a kiss under an explosion when i can i did the stuff i really enjoyed which was what I think of as the wet work.

Go on. What's the wet work? What do you think the wet work is, Alex? We're currently on the topic of kissing, so I dread to ask. Your wet work. It's your classic wet work. Your murder, your gore, your stabbing, your punching. That's the things that I really like to do. I definitely think kissing should be added to the list of things that count as wet work. I mean, it could be. Oh, actually, yes. Next question's from Big Old Duck. The soundscaping in the finale is incredible. Is there a part of the episode's production that you're particularly proud of?

I gotta defer to Elizabeth on this one. Oh, okay. So the difficult bit was was the explosion and it wasn't the explosions it was trying to figure out how to do a tape squirrel that sounded reasonable because i struggled to find any samples of like just tapes making that kind of noise so i had like three tiny samples which were about three seconds each which i was like i'm going to have to loop a lot of this and move it around a lot so that was the difficult bit and then actually the statement bit was just a load of fun oh i really really like the soundscaping of that statement i really did well it was the only one where we got to do one which actually sounded nice yeah yeah yeah deliberately it was sounded nice whereas everything else'd had to do all season was like

grim and miserable and full of wet work. So it was really good for being able to do that. And I do have a great love of, there's a dark ambient artist, Pete Namluck, who has these beautiful albums which have those sort of animal sounds and then goes into like full on music. And I was just like, I'm going to channel him a little bit because I just love that primordial sounds that I'm not making all these sounds like I found these sounds I've collected them together I'm incorporating them and I tried to incorporate loads of the pre-existing things that we had worked with so that it had that flow of like this wasn't all new right so like we had sort of that coffin sound we had sounds from the buried all sort of things that came from different episodes and then i just

really enjoyed doing that it was really nice it wasn't super hard like some other bits and pieces had been so no loved it also remember elizabeth and i don't know if you know this but with most music the actual person putting together they don't make the sounds either they often will use external things like a guitar there's no such thing as guitars the instrument mythos is cute but it's not a real thing it's always just someone's voice that this has been warped enough times like the grand conspiracy i have to say i think you're underselling yourself as well on the finale which is it's not particularly sexy like statement to give but it's very difficult like the compression is very difficult to go cool haven't extended quite a conversation in the middle of a collapsing

death tower of doom that's on fire exploding and also magic it's really quite difficult to generate all of that and still be able to hear what the heck is going on and you did a really really good job with that because the thing is with the finale it's a really good visual image that i was like hey do this using only sound you nailed it we had to cheat that so much like certain elements are way quieter than they should be and others are way louder it works it comes together flawlessly yeah but that's really difficult but i do remember going nailed it just added all the explosions and then it's like okay i need to add tape squealing and i've done everything i'm like this is definitely

collapsing this is great and then i'm like need to add this tape stuff and then i started to add that and i'm like oh god it doesn't interact with the explosions anymore very well so i had to go through and adapt all the explosions again and i was like why did we have to have this whole tape thing the entire way through this entire like 200 episodes series yeah sorry to spring that on you all of that on top of sneaking in extra secrets we don't talk about the secrets alex we don't talk about the secrets, Alex. We don't talk about the secrets. I'm going to say it just to set people off.

There's secrets in 200. Well, there's secrets in another episode as well, but... There is secrets in another episode as well. There are two secrets that Elizabeth found a way to invent that I'm particularly impressed by. Good luck finding them. I'm going to bounce on to the next one from many people if you were to continue the series or do a spin-off in the same universe what would you have

in mind for it one of the things that's fun about this particular ending is can do a spin-off in whatever universe might be fun i would probably do something it'll probably have to be a prequel be fun. I would probably do something, it would probably have to be a prequel, and it would be, I think, entirely different characters. There are some very compelling characters that would be fun to dive into a little bit more, people like, oh, you know, Gertrude and Adelaide Decker and that whole, like, previous generation. The problem with that sort of sequel is that in the original series, with that sort of sequel is that in the original series and you know in most original series that have these sort of prequels the way that the past is dealt with is very deliberate gertrude and deco and salacer and all this sort of previous generation they are specifically written to be highlighting and contrasting and interacting with the actual story that's being told

when you start to expand that out into what has to stand as its own story then that whole aspect starts to collapse a little bit and in my eyes the prequel would never be able to be as good as it could be because it's hamstrung by all this stuff that's in the original series and the original series would be slightly lessened by the fact that there's all this additional stuff that has been built up that was not in mind when it was written so like i think a lot of the obvious spin- stuff, probably not particularly interesting to me. You also have the prequel problem, which is that everyone always says, do the prequels and then we'll know the whole story.

