Amplirecathon 2012: Podfics = Reading + …

[podcath]

INTRODUCTION

I’ve been racking my brain trying to come up with a good rec list. I really wanted to find something that foregrounds the voice acting and sound mixing, and if I followed my instincts I’d try to be as comprehensive as possible...and then I’d default :) Instead, I’ll just talk a little bit about some of the ways I’ve seen podficcers play with sound--and more. And I will look at some podfics I really liked.

I feel like we’re slowly starting to realize what we can actually do with our podfic, experimenting and playing around with the merging of voice, music, and even visuals. In a way, then, this rec post comes straight out of my meta post, Podfic as transformative works--Let me count the ways, and some of the recs are replicated from there.

If I were to list the four main ways in which we move beyond “merely” (and anyone who’s podficced knows that these scare quotes must be taken seriously!) reading, I’d think of VOICES, SOUND EFFECTS, MUSIC, and VISUALS as important ways to expand beyond the text. Below, I mention podfics that have been generally recced all over the place and pick a few more that are more recent and/or personal favorites.

TWO CAVEATS: (1) Given that I’m listening to a lot of bandom (and that bandom is an immensely prolific as well as experimental podfic fandom), there’ll be lots of it. (2) Pulling short excerpts out from podfic is a lot of work, especially since I usually only have the m4b’s. As a result, I use my own examples a bit more than I otherwise would, simply because I have easy access to the wav files and usually can remember where I did certain sound effects.

VOICES

Voices are pretty much anything we do that sets us apart from a computer-generated book reader. One of the biggest frustrations for podficcers, I think, is the way some authors (and other text-based fans) regard podficcers not as transformative collaborators in their own rights, but merely as a tool for easier/better/different access. But listening to professional recordings, such as Stephen Fry’s Harry Potter or Tina Fey’s Bossypants compared to the Kindle audio reader, for example, it becomes obvious that these readings add, alter, and interpret in important ways. And while podficcers are rarely professional voice actors, nevertheless the same supplemental and interpretive qualities hold true.

Now, I know I can handle two voices, usually by pitching one lower, which works when you have a story with two main characters, but often there are more, and the task of distinguishing these voices becomes more difficult. One of my favorite readers who consistently creates multiple distinguishable voices is Argentumlupine. All her bandom stories have great voices, but I’ll rec one of the shorter ones here, because I adore this AU and have it on constant repeat. This is a story of two guys working in NYC and meeting on the transit train. It captures the weird familiarity of strangers on a train, the slow falling in like; and the reading captures me every time.

On the Midtown Direct [MCR; Reader: Argentumlupine; Author: Mistresscurvy; 1:53:26]

A successful way to achieve different voices is to collaborate. The two most often cited and recced projects that used this are probably Written By the Victors [SGA; Author: Speranza; 5:27:41] and And Be One Traveler [SGA; Author: Trinityofone&Amireal; 7:46:52], using 36 and 32 voices respectively. While few projects are that ambitious, I feel like I’m seeing more and more collaborations. Sometimes the podfic uses different readers to separate different points of view, other times the readers signal past and present or other shifts in the story. I organized a project with seven different readers recently: The Winter of Banked Fires [X-Men; Readers: Cath, Crinklysolution, Helens78, Heyiya, Luzula, Reena_Jenkins, and Rhea314; Author: Yahtzee; 7:50:45]. And while it is a lot of work, it’s great to have different voices, styles, and accents, all offering differing interpretations of these characters.

A lovely recent example for multiple voices is the following podfic, recorded at a live reading during PacifiCon. Every reader voices a different character, and it feels more like an audioplay. Or rather, it feels like we are with everyone in the room having a blast with the story. In this short excerpt we hear four different characters and the narrator (Anna_unfolding, Penny, ohnoktcsk, klb,Templemarker):

I will Destroy Ryan Ross and all that he Loves [Panic/TAI; Reader: Various; Author: Jae_w; 41:13]

One of the more interesting aspects of bandom has been the creation of the so-called not!fic. It’s not like other fandoms didn’t story talk or share unfinished story ideas, but these not!fics can indeed be fully formed, long stories, where the style is a bit more like story telling than novelized prose. Indeed, not!fics are kind of the perfect source for podfics, because they mimic the storytelling mode, except that not!fics also (ab)use emoticons prolifically. And that can be difficult to narrate, instead requiring a vast array of sounds and voice acting to express these emotions. My rec here is the first story I heard that managed to brilliantly translate a not!fic into a successful podfic:

