Here’s what’s been going on…

Searcher & Stallion was featured on the Sonic Society radio show in December:
SonicSociety.org

Kendall’s “Dreams and Wings” soundtrack CD is now available online:
Dreams and Wings Soundtrack on eMusic

I did an interview with Fred Greenhalgh at RadioDramaRevival:
RadioDramaRevival.com

S&S “Dreams and Wings” is available for Itunes RSS feed at Podiobooks.com:
PodioBooks.com

Garth is wrapping up his “Stallion fights a Dragon” story.

Brad is wrapping up his story “The Seductress”.

I Can’t wait to get back into the studio!

Scott H

One line to retake in Ep 4
Rebuild SFX for final scenes in Ep 4
Need to re-tweak mix levels in eps 1-4 (bah)
So we’re …..you know……. 99.99999% done with “Dreams and Wings”

I can’t express enough how I want this show done and “in the can”. (In the old fashioned days when audio tape or film was used, when a project was finished, the reel of tape would be placed in tinny metal dinner plate sized short metal container or “can”.) I suppose a modern version would be “I want the show done and on the thumb drive!” This setback was like a baseball bat to the face.

Kendall has spent a while remixing the music he created for the 4 episodes of “Dreams and Wings” into a coherent 90 minute piece. Last night Kendall and I were hosting an electronic music show On KRCL ( twitter.com\showwithnoname ) and we played the full 90 minutes of score music over the radio. If you’d like a copy, then send an email to getssmusic@gmail.com
(of course I don’t see why we couldn’t make that music available in the forums)

Kendall is digging through the thousands of instruments in “Omnisphere” so we can find the couple of dozen “self dynamic” instruments that can be used to singlehandedly create music for a whole scene by basically holding down the middle C key on the keyboard. If we can find enough of these instruments (and I think we are), then show production can be improved by a factor of 10. It will open up a whole new world for us.

Off to work on the next story.

Scott H

So we’re …..you know……. 99.99999% done with “Dreams and Wings”

Download Dreams & Wings Ep 1 (near final version) or listen below:

Download Dreams & Wings Ep 2 (near final version) or listen below:

Download Dreams & Wings Ep 3 (near final version) or listen below:

Download Dreams & Wings Ep 4 (near final version) or listen below:

Eps 1 and 2 are pretty much done. Eps 3 and 4 for are waiting for the acted bits to be plugged in.

Thanks to Mike the webmaster for straightening up the members only audio access area in the forums so its easier for folks to find and download the older shows as well as this newer story.

If you take the time to download these beta versions of shows, then please give us feedback about the things you like/don’t like/ or make sense/don’t make sense. Is this enjoyable? Are you eager to hear what happens in the next S&S story?

Scott H

‘Searcher’ was performed by Paul Kiernan
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0452593/

‘Stallion’ was performed by Micheal Todd Behrens
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1909655/

Both of these fellows are SLAC people
http://www.saltlakeactingcompany.org/

The craft table was excellent. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be able to insert this work into the final versions of the show. They say with movie editing that they never ‘finish’ editing, but rather the movie ‘escapes’ to go to the premier. But seriously, we’re running out of things to fix.

Scott Howard

We think we have talent lined up for the acted bits, and we should be recording at Woodshar studio as soon as we can get in.
www.woodshar.com

Allright!!!!! We’re definitely moving to another web host so you folks can actually download and listen to shows without interruption. And yes, I’ll post the latest versions!

Garth and I have been talking about recording “truck with engine off coasting down dirt road and skidding around corners”. Wish us luck.

Scott H

After Garth’s hard drive crash, it took us a while to get all 4 eps back in order. (turned out the grease between the chip and the heatsink and dried out, which caused overheating, which caused shutdown, which caused the Raid0 to rebuild, which caused some sound files to be cut into 64kb segments and shuffled like a deck a cards.) The server is running normally again. (ooo but it sounds like the seeds of a story idea)

For the lack of a nail a horseshoe was lost
For the lack of the horseshoe, the horse fell
For the lack of a horse, a rider was lost
For the lack of a rider, a message was lost
For the lack of a message, a battle was lost
For the lack of a battle, the war was lost
For the lack of the war, the kingdom was lost
All for the lack of a nail.

Anyway…

I now have 4 fresh CD’s that I get to listen to in my car. We had my mom as “suit computer voice”. She has a great ‘motherly tone’ but you could hear that the technobabble was tripping her up and it was destroying the suspension of disbelief. So we recorded Madelyn Gilbert instead and plugged that in and I think its a good addition to the show. Garth has found some additional ways to plug in comments from the suit that help illuminate the story that I hadn’t thought of. Garth has some cool sound effects sequences in ep 4 that I enjoy listening to over and over.

We’re close enough to the end that I’m not going to post these beta versions.
(You can get them at the party)

Garth makes the shows in 5.1 surround sound and he has a groovy cool tool that automatically mixes it down to a decent stereo mix. So we HAVE a 5.1 mix, but no plans in distributing it at this time.

Haven’t heard pricing from Metropolispost so I’m back to looking at a studio in West Valley to get down the 4 or 5 acted parts.

When we first started making these shows in the early 90’s, the only avenue for listening was ‘live radio on Sunday night’ which meant a person only had 1 chance to listen and understand what’s going on. this meant that everything had to be overemphasized. Today’s world of IPOD’s, P2P, and super large hard drives means that people can easily rewind and review. So now, I expect people to go back and listen closer to sections. The end result is that I am adamant about not putting in the little 30 second blurb at the beginning of each ep that says “Last time on Searcher and Stallion…….” That worked fine when I was a kid watching “the Six Million Dollar Man”, but now I figure people will just go back and listen to the whole last episode.

