Weekly News Round Up

January 2011 has been a hectic time. It has also left me with a lingering cough, which itself was spawned from a week-long cold, so some days I’m fine while other days I’m incredibly cranky!

But things are progressing on the audio series regardless. We now have an Executive Producer in the personage of John Young, who is helping out with the financial and business sides of getting the project produced. We hope to have an interview with John in the near future to get his viewpoints on why he wants to be involved with the series and his thoughts about the future of audio drama in a world of video, film and computer games. Is there a place for good audio that isn’t just the realm of radio stations? Sure there is! And John will help illuminate us why audio is more important as a medium than ever.

Dialogue edits are progressing well and in fact there has been a trial rudimentary mix of one quarter of Episode Seven with temporary sound effects, music and vocal enhancements just to see the difference all these other elements bring to the ambience and atmosphere of the piece. So far, they are working quite nicely to establish not only the overall mood but also the feel of being in specific locations. I recently played the mix to a colleague, who commented that the whole thing sounds like it was recorded in an expensive studio. I took that as a compliment that the sound quality is actually fairly impressive, and that the acting is not only convincing, but very engaging!

Also, while on the matter of sound, it looks very likely that we will soon be welcoming an additional member to the post-production team in the form of a Music Soundtrack Writer. This excites me because music is so very important to establish the feel and pace of the piece and the right person is needed to get the tone exactly. More news on this later, once we make everything official.

We are also on track to record the British cast in mid-March if all goes smoothly with all of our lives… re: my life and my other commitments to other projects. While I hate juggling things so much, I realise that I have to also earn money, so sometimes I’m at the beck and call of forces outside of the Flashback universe… I know! I mean, how is that even possible?

So, that means that, not withstanding any forseeable problems, recording with Sarah Douglas and Nigel Fairs should be in the can by the end of March. I also need to cast about for two other roles and have firm ideas about filling one of them. The other is more tricky but I’m looking at options.

And finally this month has seen talks with a photographer to start taking some promotional images of the cast in the near future as well, and I have been giving thought to what the cover of the CD box set will look like. I have included the promotional image above as a work in progress. I will tell you now that it isn’t going to be the cover, but it has allowed me to work on creating an image of the character of Pogo-stick, Tom Swyft’s robot dog. And I’ve started working on ideas for the logo. Not 100% sure about this one but you can at least see the little grey cells mitosing.

All the best for February, 2011!

Oh, and for those Sarah Douglas fans other than me, she’s about to start filming a new project in April called Strippers vs Werewolves. Consider this just another shameless plug!