This Never Happened [MCR; Reader: klb; Author: Bexless; 3:13:33].
Somewhere in the middle of Frank’s Pity Parade, Mikey calls. He’s like, dude, Gee said you ran out all in hurry, what’s up? And Frank’s like sniff sniff WE’RE MOVING and Mikey’s like ………………………………………. but you can’t :| ILU :| and Frank’s like I KNOW but we ARE, what can I do ;___; and after they hang up Mikey goes and tells Gerard, and Gerard’s like but he can’t! And Mikey’s like I know! But he has to! And they sit around on the couch in the living room moping.
Their Mom comes in and sees them lying around like
Gerard: :((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((
Mikey: :||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
(Frank, in his bedroom at home: ;__________________________;)
And she’s like WHO DIED and they tell her about Frank, and she’s like ‘oh no!’ and makes them both a glass of iced tea and sits and rubs Mikey’s knee while he tells the floor how much everything sucks. (source)

The excerpt concludes with a musical interlude to separate the sections. Every interlude here is different, because klb collaborated with Bessyboo, who included a variety of additional sound effects. All of them are relevant and match: the one that concludes the excerpt above, for example, is These Days are Dark by Harry and the Potters, adding yet another layer of fannish collaboration and intertextuality.


SOUND EFFECTS

“This Never Happened” uses various sound and musical effects to create a complexly layered podfic experience. But just like with voices, most of us do use sound effects to some degree. Sometimes we use music or sounds to signal new chapters or sections, to mark IM or phone or texting. Other times we play with the sound effects our software offers (echo, delay, phaser) to mark off other forms of interaction (again, IM, phone, texting, but also letters, for example), as well as thought. One fandom that has all but standardized some form of sound effect is X-Men: Charles’s thoughts are often italicized or marked somehow to distinguish his mental from vocal speech, and podficcers use sound effects to show this as well. Here are four different readers and the way they separate narration from mental communication:

[excerpts are taken in order from XMFC podfics voiced by Helens78 (Helens78, the sexiest organ is the brain); Rhea314 (Helens78, As Ever); Reena Jenkins (Pprfaith, Bright Nights); and myself (Yahtzee, Undone)]

My central rec is also a slightly older story, but it stands out in its multiple use of sound effects and changing background music. This is the extremely meta story of fans Arthur and Merlin (BNF writer and faithful beta), who finally meet at a con and fall (more) in love. The podfic is smart and great fun, and the reading’s pitch perfect and the various effects never distract and always enhance the narration and the general mood of the story:

Pairing Pendragon/Merlin [Merlin; Reader: Lunchee; Author:Anonymous; 2:36:14]

MUSIC

Music tends to entes podfic either diagetically or extradiegetically, i.e., it can be played within the story itself, it can be mentioned in the story yet appear in the fanfic outside of it, or it can be added to the story to produce more meanings/layers.

For the first, I want to use two examples, one where the podfic artist actually sings, another where she can’t sing to save her life, and thus has to do some judicious editing. The first example is from a lovely Due South story by Luzula, in which she voices Bob Fraser singing "Danny Boy," "pitched too high for his voice" as it is described in the story:

Sixteenth of June [Due South; Reader:Luzula; Author: Resonant; 1:14:26]

The second is an example by myself, an MCR story where a pivotal moment describes the quite memorable live introduction to “You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison.” I can’t sing, so I tried to do the panting but edited in the beginning of the song from a live performance:

Forget About the Dirty Looks [My Chemical Romance; Reader: Various; Author: Sassbandit; 1:51:52]

Finding the perfect soundtrack for intro/outro is often hard, but sometimes a specific piece becomes central to a story and thus a necessary musical backdrop. Two stories that stand out to me are FayJay’s It’s Not the Violin [Sherlock; Reader: FayJay; Author: Sam Storyteller; 0:30:10] and Penny’s Any Note You Can Reach [MCR/Panic; Reader: Penny; Author: Reni_Days; 0:31:29]. In the first, the entire story revolves around Sherlock playing Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro” on the violin, and FayJay indeed found a strings only version of the song. The second brings Gerard and Brendon together through Panic’s song Lying when MCR covers the song and the two frontmen flirt with one another through their performances. While I usually try to avoid songs from the bands in the stories, no other song could have been used here, given how central it is to the story.

