Backing Into the Podcast!
Hey there Wayward guys, gals and non-binary pals,
Hope you are staying safe physically and mentally during these UNPRECEDENTED times. (After this is done, I don’t think we need to use that word ever again).
While it’s been hard to focus with the state of the world, it’s been nice to have the light at the end of the tunnel of Wayward Guide to keep us going. Since the video has been mostly out of our hands at this point (save for a fun title sequence idea we’re working on, but more on that later) and in the capable hands of our sound designers and colorist, we’ve continued to focus on the podcast.
We’ve had such a blast revisiting the world of Connor Creek. Having clarified the form and structure, we’ve been spending our time getting into the weeds fleshing out the dialogue. And it’s been so much fun having the opportunity to enrich our characters with more bits/scenes/backstory while we play in this Wayward sandbox a littler longer.
As we've been working through the podcast though, we keep coming back to a favorite phrase that we picked up during production: we’ll just back into it!
It’s a way of saying we’ll works backwards from the end, and certain decisions will just make themselves. There are so many variables to factor in during production, that sometimes you just have to let one go for the sake of moving the whole project forward and preventing delay. Ideally you’d book the perfect location, set the schedule, and then shoot! Easy peasy! But we found repeatedly for various reasons, we’d have to “back into” a location. Because the budget is what it is, we can only spend so much, which means we have to work around people’s schedules, which means we have to find a location that must work for these specific dates. Then we’ve “backed into” the location! The choice has been made, partially because it’s what it has to be.
As we’ve refined the podcast scripts, we find ourselves “backing into” a lot of story points. The filmed show at this point is immovable. So everything that happens in the podcast has to work with and around that. We can’t contradict ourselves!
That being said, we've really enjoyed the challenge of this narrative puzzle! We've gotten excited about placing certain scenes in the podcast right before or right after scenes you see in the filmed show. And gotten creative about mapping out when Artemis and Paul might have gotten these additional sound bites. Sometimes it works out perfectly, and sometimes we realized that we’ve backed ourselves into a corner. We ended up keeping a timeline document just to double check we weren’t contradicting what we already see. When do Artemis and Paul meet a character? Which story day is it currently? Where would X character be physically at this point? The details need to line up! But they don’t always… Luckily, the town is so kooky that we're working off a fairly heightened set of circumstances, so we've been able to write ourselves out of these corners in some pretty fun ways. Combing over these podcast scripts has allowed us chances to add in more jokes from characters we love. And it’s been made easier to write for them, as our amazing cast has already brought these characters to life.
At the moment, all the scripts are written and we’re in the process now of polishing the final few episodes. In addition to the content of the scripts, we’ve locked in a release schedule for the podcast, relative to the video. The first podcast episode will come out the week before the first video. From then on, each week we’ll release a video episode earlier in the week and a podcast episode later. And we’ve added an episode! The Wayward Guide podcast will end up being 11 episodes total: 1 prologue, 9 main episodes, and 1 epilogue. We couldn’t pass up spending a little more time in Connor Creek!
Podcast Production
With so many less moving pieces than the actual filming process of Wayward Guide, we were really looking forward to prepping production on the podcast this year! "It’ll be easy," we thought!
Enter: The Rona™, to ratchet up the difficulty level.
By early March when things began to take a turn, we already had several preproduction meetings with our sound designers and set a potential timeline for recording the podcast. A lot of that schedule has been thrown out the window, unfortunately, and we’ve had to regroup and figure out the most responsible way to proceed. Once government guidelines will allow us to gather to execute a semblance of our previous plans, we want to make sure that we’re not only being as safe as possible but that all the performers and technicians involved feel comfortable with the measures we are taking. So we’re approaching it cautiously, from a place of assuming no one will feel comfortable recording. That way, we can open a dialogue to hear what sort of measures we can take to (hopefully) allow people to feel like it’s a manageable amount of risk.
TCB and Ears Up on a recent Zoom Pre-Prod Meeting
Luckily with this audio production (compared to video), it’ll be way easier to make this happen. Due to the nature of the scripts and the flexibility of audio recording, very rarely will any actors have to be recorded together at the same time. Some scenes will be outside, where it will be easy to maintain distance and ventilation. And when we are in the Ears Up studio, we have the ability to set up with large amounts of distance between performers and the engineer. Additionally, we're planning on having only one engineer, and even possibly only one of the three of us (if any) on site, with have the rest of the team connected to a live studio feed from home.
Many actors have home studio setups for voice over work, so that may be an option for some recordings as well. And thankfully, good portions of the audio isn’t supposed to sound “studio perfect” (like it's captured from a handheld recorder or Paul's portable shotgun mic) so we have some flexibility there as well. There are also parts we’ve written to be voicemails which will both be easier to record (potentially actually on people’s phones) and add authenticity to the listening experience.
Though this is a completely unexpected hurdle, we feel extremely luckily that this part of the project seems tailor-made to thrive under these UNPRECEDENTED circumstances. And with the rising popularity of Zoom, we'll have an easier time coordinating some sort of (virtual) watch party with the cast to get them back into them mindsets of these characters before we record them for the podcast!
Until next time,
TCB
