ALEX
Hi and welcome to a Making Of special of The Magnus Archives. Obviously, I’m Alex Newall, director, and I play Martin, and I have with me today…
ANIL
Anil Godigamuwe, Community Manager.
BEN
Ben Meredith. I play Elias Bouchard and I do a bit of admin on the feeds.
MARTYN
Martyn Pratt. I’m the CTO and I do all of the tech stuff. I’m not Martin the character.
[LAUGHTER]
MIKE
And I’m Mike LeBeau. I play Tim and I’m also the lead editor.
ALEX
So. What we thought we’d do is help describe for people what the making-of consists of. Because we talk a lot about the writing, and we sometimes talk about the recording and, like, the performance side a lot, but we don’t tend to dive much into the actual nuts and bolts, the mechanics of what it takes to take what is effectively a script on a page and turn that into the show that you know and love. Something that appears in your feed when you want it to and so on.
So with that in mind, we thought we’d go through sort of point by point and explain how it is that we make these shows. So starting at the thing that everyone does know, obviously, is: the script. We’re gonna go ahead and assume that people know that scripts have to be written, that Jonny writes the scripts, and we are presented with a script. This is what will be recorded. And with that we are able to start doing things like the logistics and the planning, the recording dates, casting, and so on. So I’m not gonna dive into that.
Similarly, we do casting next. I’m not gonna dive too hard into that because we have answered that in the Q&A. Suffice it to say, we get the script, we cast the roles based on people who we think would fit the part, we get them to send in recordings, go, “Oh, yeah, that sounds about right”, and then we cast the roles, and then we get into the recordings.
And it’s from here that we’re gonna start digging a bit more into it. So with that in mind, Mike and Ben, both of you have sort of taken part now in quite a few recordings both as Tim and Elias. Would you be able to walk us through what from your perspective a sort of standard recording looks like?
BEN
Well, I mean, what–we’ve now got the studio, so we’re all sat round a table.
ALEX
Yes.
BEN
Which is great.
MIKE
This is, yeah, it’s much better than it was before.
BEN
Yeah. We did the recording today, and we all got to sit down. We weren’t all huddled in Martin’s hallway, surrounded by a duvet that keeps falling over, or underneath a yurt made of, uh…
MARTYN
(Simultaneous) Duvets. A lot of duvets.
MIKE
(Simultaneous) A yurt made of blankets, yeah. (laughing)
MARTYN
A lot of duvets in pretty early days.
BEN
Yeah. (Mike laughs) Still very warm.
MIKE
Yeah.
BEN
But effectively, I guess we go through the script and we make any edits that need to be made because of how people speak and, like, ideas that are had during… which, you know, doesn’t happen too much, to be honest.
MIKE
And then we’ll do a readthrough, right, so we’ll have a look through the script and then we’ll read it to each other just in normal speaking voices and then in character, to make sure that if there are any points of contention, we can iron those out.
ALEX
Or typos, that’s a common one.
MIKE
Typos is another thing, yeah. It’s unbelievable just how much a typo can throw you off when you’re reading through a script.
BEN
Oh yeah, completely ruins it. There’s lots of, I mean, we did one today where we changed something and then changed it back, and every single time I got to that line I just went, “Ablurbbbb…” (Mike chuckles)
ALEX
So, once we’ve done the readthrough, what we do is we get everyone allocated to each of their individual mikes and we set all of the mikes running simultaneously – as we are now, actually. So once we’ve done that, we start doing these takes. We’ll do one take or two take–if it’s a normal statement, I’d say normally what we do is we do it in a single take, but we stop and start, so we’ll record a paragraph, stop, maybe re-record that paragraph or carry on. And then work our way through in a choppy way, rather than doing one huge whole episode, stop and then reset a whole episode again. Because we tried that and it didn’t really work as a way of functioning, really.
ANIL
Yeah, I mean podcasting is not like radio.
ALEX
No.
ANIL
It, you have to operate in a completely different fashion.
ALEX
Yeah, absolutely.