Likewise, some stories use multiple musical insertion that resonate with the story. One of the earliest I can remember is Rave Atlantis [SGA; Reader: Dodificus; Author: Smittywing; 1:47:56], where the songs that are placed throughout the podfic are an all but necessary addition to a story that revolves around meeting at secrets raves in the bowels of Atlantis. A more recent example, which I absolutely adore, is Live and On Stage [J2; Reader: Baylor; Author: Allamboy;  2:13:13], where Jared and Jensen are teen pop starts, and the music in between the section pulled from a variety of pop songs that pull me back into my popslash days.

My central rec in this section is one I rec whenever I get a chance, but it’s just this good, this smooth, this exemplary for what I’m discussing here. Recorded by Penny, with musical assistance of Xenakis, this performance beautifully illustrates how podfic creates both an interpretation and supplement to the story: where Arthur and Eames are singer and accompanist, creating art out of the music they see on the page, Penny and Xenakis collaborate to bring toomuchplor's story to life. In fact, the central piece of the story is Der Erlkönig which is in itself a transformative piece, set by Schubert to lyrics by Goethe (and, in a further transformation, Franz Liszt created an amazing solo piano version) in a way that Inception gives life to toomuchplor's transformative work. Below is the intersection of the story, Penny’s reading, and a performance of "Der Erlkönig" (the excerpt is quite a bit longer than the others, because I couldn't cut the Lied:):

Ach des Knaben Augen [Inception; Reader: Penny; Author: Toomuchplor; 2:36:18]

IMAGES

At this point in podfic history, it’s pretty common to create podbooks for one’s podfics (at least over a certain length) and embed a cover image. I love the well done photo manips and the gorgeous art that often accompany podbooks, being both nice to look at on my ipod and functional when I forget author or reader. Just as the rise of visual capabilities on the World Wide Web suddenly allowed fanfic to experiment and embed multimedia, so has the increasing capability of podbook makers allowed more engagement with visuals. There are two stories that spring to mind for me, both by Lunchee, but I’m looking forward to more podficcers using the visual component.

The Giraffe Notes [TSN RPF; Reader: Lunchee; Writer: Jeyhawk; 2:34:09] is a sweet lovely story of anonymous admirers and email romances. Lunchee creates these characters beautifully and manages to incorporate the various drawings that accompany the story. Each new image begins a new chapter and the listeners can see the image as a cover on their screen. Here are some of the images from the story that Lunchee includes:

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The second podfic I want to rec is a thrilling XMFC AU with an interesting structure; Charles’s Killer [XMFC; Reader: Lunchee; Author: Luchia; 4:40:00]. I had assumed it’d be hard to follow the non-chronological time line, but including the covers definitely helps. All the images match in style and tone, and the clear numbering helps with the internal timeline. The characters are beautifully IC and the non-powers AU translates them beautifully with Lunchee's reading enhancing the complicated relationship between Charles and Erik, letting us understand both:

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PODVIDS

Last not least, I want to mention something I stumbled across via a twitter link: YouTube fanfic. I can’t recommend one in particular, both because this really isn’t my community and because I don’t listen to podfic on the computer and thus have no idea why anyone would want to sit and listen to an hour or more but...it’s a fascinating multimedia endeavor, resembling fan videos on some level while creating a sound track via podfic. If you’ve never seen it, here are a couple of examples: Coffee and rain and sarcasm [Sherlock; Reader: Sursumuma; Author: SursumUma; 0:2:42]; Worlds Apart [STR; Reader: MisplacedMama; Author: Team Kalifarr; 0:29:04]; and After the Storm [Sherlock; Reader Obstinatrix; Author: Obstinatrix; 0:03:11].


CONCLUSION

I’d love to hear some more examples of interesting use of voices, sounds, music, or imagery in new stories and strange fandoms :) I used to dislike music in podfic, but I think I (and we as a community) have come a long way, and the fact that we are trying new things and experimenting with different forms is really exciting!