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I hope it's okay that I cross-post from the Pimp Your Podcast Megathread, but the podcast my girlfriend and I are working on fits into this niche. The Spoony Bard's Aural Theatre I'm a big fan of old fashioned radio dramas and other things that rely on audio as its only medium. I live in Oregon and in Portland they have this radio show called Livewire; it's kind of just a variety show, but I've been in the audience many times. I grew up listening to the Firesign Theatre and that sort of thing. Anyway, I work a graveyard custodial job at OSU and thus I have eight hours a night to kill with nothing else to do, so I devour podcasts like it was air. I sometimes like to listen to audiobooks of books I've already read; something about revisiting those books via another medium is really appealing to me. Anyway, one night I was listening to Watch Out For Fireballs, a podcast in which two guys talk about a single game for like ninety minutes. They don't just talk about the game; they walk each other through every step of the way, and I was listening to their three-part episode of Final Fantasy VII and I remembered how wonderful that game was when I was like twelve or whatever. I never played it since, but I remembered loving it and hearing the WOFF guys talk about it made me appreciate the story all over again. So then it gave me this idea. A lot of video games have a really great story, many rival or even best the best works of literature or film. But it's its own niche medium, sort of -- I know that more people play video games than ever now, but I feel like a huge chunk of those people are Call of Duty or Counterstrike people, the kind of people that play games for the action and not a very long, drawn-out story. I was thinking back to old games, how so much story was told through these really simple graphics, tinny synthesized sounds, and odd, often terrible translations. I thought it would be really neat to listen to a kind of radio drama / audiobook retelling of these classic games. I got on the phone with my girlfriend. She's a dramaturg with two Masters degrees in Shakespearean theatre. Her job primarily is to do research and make sure the production of whatever they're doing is accurate. She also re-adapts scripts to fit a specific need. For instance, recently she adapted the old Greek play Lisistrata to fit something like a 60s Motown feel. She's also a huge geek and is all kinds of excited to work on this project with me. She's acted and directed and has a lot of experience in theatre. I don't. I like theatre and I have experienced much of it, but I've never acted. She's also never done any technical work when it comes to sound and stuff. I've only ever edited sound on a small scale for old Flash animations I used to do. But we gave it a shot. She picked the game Final Fantasy IV because she has a lot of nostalgia for it. I only remembered a little bit of it, but I recalled liking it. The most important thing about it was that it had a long story that could be narrated and had no voice actors so as that we could do that ourselves. And oh, of course, we named our podcast after a weird translation from the game. That's the gist of it. We intend to do many games, but right now we're doing Final Fantasy IV. We're using the translation that was found in the Playstation 1 "Chronicles" release as opposed to the original US release (called "Final Fantasy II" here because we didn't get the original II or III) because that version is all kinds of weird and so badly translated that, while entertaining, it would completely diminish the story, which is really good. The only dialogue we're adding is the narration, provided by Girlfriend. Otherwise, all the lines spoken are exactly as they were written in-game. We're using all the music and sound effects from the game, too. We've only got one episode up so far. It's forty-five minutes long. We are going to try to release it every other week. The next episode should be out on the 23rd of this month. It takes a stupid amount of editing to get this working, and like I said, neither of us have any experience with sound editing or podcasting. If anyone here listens to it, please leave us some feedback and tell your friends! We want to develop a listener base -- but more importantly, we want this to be competent. There will be some things that must develop with time; for instance, it's only her and I doing all the work. Later on we hope to bring in some other voice actors, but we're both new to this town and don't know many people, and the people we do know sure aren't familiar with Final Fantasy IV. She already has a lot of connections with the local theatre; perhaps one day we can perform an entire game live with live foley work and many actors and who knows. Well, that's a dream, anyway. Maybe one day. Anyway, here's the link: http://thespoonybardpodcast.com/ Thanks, guys. credburn fucked around with this message at 10:39 on Aug 14, 2016 |
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Aug 14, 2016 10:37
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SamuraiFoochs posted:I love the idea of this a LOT, but you guys really need a bigger cast. I know you said you're working on it and that's understandable, but yeah. If you're going to be acting out entire games in this style having a full (or at least moderately-sized) cast would go a huge way. The initial idea for this was not actually a dramatization, but rather an audiobook. Most audiobooks are done by a single person doing all the voice work, narration, men and women, and that's fine. The idea is to convey the game's story...but we want this to evolve into a real radio drama-esque production and I would love to broaden our cast. Maybe for our next game we'll enlist some goons to fill in the other characters.
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Aug 16, 2016 06:56
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We want it to become like a radio drama. Maybe in a few months we can muster the funds to compensate real actors helping out, upgrade our equipment, get a real thing going. For now, it's just me and Girlfriend.
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Aug 16, 2016 09:33
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