And it's like, no, because you need to understand to do a good prequel, you're also going to need a bunch of characters that existed before the prequel that you can use to compare and contrast again. It's a bottomless pit. There's not an end in that dive. And if you ever did get all the answers for all the characters, it's incredibly sterile it's incredibly boring it's just this like weird perfect artificial thing that feels incredibly fake but yeah i would probably i've had various thoughts but i think it would probably be

some alternate dimension thing also you know, everyone, let's do a series of Joshua Gillespie just not noticing creepy things. I think we came up with the perfect other series that we should have done for it. And it is the prequel. It's Gertrude, the Welsh version, played by Laurie, who the entire way through, we don't know why she sounds Welsh until the final episode where there's just some magic that happens, turns her into like rp english right which um turns her into my mum that's the entire most important part of that story arc is that we get that change but it's never explained until the last episode see i've been giving this a lot of thought and i figured out what will work as a spin-off in the same universe, even, which is tricky

because I'm like, normally that's really, really difficult to do. Prequels and sequels in the same universe can work. Spinoffs in the same universe that aren't hack is difficult. I want to do an intimate office comedy horror from the perspective of the other tenants in the building that the Magnus Archives is housed. They have no interaction with any of the people there but it's just a tight little office comedy going on where all this awful stuff keeps happening to the other tenants i think that would work yeah rose and kranz and gildan stern are sharing a

building with the magnus archives yeah absolutely i think that would work and i've been thinking how do you do same universe i think that would work oh i've been thinking how do you do same universe i think that would work oh actually thinking about it i also like i am fascinated actually in the world that we have left behind post magnus see i'm deliberately dodging giving that answer for the simple reason it's the one that i think has the actual most potential i largely want to mention it because i discovered a bunch of post post apocalypse memes on tumblr which are amazing they are in universe memes created by people who have come out of all the fear dimensions oh that's such a good idea and they are astounding they're so good there are accounts which are like in universe posting about someone's like oh yeah

i'm having some real problems with like my boyfriend because he was in space and he was contemplating the bigness of the universe but i was in a war dimension i got shot a lot and it's really driving a wedge between us because he's like oh no mine was really scary and i was in a war dimension i got shot a lot and it's really driving a wedge between us because he's like oh no mine was really scary and i was like how many times did you explode okay yeah great stuff you've got to link me to that i wasn't aware of this as a thing there's a few posts i've seen and oh they're great i'm gonna go on then to next question from marie which is what was the most challenging aspect of creating the series full stop just across the whole lot what was the most challenging aspect the constant forward roll of it all and

it's something that I didn't really notice until I started doing a lot of other writing because like you're writing a book or you're writing most projects you reach the end and you're like no this doesn't really this detail isn't quite gel or i'm not feeling so good about this in relation to x or y that was earlier in the series you can go back and change it you can tweak it like it is an entire thing that you can change the earlier bits to suit the later bits this sort of rolling production you can't go back once an episode is out there it is now in the world it is now locked in place so there is very much this feeling of like you are running in front of a

boulder desperately trying to build little bits of scaffolding or little bits of pathway to try and guide this increasing momentum thing towards quite a narrow goal and like you knew what the goal was going to be the first like right from the start but actually trying to manage that momentum and figure out oh which pathways you need to trim you're still steering an avalanche yeah you're steering an avalanche the whole time and it's exhilarating in a lot of ways, also really difficult. You're always ending up with things where like, you're like, well, this particular thing, I'm not 100% on that ending for, I know, this storyline or this character, but you're like, there's no other way to do this based on what has gone before, based on the momentum that's coming towards it. If we dive too deep into this one one then it's

going to like completely divert everything and the path of the story isn't going to go right and that's not even taking into account production changes and production concerns like i don't know a massive pandemic that further cut off a lot of the tools that you have to actually guide that avalanche and the burden only gets bigger elizabeth what do you reckon oh the most challenging bit is well we just made a commitment really when i say we really alex made a commitment to the audience that he was going to um deliver so you've got that triangle of quality time and money and we really tried to hit quality as well as um as much as possible just do everything just be all

things to all people at all times is that's the goal right so my thing is when i think about it as a production crew there's only one person that if they had disappeared you know if johnny had disappeared we would have maybe it had to have gotten another writer to come in or something like that but it wouldn't be the same series right if something had happened to johnny that might have been the end of the Magnus archives. My thing is that if something had happened to Alex, we would have finished it, but we would have finished it about three years from now. I mean, yeah, but you'd have finished it on your terms, Elizabeth.