MIKE
And to be fair, I mean, having gone through this process a few times, I mean, all the guys who are in the cast, like, now we know each other’s styles a lot better, so we can start doing fewer takes every time we come in. And we know how we’re gonna react to things, we know how we work with each other, so that’s, it’s sped up the process quite considerably.
ALEX
Yeah, absolutely. So, the only time that that really changes is when we get a guest in. So part of being a guest is that we have to sit them down and we brief them on… obviously, who their character is, and sometimes if they’re gonna be a recurring character we have to walk them through, you know, what kind of arc they’re gonna have…
BEN
Give them all the spoilers.
ALEX
Give them all of the spoilers and then force them to, uh, never ever…
ANIL
Well, as far as Jonny has written them.
[LAUGHTER]
ALEX
…and then force them never ever to reveal what they’ve learnt here until it’s already common knowledge, et cetera. And… yeah. The recordings, generally speaking, we can record up to I’d say about 4 episodes in a day? More than that is unusual, but it can happen. But we try to record about once every two weeks and we’ll record about 4 episodes so that we can build up a backlog nice and quickly. Guest recordings can slow that down a little bit just because, you know, people need to get used to the setup, and simultaneously we’ve not worked with them before, so we try and arrange things in a way that suits them. But, skipping ahead, we’ll say that we’ve got the recording. Recording is done.
BEN
(Deadpan) Yaaaay.
MIKE
Whooo!
BEN
(Deadpan) Everyone was really good.
MIKE
Celebrate.
ALEX
Everyone was brilliant.
MIKE
(Unconvincingly) We’ve all done a really… good… job.
BEN
Yes.
ANIL
Lots and lots of raw audio. (Mike laughs)
ALEX
Now, that’s the thing, is whilst we have an audio recording, let’s say a 20-minute episode can run at 40 minutes, 50 minutes of raw audio sometimes, and that’s not actually a bad recording. That can be just a good recording with lots and lots of retakes because we want to get it perfect. And with that in mind, we then save that and make it available to our team of editors, of which Mike was lead editor for the entirety of Season 2 of Magnus.
MIKE
Yeah.
ALEX
So with that in mind, walk us through. You have received a large amount of raw audio in your lap. How do you then turn that into a fully-fledged episode that we can pass to Martyn for release?
MIKE
Well, the first part of the process is to get a pan and put it onto a medium heat. And then usually it cooks quite well on one side before you flip it over onto the other for about, you know, after about 30 seconds or so. That’s if you want it pink in the middle.
MARTYN
You start on the left side or the right side?
MIKE
Gotta start with the right side first. I find that…
ANIL
So no audio tartare then.
MIKE
No, not in this case. I mean, we haven’t got the budget for that yet, but we’re working towards that, Anil, as you know, in the Patreon stretch goals. That’s kind of where we’re at.
ALEX
What an excellent example of the kind of thing that can turn up in raw audio that you need to remove (laughter) in order to get a fully-fledged episode out of the end of it.
MIKE
So Alex will usually pass me the episodes in bulk, and we do this through online drives because that’s just the easiest way for everyone to be able to access the audio as and when they need it. Before we were able to bring on other editors and when I was–back in the beginning of Season 2, it was mostly Alex and I who were doing all of the editing together, and so I would do the first pass. So I would look through the audio, find the silence gap that we’d prepared at the beginning, use that for background noise removal.
Once we’ve done that, we clean the audio a little bit using a couple of tricks that we have up our sleeve and make sure that each bit of the audio is sounding nice and leveled, and we make sure we take out any top-end or bottom-end noise, and also we work on the actual waveform itself, we normalise it and make sure that it’s all kind of playing at a standard volume level and there’s nothing there that’ll aggravate or annoy any of our listeners. And then once that’s done, we start cutting it together.
ALEX
Yes. So what’s worth bearing in mind in this is that when you’re editing an episode, we actually split it into… sort of three parts, I’d say, really, which is: vocal cut is you take your raw audio and you get the vocals. You get what you want there, you get it laid out correctly, you get the timings right, and you get it sounding like someone’s speaking it. You know, without retakes, et cetera.
MIKE
Yeah.
