Creator notes look at the process involved in creating each episode, along with my thoughts on how things turned out. Additional context for those interested.
Initially I was writing this as an article for the now defunct 1UP Pod website. I had a lot of thoughts on The Callisto Protocol rooted in my deep disappointment in that game, as it had been a while since a game failed to meet my hopes and expectations as drastically as this one. I wanted to do something even if I wasn’t covering it as a review – I got rejected for a review key, but that’s pretty understandable, the site was very new and many of my old PR contacts from my Digital Fix days had moved on to new places.
I wanted to frame the article around examples of how to do these same ideas the right way – which turned out to be the way Dead Space did them, every single time.
At some point, I thought the podcast needed extra content so I thought about adapting it for that. It would’ve followed the format of previous 1UP Pod audio reviews, where me and a host talked things through. But the sheer volume of stuff I needed to break down made that seem unfeasible. I would be talking almost the entire time anyway, so I changed the format to a solo review. I had only done one previous solo review – a review of the pixel art graphic adventure Backbone – and while I liked the review, I didn’t feel as enamoured with the recording itself. It just felt like too much talking, which is a funny complaint to level at a podcast.
I had the analysis all down for this comparison piece, it came to me very easily. It had been quite a while since I really felt engaged by a piece of analysis that I’d written, I used to do it all the time when I wrote for The Digital Fix’s gaming section (of which I was the last editor before the section got shuttered by new management). That alone told me I was doing something fun here, so I really wanted to do something with it. But it just didn’t feel very compelling for a long form audio review. I was happy with the meat of the writing but it was asking a lot of the listener to sit through half an hour of one guy just talking at them. I concede that I don’t always have the most gripping of voices, it’s very dry and blunt, thanks to my Barrovian DNA. I needed something to break up the words, something to liven up the audience a little. I wanted to do something different, but I wasn’t sure what.
The question of ‘how’ bugged me for a few days, I can’t pretend inspiration hit me in a moment of crisis. I was wandering in a fog of formless ideas, most of which involved smoke & mirrors. The idea that stuck the longest was the use of background music during the episode, something to create a mood. From there, I thought about how I could better create a mood, an atmosphere, and the idea of using ambient sound – to make it sound like I was on a spaceship – pushed the music aside. Now being on a spaceship, I started to ask myself what exactly would happen if I was on a haunted spaceship trying to record a podcast. A story started taking shape from there.
It made a lot of sense that I would somehow settle on this idea. I’ve always been a fan of audio plays. When I was a little kid, I used to listen to He-Man Meets The Beast, a cassette tape that came with a small illustrated book. A lot of it was a standard audio book but it used music and sound effects to build ambience. This would comfort me while I fell asleep. Later in life, I obsessively listened to the Judge Dredd audio adaptations that used to air on BBC Radio 1 when I was a teenager. I later bought all of these on cassette and listened to them on long car drives. Most recently, I have absolutely adored the all-star cast Sandman dramas produced for Audible. The medium requires some mental investment from the audience because they need to use their imaginations to picture these scenarios, there’s an opportunity for some degree of immersion here. It’s an engaging experience rather than a purely passive one.
It felt like that was a good way to get people to take on my critiques and analysis, while bringing a bit of themselves to the listen. They’d get to picture the corridors of the spaceship, they’d imagine what the monsters looked like. I liked that.
I built the script around my article in about a day, trimmed down the analysis where necessary, and recorded it a few days later when I had spare time. I edited it together in a few hours here and there in the days that followed. Despite being the first episode and the first time I’d ever produced something like this, it was weirdly one of the easiest episodes of the series to put together. I found everything I needed and knew how to sufficiently edit other assets to reach the sounds I wanted. It was a pretty simple concept, to be fair. I have made things difficult for myself in the episodes that follow, as my ambition grew and got more unruly.
I really enjoyed the production and the quality of my criticisim/analysis. I had so much fun with the idea that it made me want to keep doing it before I’d even posted the first episode. Honestly, even if no one said anything about it, or no one even listened, I probably would’ve kept doing it because it was that much fun.