Hehehe speaking of which, It was Kendall’s idea that the title sequence of S&S was patterned after the greatest title sequence of all time “The six million dollar man”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39co0zKbQAQ

And in ep 2 of “Dreams and Wings” when the Searcher shifts from jogging fast to “doubletime” in my mind I envision Searcher running like Steve Austin.

With the Army’s “Future Warrior 2010 program”, the concept of soldiers wearing futuristic super powered suits is not that far off. In Salt Lake City is a company called Sarcos that is working on a supersuit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ4J69EEpu4
(Can you imagine a 4′10 gal lifting a 2000 lb bomb over her head and attaching it to the underside of a bomber on an aircraft carrier!)
As soon as some one figures out how to provide the insatiable power such a suit requires………………….

As the 3 of us keep reminding ourselves, we need to get this show done while its still science fiction, and not science history.

Scott Howard

So Saturday the 26th instead of remixing all 4 eps, Me and G discovered that we needed to finish cleaning up the re-read of ep1 narration. So we spent that whole night just putting Ep 1 back together. I like the new read much better.

Then Garths server lost a drive in the array and he was offline for Sat the 2nd while the array rebuilt, so I visited with Kendall about his pitch for Story 2 of the new series. The pitch was good. Lots of cool scenes tied together with an engaging plotline. It needed bigger doses of S&S so its off to re-write. Plenty of Characters, so tons of acted scenes.

For Story 2 as an experiment, I’m thinking about producing it “chinese fire drill style”. Meaning 1 month per episode instead of 1 year per episode. But how do you ask? A combination of “not refining to the umpteenth degree” and simply taking gaps out of the schedule.

This upcoming week, I’m looking forward to seeing a billing proposal from Brent at Metropolis concerning the acted bits in eps 1-4 of “Dreams and Wings”. Metropols Integrated Media is an awesome facility and they’ve been around a long time. More info at www.metropolispost.com

Scott Howard

Music
Kendall and I have been playing around with Ableton Live 7 to create music backgrounds for the next story. Ableton has a neat feature in that you can make musical elements and then stack them like building blocks to make songs. Its simple to move the blocks around so as to make the music match the action. its very quick and fluid. I’m hoping that this will help to decrease music production time.

Actors
We can record narration reads ourselves, but we need a better facility to handle the actors for the acted scenes. We’ve had conversations with a small number of Salt Lake recording studios looking for the right location to record. We’re looking at the early part of August to record Searcher, Stallion, Suit, Dead guy, Operator, Newscaster, and optional mysterious voices 1 and 2. (Sorry kids, I can’t afford christmas this year)

Story 1
This Saturday I get to do a final review on Narration, SFX and Music for Eps 1,2,3,4 so we can make beta mixes that the actors can review so they can put their performance into context.
Is that light I see at the end of the tunnel for Story 1……Can it actually be……

Sales (hysterical laugh)
We have discovered a role model to follow with regards to distribution (not format) here:
www.twilightzoneradio.com
They’re syndicated on about 100 stations. (even ksl on sunday nights at 8pm)
You can download a 40 minute episode for like $2 bucks or you can buy a 10 cd set for $20 bucks.
They have produced like 50 episodes. (Hey scott didn’t you produce like 72 episodes of series 1………Don’t remind me)
The only difference between them and us is……….Well they have a known product (we don’t), they have famous actors (we don’t), and they have 50 eps in the can (we almost have 4 eps done)

Once “Dreams and Wings” is done, I’ll mail a CD to 2500 radio $tations, a bunch of new$paper$, media magazine$, web$ites, Blog$ites, Podcast $ites, anyone that would find us intere$ting.

I have a plot arc that contains 110 stories. I have outlines for 75 of the stories. If I had the resources I have at least 10 stories from series 1 that could be quickly revamped for the new series 2 format. At four 30 minute episodes per story, I’m sitting on like 440 episodes or 220 hours of content. At our current rate of production, Garth and Kendall and Me will be like 900 years old before we’re through. Well let’s hope that “DW” is received well enough to grease the wheels of production.

Scott Howard

Up until this week, to make sound level changes in one of the 50 tracks, we had to use the mouse to move virtual sliders on the LCD Monitor in the SAW STUDIO software. You could only move one virtual slider at a time and its not very intuitive.

Garth picked up a Mackie MCU Pro 9 channel mixing board. It plugs into his pc with a USB cable and interfaces with his digital editing software. The mixing board sliders have motors in them so when you move the virtual sliders in the software, the real world sliders move too. (and vice versa). Way cool. They used to call this a HUI interface (”huey”).

So now all 50 virtual tracks in the software boil down to 3 real world sliders on the new mixing board for final mix. On Saturday night I was able to do a mix for the 30 minute ep 4 in about 45 minutes and all I had to do was drive 3 sliders (Narration/Dialogue stem, Music stem, and SFX stem) in real time. In the past, we’d spend hours driving for a bit, stop, change a db level from minus 8 to minus 6 at a certain spot, then backup and re-listen again. Drive for a little while longer, stop, change the level from -6 back to -8, start up again.

Now I basically leave the narration level at 0 and one hand drives the Music volume and the other hand drives the SFX volume and I just listen and make level adjustments at the same time (like the old fashioned analog days). The difference is that in the analog days of the old Series 1, I had to do a 1/2 hour performance in a single take to get all the volumes right for the CD’s, effects on cassette tape, voice on Reel or Dat, and flying in Kendall’s synthesizers. With the MCU and Digital Editing Software, its the best of both worlds

Anyway its frikken cool and I can’t wait to get this story wrapped up and released to the public for real.