ALEX
The second layer, the – again, I’ll pass to Mike when we go into a bit more detail – is we put the music in. We put in ambiances and soundscaping and all of that. And then the last stage is the sort of mastering which is, realistically it’s just going through and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking until it’s just right. But, let’s say that we’ve got our vocal cut together. What’s the next step?
MIKE
Well, once everyone’s sounding as beautiful as they can possibly do, Alex…
ALEX
Or horribly but in a good way.
MIKE
Horribly but in a good way also. We have some music tracks which are produced by our in-house music producer, Sam Sam the Music Man, and he…
BEN
Is that the official title? (laughter)
ALEX
Sam Sam the Music Man.
MIKE
(laughing) Official title. Yeah, yeah. He’s developed some tracks specifically for Season 2. So in Season 1, we had some tracks that were developed for Season 1. But in Season 2 we wanted to kind of give it a little bit of a different feel, we wanted something that was a bit more dynamic, and so we worked on producing a set of, a series of tracks that worked together no matter what order you put them in, which is quite clever on his part.
ALEX
Yeah, so they’re all, like, for anyone who knows their music they’re all in compatible keys, they’re all in compatible time signatures, and that kind of thing so you can layer them up as many times as you want, and they will all still fit together like a jigsaw.
MIKE
So some are more bass-y, some are more treble-y, and there are some that are kind of middling, so you’ve got your upper, middle, and bass, and then you just sort of use your ear, really, at the key points to try and make sure that the music isn’t overbearing but is also trying to emphasize the specific parts of the story that it needs to. So if a monster’s chasing you, chuck in a little bit of treble, or depending on the type of monster maybe some bass, and then you work it through all the way through until the key crux of the episode.
ALEX
To quote Sam Sam the Music Man: good music is invisible, in that it’s there, and if it was missing you’d notice, but when it is there you’re not really paying attention to it. Because if you’re paying attention to it, there’s too much going on.
MIKE
And that’s the hardest part.
ALEX
It’s really, yeah.
MIKE
That’s the hardest part about editing the music for Magnus. Because getting that, striking that balance between things being not quite visible in terms of you’re not focusing on the music but being present, that’s the trick. And we only really know that we’ve done that once we go through the mastering stage, where that’s sort of where I pass it back to Alex and say, “Hey what do you think of this?”
ALEX
The thing to bear in mind as well is that at the start it was just myself and Mike, and now we have, we’ve had a dedicated team working on it, we’ve had someone working on vocals, we’ve had someone working on music, and it’s all been a lot more complex but a lot more streamlined as well. And it gets passed eventually to myself for mastering.
What mastering consists of is… it’s always easiest when the director is mastering because the director knows what it should sound like. Ideally before they’ve heard the episode. You know, you have a clear idea of what it should sound like, what bits should be silent, what bits should have a loud noise to them, what should have soundscaping, what shouldn’t. Basically, what we’ll do is we’ll go through and we’ll tweak it, one little tweak here, one little tweak there, but through every single second. And when I’m saying a tweak, I’m talking… sometimes we’ll shift a vocal performance 1/10th of a second. I’ve spent 10, 20 minutes before getting that 10th of a second right because that edit’s just not quite sitting right.
And then one thing that I’ve been tending to do as well is I’ll do the soundscaping, and that’s one that can take a long time as well. So with that, the way that we’ve been functioning is that we’ll take either some foley, rarely, but normally we’ll make use of Creative Commons available foley that other people have recorded. We tidy it up, we basically pass it in some ways through all of the stages that you would a normal edit, and then we layer them together until you’ve built your soundscape. So that sort of falls under mastering at the moment.
But long story short, once all that’s been assembled, we have a finished file, let’s say, that we then export as an MP3. And that is our package product. That is our “we have an episode here”. And at that point gets handed to Martyn and Ben between the two of them, really, because Ben, you handle the uploading and so on and Martyn sort of set up all the infrastructure. So between the two of you, can you walk through what happens? We have just handed and put on the sort of servers and the drives ready, a finished Magnus episode on time and, and, and wonderfully in time for release, et cetera.
BEN
That’s a lie and you know it.