And then people would have maybe drifted off because it was taking so long. And it's a good thing. We really committed to delivering quite a few episodes in a set period of time. And I love that we did it, but it does mean that you have that boulder, that constant drive to, like, get things done. And the reflection time is shorter.

But, I mean, I wouldn't have changed it just to finish the series in three years' time. I mean, to follow on, like, from what you you're saying i can materially state this is it this is the maximum amount that you can make of this type within this time period and i can say that definitively if you think you can do more than this in the same period you cannot it cannot be done it's not a case of more resources more money more people or anything like there is a material limit and i pretty much think we hit it i really don't know how we could have squeezed any more out i really don't and if you think that you should try to do the same amount yourself

don't save yourself don't don't do it i'm gonna move on then to uh crunchy sfx question oh literally crunchy question from ben phantom what sound was the grossest to make interesting question though that's what was the grossest to make not what is the grossest sound i mean clearly the grossest sound is kissing i think that's well established so i didn't make that many sounds myself so what i guess the question really is is what was maybe the grossest sound to construct inside the story? Oh, it's at 194, where there's an old man who's like in someone's shoulder. Oh God, yeah. It's probably pretty hard to pick up on actually, but there's lots of little mouthy sounds and like

him coming out and sort of crawling towards the couch. And that was constructed out of, yeah, literal mouth sounds. There's an eye noise of someone who's pushing their eyeball and has recorded that. There's, you know, the classic melon hits and other gore things like celery breaks and all those. But I remember the eye sound of someone. Yeah, it's a sort of squishy sound that you can kind of hear, which sort of flows through. I think it's all very subtle for if you're listening but that's the one where I was like oh yeah this is this is quite a collection of weird noises and then of course the the surgery hospital was um lots of also gore sounds but then you would just add those cutting noises and then suddenly it sounds very very graphic but of course they're completely unrelated sound effects but

yeah no my favorite is probably the recording of someone pushing the rival that's amazing mine's gonna get a little bit of a real answer here like a little less of like a soft one for me where normally i joke around is because we have to make quite a lot of use of like other people's recorded foley and creative commons sound effects and so on because of that production cycle we talk about there's a few elements in magnus where it's like, you know, human suffering or a thing based in a hospital or whatever, okay, where you have to do a troll, you know, you have to look for the effects that are going to match. And it tends to be one of three things, especially on like, if you're looking for human suffering as a sound effect, it tends to be a combination of one, oh no, ah,

ooh, ah, which is dire. And and that's it just takes ages to troll through that you tend to get some people who are doing a really amazing work and you're like you should not be doing this as a creative commons you should just go off and do this professionally this is you're very good and then there's the last type which is where it's like with very little warning you'll go here's a recording of my actual brain surgery. And you're like, oh no, oh no. And I never use the last type, like ever, but it's still like, oh, and you stumble on it. Yeah, that's pretty, a visceral response, I think, from me. That's one of those things, actually, because I remember trying to,

you'd think screams would be easy to get, right? Like, because I remember early on we were trying to, but getting screams and also getting people suffering noises. There are a couple of good sound effects that I managed to source from a few different spots. But one of the ones that I was very careful around as well was like every so often we had a young child. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when I was looking for those i was like okay so i do want like the sound of a quite a young child here i think that's for peers which is like 189 but i want to make sure that the description has context around it like you know

this is my son that he's just about to be fed and i also looked for that sound where they the kid had been crying a little bit but then they they're being soothed, right? So I found it very, like, I just couldn't pick a sample where it was, they're just crying, they sound miserable. And then that's the end of the sample. I was like, oh, God. For those, I was like, okay, so I will find one where you can hear that they're just finishing up crying. That's the other thing. Because sometimes with babies, you can tell that they've been soothed but they're doing the the wind down yeah i do remember sort of with

children particularly i was like okay so i just i can't bear the sound if i don't know it ends well in earlier seasons as well like i did a little more i again i backed off a lot on season five i would often use a child happy cry out of context because with the right tweaking a kid going followed by it's that christmas present i wanted like it's close enough that you can make it work so like the unknowing a lot of the yells are very happy children there you go there's a chunk where there's like you know lots of people crying oh in the background a chunk of it's just kids being really happy because it's like, oh, a recording of Christmas Day or whatever.

Because, yeah, I really struggled with that, I think, as a thing. I think the most disgusting sound is whenever Alex talks. Boom. Got him. Fair play. With that, I'm going to bounce on to the next question because that's just a sick burn, yo. You're so hip, Alex.

Thank you. I'm down with the ute. Yeah. Rosemary Cat asks, how do you go about soundscaping the more subtle scenes? So rather than quote, things get weird, unquote, basically, how do you do subtle? And how would you suggest someone go about learning that process? Good question. I have a useful tip to get started on the learning, which I thoroughly recommend, and no one ever seems to do

find some feature films that you like find some tv shows less so unless they're really high end slap on a pair of really good headphones plug them into your tv or whatever you're using to watch them and then watch films with headphones on to listen to the sound design. And when you start actually critically evaluating what you're hearing, you can very quickly break it down very quickly. And you can also go, hang on a minute, that's Foley, because they're walking, but they're walking like 300 feet away and there's no camera and I can hear the crunch, crunch, crunch. Oh, look, it's slightly out of sync.

Like it will destroy films forever. But you asked how to, you know, get better at the editing side. That is a thing that I actively did, actively encourage others to do, just proper headphone listening to really high end sort of film and listen, properly listen to the sound and deconstruct it.

You will learn a huge amount for free very quickly. It's very similar to video in that what you capture dictates very much whether it's going to be any good. If you film something and your mise-en-scene is terrible, there's no amount of editing that's going to get around that. And for sound design for SFX, you need to have the right samples because if you've got a sample of someone doing something very close in your story they're very far away it gets harder and harder to change that you can do some EQ and then of course the opposite is also true where if they're far away you can never get rid of that

echo in a room so you really need to select what you're starting with because it just gets very hard to manipulate I mean you can manipulate sounds you can make them sound a bit more further away you obviously can add echo and reverb but removing those kind of things that already exist, it's impossible. For season five, you know, there was a lot of layering of sounds because we don't have so much bass, but there's lots of also like subtlety, right? So like, for example, the last hospital scene, which is in a reception. Okay, so that wasn't recorded in a hospital.

Any of the hospitals scenes that we have, there's only, I think, three samples that actually come from a reception. Okay, so that wasn't recorded in a hospital. Any of the hospitals scenes that we have, there's only, I think, three samples that actually come from a hospital. One is me walking in a hospital. One is a blood pressure monitor. And I think one is a latex gloves, which they said was recorded in a hospital. But that was another thing. I kind of tried to avoid recordings from hospitals because there is literally a brain surgery sample where I'm like, I don't know where this comes from. And I tend to probably overlay it. So I just go for as much sound. And then Alex can just be like, I don't like all these sounds, Liz.

It's never that. It's just that, Liz, I need you to understand that we've hit the material limits of the human ear. Yeah. I'll add in the bugs. The human ear cannot discern 7,000 layers. It'll have to be 6,999. Look, so, you know, like with the hospital reception, it was like, well, what's the

classic thing is a certain type of phone, office phone noise that you'll get in hospitals. They tend to have a lot of reverb. You'll get people shuffling about. You'll get quiet murmuring. You'll get a vending machine because almost all reception areas for all lobby areas might have that. You could, if you wanted to, depending on your storytelling, you could have distant ambulance that comes close if they've got the A&E nearby, your people rushing by, you've got trolley noises. So you've just got to, I think, think of all the things that could be in that environment and which ones sell that the best. And for us am I going to need that sound later on I only wanted to use phone sounds as limited as possible because if you just keep adding phone

sounds and suddenly all your environments sound like the same and for example even with Helen I was like she's in that hospital I'm going to put her in a lift because we've always got doors opening like I am getting a lift in because that's just a different sound for people to kind of enjoy that Helen might just you know pop out of the elevator rather than out of like a squeaky door again that would be what I'd say is just trying to think of those environments and then yeah we just we definitely go for a style where we have lots of like little cloth noises and lots of and very squeaky chairs like probably more squeaky than your normal chair but like you know you just kind of need to double up what happens in the real world to kind

of sell a scene i think so i think you and i saw eye to eye on one thing as well which we kind of take implicitly but other people might benefit from hearing which is yours might be slightly different but we still visualize the scene which is for me if i'm soundscaping a scene i'll read the script see what's happening blah blah and then i will sit i will literally sit close my eyes and play that film in my head and then i will plonk myself in it as if i was in a vr environment and go right if i was sat in this scene watching it play out what would i be hearing and that's how i generate my list of layers that i would expect i don't know if it's quite the same for you, but I know that you work quite visually as well. No, I definitely need to see what I'm making.