[LAUGHTER]
ALEX
So what happens next?
BEN
Well, I dunno, Martyn, do you want to start off with the, sort of the foundation of everything?
MARTYN
Well, yeah, first of all there’s the initial setup of our systems. We’ve gone through different ways of hosting audio.
ALEX
We’ve moved around a lot.
MARTYN
Yes. And there’s the between stages where you have to take all of the audio previously and move it to the new system.
ALEX
Yes.
MARTYN
So we’ve done that now at least three times.
ALEX
So what are those systems doing?
MARTYN
So they’re doing a number of things. One of the things they’re doing is hosting an RSS feed, which is what everyone is subscribed to. So that’s just a big list of a format called XML that just has a big list of episodes. And they’re also hosting the audio files themselves, so that’s just a file itself on the internet.
ALEX
So your RSS feed is more like, for computers it’s a written set of directions leading you to the files.
BEN
It is in fact a directory.
ALEX
Yeah.
MARTYN
Yes. So both of those are actually hosted on Acast and it makes our website–it means that our website is a lot lighter and does very little, essentially, and just points and says, “Oh yeah, the RSS feed? Go to Acast, they know all about that.”
ALEX
So pretty much the heart of everything comes down to that RSS feed, which is, yeah, that set of directions. So from the website, if you play something on the website, actually what you’re doing is you’re clicking a tool that just goes to that directory, goes, “Oh, this is where the file is,” and then plays it for you. So that’s pretty much the core of what everything holds around.
BEN
Well it’s whatever, like, regardless of what podcast player you’re using, what the podcast player is doing is checking the RSS feed and downloading the episode when the RSS feed says, “It’s here!”
ALEX
And that’s the same for all podcasts. Like, all podcasts that are running, as far as I’m aware, that’s the only way that you can really do podcasts.
MARTYN
iTunes is so tied to the format that I think it’s basically, like, if you, when you are hosting a podcast it’s an iTunes podcast and that’s just the format that you use. Even if you’re not necessarily listening to it on iTunes.
ALEX
If there’s one piece of advice for anyone who’s wanting to do a podcast is, it is so much easier to use one of the big, like, systems. So LibSyn’s the most common one because it does it all for you and you can put it on there and it will handle a lot of the sort of admin of getting your feeds added to other places.
MARTYN
Or you could do it yourself like we did! Figure it all out! (Ben laughs)
ALEX
It took ages! But we know how it works now, which is good.
ANIL
Well the other thing is also, if we are not on your podcast feed of preference or platform of preference, do let us know. We’re…
ALEX
Oh, yeah.
ANIL
…new ones pop up all the time and we don’t necessarily know them all. And it also helps, if there is a particular platform you want, just tell us and we’ll add it. It’s not…
MIKE
But Anil, the audience are saying, “But Anil, how do we get in touch with you?”
[CHUCKLES]
ANIL
Well, you can get in touch with us on Twitter @therustyquill, or email us, mail@rustyquill.com. We have a Facebook page and we also do scour various other forms of social media. But it is probably easiest to find us on Twitter or email.
ALEX
Genuinely speaking, though, if you’re having technical issues with a system, let us know. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’d say the majority of the time it is, it’s not an issue with the way that we’re running things. Which is great, but…
MARTYN
Try turning it off and on again.
[LAUGHTER]
ALEX
But we do need to know. So do let us know if you’re running into problems. And…
ANIL
Yeah. Tweet me and I will basically drop Martyn a line and basically bug him until he either gives me an answer or the problem is fixed.
MARTYN
It all comes back to me.
ALEX
There is one exception which I’m gonna address now and we have addressed previously is Google Play. Google Play is not currently available in the UK and for reasons that make no sense to anyone, when you make your RSS feed it has to be tied to a real-world country, basically. We are tied to the UK because we make things in the UK. And what that means is that Google Play is not available for us. When it is available, we will be available on there. But who knows when that will happen, so…
ANIL
Similarly with Spotify, we are working on that one.
ALEX
Sure. That’s sort of our infrastructure, so that’s the sort of nitty-gritty nuts and bolts of how things go together. Ben. You’re really, at the moment, the person that I’m handing these finished files to. What do you do with it when you’re handed a finished file?