So even like my vision of Annabelle's web, I have a very specific vision of what that is. And I've made sounds where I'm like, that goes with that. And Johnny had a different vision as well. Like Johnny's script was like giant spiders in the background, you know, like in this distance crawl around.

And I'm like, they're not going to be heard. So like, they'll spiders in the background you know like in the distance crawl around and i'm like they're not going to be heard so like they'll be in the film no i disagree don't sell yourself short elizabeth those 50 layers of purely silent giant spiders crawling around in the background was some of your best work i could hear them so i had my own sort of vision of what was going on and like i remember like anil came along and was like, what is this tape noise? And I described it so specific. And then Alex was like, probably just like, allow people to imagine their own thing, which is really what I'm going for as well. But I personally needed to have something where I was like, oh, that reminds me of this thing over here. And it doesn't bother me that people interpret it another way, as long as it's still a big giant web in that case.

They just need to know that they're wrong and that you are the one with the definitive vision. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yes. When the film is made, those things will be in there and they'll be super creepy. Have you not heard about this critical concept, Death of the Soundscaper? It's the hot new thing. I'm going to jump on to the next one, a bit of a fluffier one. Submerge Lambent asks, In the vein of the Magnus Archives ending up as a grim souffle what unfortunate desserts would you

allocate to each of the other individual seasons which one's the bloody tiramisu so let's go through them in order so you got season one right yeah so season one's a comparatively plain, subtle dessert with a little bit of a kick at the end. It's a cookie. No. No, it's ice cream. It's a Victoria sponge cake with shark teeth. I'm with Elizabeth. I'm with Elizabeth.

Okay, no, you're right. You eat the sponge cake and then you realise that there's teeth in the... It's a Victoria tooth cake. That's vile. I love it. That. That. Okay, okay. it's a victoria tooth cake that's vile i love it that that okay okay i'm gonna say a victoria sponge tooth uh because a sponge tooth sounds just a lot nastier okay understood season one is a victoria sponge tooth okay season two season two so we got not sasha kicking around

it's a lot more about sort of uh so you got that paranoia vibe so it's it's got an odd flavor to it i think it's like a a mousse or a sorbet or something like that like i'm with you on something a little bit more liquid a little bit more moussey but it's something that has like a surprise citrus running through it or something i think it's going to be a histam bloomthal thing where it's like you think you're eating a cake but actually it's fish sauce uh no i think it's some sort of evil creme brulee okay here we go then so what it sounds like to me is that season two is a creme br of evil creme brulee Okay here we go then So what it sounds like to me is that season two is a creme brulee A creme brulee sleigh

But then it turns out that it's not a creme brulee It's like I don't know a type of cheese that looks exactly like a creme brulee Including the container or something Thin layer of creme brulee gravy underneath There it is there it is season two okay This isn't a horror dessert this is just a bad dining experience wouldn't that be the worst though like you're going to have your dessert you're like oh this is going to be so delicious and then it's just gravy people enjoyed season two like you know yeah you just stop before you hit the gravy okay season three i think this is a dessert that has to have some spice running

through it like i'm thinking chocolate and chili kind of vibe you know those nailed it things where it's like someone wants to make the beautiful like cookie monster and then actually you know they just make this horrifying thing i feel like it's got that vibe to it what are you saying about season three it's the interior so the exterior looks nice once again the interior like it's a rainbow cake where it just all turns like to worms in the center it's got to have a big messy finish as well it can't be something you can eat easily it's got to be something that makes a mess so you know sometimes in funfairs you'll find those stalls that sell you like just a big bag of tiny ring donuts that they've just fried up oh i love those yeah they're great but

there's always like way too many of them no there's never enough they're a lot more filling you're like oh these are tiny and then you're like oh no i've eaten too many donuts oh you didn't go for the double xl extreme you never go for the double xl extreme and they've always got like a little bit of cinnamon on them that but they scream oh i've got it okay yeah i like donut bag if it's a screaming donut bag the very last donut at the bottom there was way too much cinnamon in the bag like way way too much so that the last donut in the bag is just effectively the cinnamon challenge in a donut that is it though that is what actually happens yeah i'm going to accept donuts of season three okay season four i have a hot take on here it is the tiny little mint because you've got just

a little bit more space which is then followed by another effing great dessert that you didn't know was coming i'll be honest season four for me has to be the tiramisu i love tiramisu and it's got layers you know season four has layers but it also is over dense so it's a tiramisu that didn't quite come out right and it's a little bit heavy it's an evil tiramisu obviously what we think is it's just lightly radioactive or something i'm aware i say tiramisu and a lot of people say tiramisu i don't care i. I need you to know, I really appreciate you acknowledging that because I'm literally fiddling with my cable in an attempt to not engage with that at all. I know. It's just how I say that word.

Elizabeth, save us. I've got a boring tiramisu. What's missing from this? What edge does it need for season four? Well, season four is knowledge. Knowledge and lonely. So knowledge and lonely is what comes up. So what's the loneliest thing you can eat?

Oh, it's got to be have some ice cream in there. Like a tiramisu with an entire tub of ice cream on top. You've just had the worst day. You just add. I'm just going to have some ice cream. I'm sorry, it's a classic trope, but the thing where you're like, I'll just have some ice cream. It's the Bridget Jones Diary ice cream tub, but it's full of tiramisu instead.

Or it's just a normal size like family tiramisu that's like oh this will serve eight and you're just having to eat it alone because no one else turned up okay here you go yeah that i'm with i'm with okay with that or like a trifle you know because you get the trifle you're like this is i mean i'll just have a little bit with my flatmates or something and then it's like they've actually gone away and you're eating an entire trifle. And it's a lot of custard. To be fair, tiramisu is just a trifle, but good. So what season four is, is it's just a family-decised dessert eaten alone.

That's what season four is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Because it is quite dense and there's a lot in it. Keeps going. You know what? I'm legitimately proud with how well we got through that. Those are some good answers. Right, I'm going to bounce on to the next one, but I respect your creative visions there. legitimately proud with how well we got through that those are some good answers right i'm gonna

bounce on to the next one but i respect your creative visions there okay bit of a uh more crunchy one but nice straightforward answers from jerry's oedipus complex did you choose specific episodes or clips for the cacophony of tapes in mag 197 or did you just keep layering any old stuff until it sounded right i chose specific episodes i think there were one or two that i requested but then you were like are there any others that you want i was like i got crazy it's also worth factoring in that we have had issues with raw and vocals from like earlier seasons that just technically recoverable but buried in the depths of like semi-destroyed hard drives and very difficult to recover.

So Elizabeth's range of what she was able to pick from is quite narrow in certain ways. It wasn't actually so bad because you just do like a noise reduction on the tape sound effect. The problem is more the music, but once you brought the volume down to like minus 24, actually the music wasn't so bad either. That's good to know. What I used for Adam Biles biles area it was 12 episodes from season 1 10 episodes from season 2 12 episodes from season 3 and 15 episodes from season 4 oh my gosh elizabeth that's a whole season it's worth of episodes of manually selected audio

with specific time codes each processor they can be blended into it this is a really good example of invisible work that makes it work but no one would have anticipated but it's done in a way where it's like okay so there's one episode which is web and then the rest of them are all the other fears so they're all episodes which are for certain fears so there is extinction only has three references and then everything else is more like five or six. The total amount of samples I think is six times eight. So that's like 42, right? She does maths. Yeah. So it's something like 42 plus one, which is the web one. 48. You underestimated yourself.

Because I thought if people ever want to know, it will matter to them that it's fully covers all the different fairs, right? So that each fear is literally being played as per what the web is talking about right that it's drawing the different fears along i guess the other thing is to cover off the other because i think someone did ask on discord once about other things to do with the tape so the tape that rewinds for the episode before that is grifter's bone i think i use grifter's bone because like it literally an episode about being discord and there's lots of tape rewinding, which is just Grifter's Bone. So for the episode before that where Annabelle shatters the camera,

that's 160 runs in reverse. And then for the end of 200, for the explosion, that's 160 running fast to the point where you hear the like really harsh static sound and that's the end of 160 where the world is being destroyed or whatever you want to call it transformed because i thought that was a good episode to use for around the web because it was obviously the one that transformed the world so the answer is yes specific episodes were used good luck decoding it all there's a lot in there but it's all law correct which is the important thing which i quite like elizabeth traditionally has been much more hot and accurate on the law