BEN
Uh, yeah, so it usually turns up in Google Drive and then I have to upload it to two places. One of that’s the Patreon, which is patreon.com/rustyquill, and the other one is Acast. So Acast have their own back-end. And basically what I’ve got to do is upload both of those things, make sure the adverts appear in the right place, so–although, if you want them without adverts, come to the Patreon ‘cause it has no adverts in it. So that’s good.
ALEX
That’s the reason for it.
BEN
That is in fact the reason for it. And basically just make sure I’ve got the title right, and that I have credited–or, well, Alex keeps a big Google doc with all of the credits and stuff, so who…
ALEX
So because we’re using Creative Commons effects, yeah, part of that is that almost always they ask for attribution, which is where you say, “This person gave me this effect, this is where I can get it,” and if you actually look in the show notes for any Magnus episode, any time we’ve used an SFX there’s always either a direct link to the thing or we’ll mention that it’s previously credited artists – ‘cause shocker, some people are good at it – and we use them so much that we just have a massive list that you can just go look at via the show notes.
BEN
Yeah, and I just compile the show notes for that, and, yeah, credit anyone who needs crediting, make sure that all the patrons for that week are in, and then just basically scheduling it.
ALEX
What happens next, Anil? It’s sat there, it is ready to go.
ANIL
Assuming you have subscribed, it should be waiting for you when you get up or when you get home, depending on if you’re in the US. I will then do a shout-out on social media and then I’ll go on the forums and you will get a dedicated thread to the episode. After that, I’ll then give it a couple hours and throughout the day I will then do social media sweeps, just to keep an eye on what people are saying, see if there are any problems with the episode. Then check the reddit, we do have a dedicated subreddit for Magnus at /r/themagnusarchives, and just follow the conversations. See if people liked the episode, see what they are talking about it. Have they delved into the conspiracies and the red string behind it?
MARTYN
Would definitely you recommend listen to the episode first then go on the forum about it.
ANIL
Yes.
MIKE
(Laughs) Yeah, that is a good idea.
ANIL
So yeah. See what the discussions on the forums and the subreddit are going, and then also like to do a sweep checking what the Tumblr community are saying about it.
MARTYN
Proper shout-out to the Tumblr community…
ANIL
Yeah!
MIKE
Yeah.
MARTYN
…and what they are doing with…
ANIL
Like, the amount…
MIKE
(Simultaneous) With everything that we’re doing, yeah, yeah.
BEN
(Simultaneous) The fanart, and the fanart and stories and…
ANIL
(Simultaneous) Yeah. The fanart, the stories, and I will say here, those of you who have listened to the Q&A will have heard Jonny say that he doesn’t read any of the fanfic or anything like that…
ALEX
And myself, I don’t either.
ANIL
…and neither does Alex.
ALEX
No one who’s generating story reads the fanfics.
BEN
But we get to!
MIKE
Yaaaay!
ANIL
I will say that I will. I’m really interested to see what you guys have come up with. The fanart is amazing.
ALEX
And the fanart I do watch.
ANIL
Like, we’re really really interested to see how you guys have interpreted the episode.
ALEX
One thing that I’ll mention at this point as well is we are always on the hunt for visual artists, and we’re always on the hunt for new people to get involved. If you’ve done some fanart and you think it’s great, yeah, like, if you want to just release it, like, in Tumblr and keep it out of our sight that’s absolutely fine, but similarly, if you want us to see it, send it us, and if you’re sending us stuff that’s great, we will come and we will message you and be like, “That’s really good.”
MARTYN
(Laughing) We won’t come to your house.
[LAUGHTER]
ALEX
We won’t come to your…
BEN
And I think it is also important to say, like, yeah, if you’re doing fanart and you’re not a professional artist and you’re not doing it, like, you’re doing it ‘cause you want to do it and not as a job thing, also send it to us because it’s really cool.
ANIL
Yeah!
ALEX
Oh, yeah.
BEN
Like, I saw some Elias fanart I think the first time with the brutal, sounds of extended–oh. Yeah.