than i have by a vast margin okay nice specific one at least for this one from jack in season five was the sfx of destroying avatar so the smiting sounds was that meant to sound like old sci-fi serials like flash gordon was that something that johnny specifically requested or was that something that we production wise just decided on our own everything up to this point in the series had been deliberately quite very similitudinous insofar as it was either let's make it sound like a thing or let's make it sound like a tape couple of exceptions like the unknowing but for the most part it was quite analog i guess and i wanted the smiting to have a bit of a fresh sound to it that people

wouldn't have heard before also people forget that if you go back and listen to previous seasons there's a rule in magnus which is when the world is normal it's in mono so that means it's a single flat plane and it's all on the one place the second that things are not normal so when the world has gone wrong specifically the unknowing and post-apocalypse and so on it splits into full-blown stereo so while they're in their bubble in the cabin it's in mono but once they head out into the world it goes into stereo and if you listen on headphones you'll spot suddenly there's panning and all that kind of thing so for the smiting as well we had a lot more scope with which to work within i confess i did kind of deliberately try to make it a little bit flash gordon-y but not in a way that people go

oh how kitsch but more a little just so it's a little bit more distinct but what i would say is although i generated the initial sort of smite suite which is six or seven layers of various types of static i definitely handed it over to you elizabeth to start making actually work in the season later so i strongly suspect it would have been modified to suit as time went on well yes because we obviously changed it if it wasn't a smite because we had about like five smites right we murderized five baddies about that and we made someone an avatar right in the ant episode and that was like okay so you need to have the build which sounds the smitey kind of sound like the build-up of john's power so i have two concepts it's like there's what's John's building power

and then the lens, which is doing the smiting. If the lens isn't focusing, which is two sounds in my brain, then you need something else to add that. It was adapted to suit if we were doing something different like that or pulling down Elias slash Jonah from the ceiling. It certainly wasn't something

that I specifically requested. Like, by this point, if I ever did, I long since stopped trying to anticipate what the sound might actually be like and just described what was happening in-universe. So it's something like, oh, they are torn apart or, you know, they are unmade. I forget the exact phrasing.

In your defense, the stage directions that you gave for smiting were actually quite useful. Oh, yeah. Good work, Johnny. Okay, we're on our last two questions. Last two questions now. All right, let's do it. From basically everyone, what was the most difficult domain in season five to soundscape? So I think the first hospital. I remember there was some painful moments there. I think the

domains themselves, like if you're talking about just environmental sounds, like, oh, this is a prison. Those aren't so tricky. It's more the character action that is the hard stuff. So I mean, the vast 195, I had gotten all the sound of like people kind of swimming to do the underwater noise. Then I processed it into an MP3 to check how it sound. And all of that turned into sounding like plastic. Like it just, the MP3 just crushed it all. So I had to go back and redo the underwater sounds because like some of them were fine,

but a lot of them weren't. So I was like, okay, so these ones here sound fine. So I need to go back, do my sample so that they sound like that because sometimes yeah they're going from the project to even a web file can change how much you're getting out of it and then going to mp3 like yeah I remember the peers episode that was trying to get the sounds of like a really burly parliament that the UK has right those like jeers so it tends to be more like certain elements in each episode would be the difficult bits yeah the underwater one just was frustrating there but actually as an episode I really love it and then um that first hospital just because there was a lot of figuring out how

I was going to do those scenes with the therapist there was just a lot of different transitions between different scenes and you know Helen coming in and this that and the other thing and a hug slash kiss even was in there I think again I had a lot less on the soundscaping side I struggled a lot this season with and it's not even their fault Frank Voss because of pandemic and everyone's recording in different spaces and so on, it just so happens that the space that they are able to record in is particularly sort of reverberant, quite resonant, which as a result meant that you can take the vocals to a certain point. Like Elizabeth was saying earlier, you can't magic stuff away or add extra stuff that isn't there beyond a certain limit so there was a certain

amount of season five where it's like some of those scenes are a lot more interior than they were written there's a couple of them where it's like basira and the archivist are like out overlooking the sort of meat plant or whatever and it's like that's in a cave they're huddled in a cave or something because otherwise it doesn't work that's where they are now there was a lot of executive decision making on my end where characters were just teleported into similar but not quite identical spaces sometimes just to get that right and it's no one's fault it's just the realities of you know recording in this situation but that was very frustrating because

elizabeth had provided something that was literally flawless. And then I'd go, Elizabeth, I'm going to warn you now. I'm going to make your work actively worse in order to mask something that's not your fault. So sorry, I found that quite difficult because, you know, that's real work and you're making it actively a little bit muddier. That hurts. That hurts physically to do. I think my favorite thing that I found quite funny was

Johnny writing in the Epoch script, distant, horrible seagulls. Me working to be like, okay, I got distant, horrible seagulls. And then Alex getting it and going, it sounds like the beach. It's gone. It's like, okay, bye.

Yeah, sorry, seagulls. No, you get one or two. In that case, then the last question the last last question of this q a there will be another one after this but it's not going to be as sfx focused is from mr gay shoes if you could change one thing about the magnus archives what would you change i know i'd change dead easy gertrude wasn't shot three times. I was right. Done. Done. It's one of those things that like, if I started changing it,

there's so much that would be like tweaked and changed and reshuffled. And there's so thing I can't think of like a single specific thing that I'm like, oh, I wish that this was specifically different. If you pull up threads, the whole thing can just unravel into just, it stops being a tapestry and starts being a pile of thread again. It's very much like, oh, well, I wish that I'd done more with this character. But if I'd done more with that character, then that would have completely unbalanced this whole arc.

And that's fine, actually, because thinking about that arc didn't really have as much of a narrative landing as I'd like so what i'd like to do is to take that arc and integrate with and suddenly the whole structure is being revised so there's certainly within the writing of magnus itself there's plenty of stuff that i would change but i don't think there's a like a single specific thing that is the one thing I would alter. Yeah, it's a difficult question because you're like, the most important thing was having something entertaining that ended well. And I think we did that.

Like there's very few perfect works of art, right? And now there's one more. Exactly. And now there's one. There's little things that like potentially I would go tweak i like to think of her as knife wife but because i really thought that alex was just gonna throw that out because he said no knife wives i would have made that a little bit tidier and made that a little bit nicer but at the same time all sorts of little things that you could say you might want to tweak or you might want to revisit but i think the overall thing is that I guess in some ways

I was always a bit sad about Tim dying, but I was also kind of happy because Mike left the studio. So I wouldn't have to compete with like levelling him. Mike is a nightmare to level with other people in the room. Yeah, he's fine by himself. The moment you have other people, he's all over their mics. I still remember recording with him in a corridor with like five of us squeezed in there everyone just in front of mike to dampen his resounding bass and him holding like three different cushions yeah i think actually

the recordings were frank it would have been amazing if we had been able to get those recordings really perfect because i think that was something that stressed us out. So without that stress, that would have been pretty sweet. I have to agree with that one. I think we could have, it's one of the only things across the whole series when I'm like, in any other timeframe, I think we could have made it materially

just that little bit better. And there's not many points throughout the whole thing where we can say that, but I feel like that about that. That sounds like a negative. The real takeaway here is, is it perfect? perfect no would we want to change some things there are many things that we could improve on would it still exist at the other end probably not well this is the thing like to get that perfect show it would have been coming out three or four years later yeah it's 60 hours it's like 600 000 words it's fine it's fine are there 100 000 of those words that i'd like to be

different yeah johnny it's fine we'll take 2015 to 2020 to draft the scripts for magnus archives then 2020 to 25 we'll redraft 2025 to 2030 we'll do vocals and then by 2050 you've got the perfect show i think going for the almost perfect and out so that people can enjoy it is still the better option, I'll be honest. Oh, I disagree. I disagree. The Magnus Archives sequel coming May 2167. The original podcast vaporware.

On that point, I think that we're done on this Q&A. There will be more, but it's going to be a lot more story focused, I think. I think we'll free you from this ongoing Q&A based purgatory, Elizabeth. Godspeed, Liz. Free yourself whilst you still can. Run free. Hooray.

Tell our story. Live your life. Run out into the streets and then be like, oh, that's right. I have to stay indoors. Thanks for your time, Elizabeth. We'll see everyone soon. Bye, everyone. Bye-bye. This episode is distributed by Rusty Quill and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 international license. Thanks for listening. Agnes Archives, letting you know about our sponsor, Audible. For fans of heart-racing,

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