BEN & ANIL
(Simultaneous) Sounds of extended brutal pipe murder.
ANIL
Which…
MIKE
Hashtag that.
ANIL
…comes from the transcript, which–and again, transcripts you can find on our Patreon.
ALEX
So, walk us through the transcripts. As in very very quickly, other things that we have to do regularly. So we have to generate transcripts and other Patreon bonus material and stuff like that.
ANIL
Patreon content is something else that I also produce. So, again, those of you who have listened to the Q&A will also know that I am the writer for Martin’s poetry.
ALEX
Sure.
ANIL
And that gets released every so often on the Patreon feed. I also do the transcripts and we release those for free on the Patreon feed, both in a normal format and in an accessible format. I will say one thing, Alex did mention talking about communities not wishing necessarily everything to be shown. If you are on Tumblr or even on Twitter and you don’t want us to look at or feedback on stuff that you have produced, we do have a tag for Do Not Archive. So you can use that, and you can be sure that this is not getting back to the creators at all.
ALEX
Yeah. And I think that’s basically it. I mean, we can’t dive into every single little thing because that will take days.
MIKE
Hours, yeah. Weeks.
ALEX
Like, so much time.
MIKE
Maybe months.
ANIL
But it’s all content, Alex!
ALEX
Yeah.
BEN
Delicious content.
MIKE
But I haven’t told you about my…
ANIL
The fans want to hear this!
MIKE
I haven’t told you about my flambé-d episodes yet.
[CHUCKLES]
ALEX
But I think we’ll wrap up there. So that was a very very quick walkthrough of how we go from script to what arrives in your podcatcher of choice. As we’ve said this before and we’ll say it again, if you want to get these things automatically sent to your podcatcher of choice, if you want the episodes waiting for you when you wake up in the morning, remember to subscribe. You can go get them manually and you can go fetch them, but honestly there’s so many easier ways of doing it if you just use one of the podcast services. Or, again, you can look at it on the website and stream it from there if you prefer – www.rustyquill.com – but subscribing is easier.
If you haven’t already, leaving a review on whatever service you use to access the episodes makes a massive difference for us. A lot of people underestimate how much of a difference that makes. It literally determines how visible we are on these services so that when new people are looking for a podcast, we’re there, we’re waiting for them. The reason that we’re so visible on iTunes is ‘cause so many people have taken time to review on iTunes, but that’s not the only service out there.
If you want to do us a favor, and it doesn’t cost you anything apart from a little bit of time, leaving us a review will make a massive difference for us. And then the last but not least thing is spreading the word. We have no marketing budget. We are not spending money on posters and on adverts and promos. The only reason that anyone has heard of us is ‘cause one person heard us, went, “That’s quite good,” and then told other people. That’s how we’ve been functioning, that’s how we’ve got to where we are. So the biggest favor you can do is recommending us to people. Until Martyn finds a way to entirely automate the listening process so that now no listeners are needed, (Mike laughs) yeah. That’s gonna be the best way that you can really help us out.
MARTYN
Just make the podcast listen to themselves.
[LAUGHTER]
ALEX
I mean, that’s the dream.
ANIL
And not just Alex…
BEN
A brilliant ouroboros of audio!
ANIL
And not just Alex. It really gladdens my heart when I see somebody say, “Ooh, have you heard The Magnus Archives?”
MIKE
And also, I mean, from the editing team’s perspective as well, whenever we look at reviews that are left about the podcast, we always feel a little bit better knowing that, you know, if people are enjoying it then what they’re enjoying, or if they’re not enjoying it how we can make it better.
ANIL
Tell us about the production values.
ALEX
Throw some love to the editors. By far it’s the hardest, least rewarding job here. It’s really difficult and takes ages and… really dedicated.
BEN
But make sure you say Elias is brilliant.
[LAUGHTER]
ALEX
So I think we’ll close up there. But thank you all for coming and talking about sort of the making of and we look forward to Season 3 and we hope you all enjoy the trailer which should be incoming to you very soon.
BEN
(Spooky) Oooooooooh.
ALEX
Bye, guys.