Podfeels Season 1 Retrospective
4/13/2024 marked the two year anniversary of Podfeelsā first airing, and in August, we will celebrate the three year anniversary of its inception as a project. It feels so strange, looking back on it all. To me, it feels simultaneously like its always been in my life, and also like it just started yesterday.
Iāve spent nearly three years now spearheading this project, and weāve expanded from a team of ten to a team of thirty in that time, and have put out roughly four hours of highly produced, full cast, full sound effect audio drama.
That may not sound like much, but for a team composed almost exclusively of first timers at its inception, and with two big hiatuses out of everyoneās control, Iām pretty damn proud.
With Season 1 ending back in January, us currently in the exact two month midpoint between anniversaries, and Season 2 being worked on behind the scenes, I thought now would be a good time to release a bit of a retrospective on our first season. Talk about the process, what went wrong, what went right, and also release our assets for the public.
Iām splitting this into three sections so you can skip around based on what you give a shit about.Ā
Reminiscence about how I got into godfeels through a series of insane coincidences that make my heart feel warm.
Discussing the process of adapting the work into our medium.
3. Portr8s, 8ackgrounds, and Sound8ites
A release of Season 1ās art and sound assets for your perusal outside of the videos, use as desktop wallpapers, or what have you.Ā
In March 2020, I got covid for the first time. My workplace had no protections for it yet, so I lost my job. And while bedridden with covid, subsisting off a diet of lukewarm broth, saltines, and nyquil, I set my youtube Watch Later (ok, thats a lie, it was my Likes, which i used ((still use)) as a watch later instead of using the actual watch later function, BUT-) playlist to shuffle. And in this fugue state, I stumbled on the video that would completely change the trajectory of my life.
āWhat I Learned Writing 50,000 Words of Homestuck Fanfictionā, by Sarah Zedig. I vaguely remembered her from some video about the McElroys and from Hbomberguyās stream, and I had put off watching this because at the time of its release, I hadnāt yet finished Homestuck. So I shuffled it away for later, and it found its way back into my lap at the perfect time. Having now finished the comic, read the Epilogues, actively reading Homestuck ^2: Beyond Canon, and five months in to my first ever real creative outlet in my semi-abandoned video essay channel, I was interested to hear what this goat had to say.
In the video Sarah went into detail about a ton of wider context about the Homestuck Renaissance that I was fully unaware of, and made a very strong case for her own postcanon work, godfeels. Her passion bled through and I figured, sure, why not, Iāve got nothing better going on, Iāll read the story of Spiderjeggingsā No Good Very Bad Transition. Why not!
55,660 words later, crying alone in bed, I was now a girl. Reading the scene of June making her list of wants the morning after Tereziās return, I said out loud to myself, hoarse as can be, āI canāt put it off any longer.āĀ
After reading to current I ended up joining the godfeels fanserver, and from getting settled in these circles Iāve met so many people I wouldnāt have otherwise, and come into myself in ways I canāt begin to fully quantify. I went from one relationship to fourteen to now a stable four, the other person in my head shook back loose after a decade of suppression by me (sorry again, Aegis), Iāve become more cultured, Iāve gained more friends, Iāve gained more hobbies, and most relevant of allā¦ Iāve gained Podfeels.
Podfeels proper actually started in a really funny and impromptu way. In Sarahās video she mentions wanting to start a podfic adaptation of it, but with that being two years past with no more word, a conversation about it cropped up in the server, and it was revealed that it had been canceled for various reasons. Everyone immediately understood why that had to happen. It was an insane amount of work, especially now that Godfeels was entering the territory of a space opera. But the demand was there among all of us, and after almost a dozen loops of us all going ādrat, would be cool. I wish someone would take the helm on that!ā, I just went ALRIGHT I GET IT and opened up casting. Podfeels was actually originally a joke name made by someone in the server before I even entered the conversation, but we used it for so long during development that by the time we came to release day it just felt wrong to call the project anything else. The name just stuck.
After a few hours of people daydreaming about it happening, and me encouraging other people to take the helm, I finally gave in and opened up casting. Now, itās important to understand, I had never directed ANYTHING like this before in my life. I made a really terrible sketch in high school theater class and thatās about it. Iāve always been a bit of a natural leader but never anything with the kind of scale this would require, and it showed. I crowdfunded almost all ideas for what to do and how to handle it, and my best idea for how to do auditions was ājust send in a few lines of you doing whatever character you wantā. And my language wasā¦ insufferably fawning. I was hedging my bets at every opportunity. Every development in the project was ātentativeā, I was the ādirectorā until someone else took charge, etc. Looking back its actually kind of adorable?Ā
Look at that sweetheart. Sheās so scared. She has no idea the beautiful changes she is in for.
The casting process was an unmitigated DISASTER. Nobody there knew how to audition, and I didnāt know how to wrangle. We were an unstructured gaggle of doofasses stumbling into each other. And due to the limited pool, I was stretched kind of thin on where to put people. Obviously I stand by all our decisions and love our cast, but because I was pulling entirely from the fanserver, options were very limited. I wanted to get everyone who wanted one into a role, but having to do the math of āthis person is 40% good at Character A and 60% good at Character B, but this OTHER person is 80% good at Character B and the closest runner up for Character A is only 35% goodā was agonizing.
We ended up deciding to make a few demos first, to test our chops as actors and mine as editor. We had four planned. But after we fully produced our first two demos and had recorded the thirdā¦ I decided we should immediately start chronological production.
Why did I make this decision, you ask? Well. We had a few months until 4/13/2022. If we immediately all went overdrive, me especially, we had the chance to get our first episode out on the 13th 4/13 anniversary of Homestuck, and like HELL was I about to let us pass that up.Ā
This was the right call, I think, but it did bring us into a BUNCH of complications. First off, it meant we never really tested our violence and drama chops on the houseraid. Second, if I had waited, we would have been able to dodge our first big hiatus, where I put us on pause for a couple months while we waited to see if our Terezi wanted to leave after she floated the idea, which she ended up doing. If we had stayed in prepro, we would have skipped a huge hiatus and not replaced a key character between episode one and two. It also meant that we didnāt fully solidify an editing pipeline, and I was handling practically all editing until around episode 3. Additional prepro time would have helped us iron that out, as well, rather than me breaking myself on the first couple episodes before bringing in help out of desperation. This rush ALSO led to us having to release episode 1ās video around a week after the audioās release, and with a fucked up background because I was crunching so hard I didnāt notice Iād accidentally completely butchered Johnās bedroom somehow! I think I somehow content aware filled the wall? Fucked if I know why!
This is an abridged version because I want to get us to the meat of the matter today and I feel a lot of the longer story is best saved for a video I plan on making down the line, when weāve reached 50 hours of runtime. For now, letās move on.
A few folks have asked for indepth adaptation notes for what we change in an episode and why. As a general rule, we make changes with three primary motivations. First, adjusting text-based ideas to sound-based. Godfeels plays with its medium in countless compelling ways that, when shifted to a different medium, are either clunky or incomprehensible. So our first job is to translate those into sound. Second, turning narration into sound effects. We donāt need to discuss sounds in the scene, or a characterās tone, when we can just hear it all ourselves now. This then expands into further issues, however, as some things DO need to stay as narration. Thereās a lot of pathos in the narration, and often thereās details that canāt be conveyed through audio alone. But by removing just the audio cues, we are left with very clunky phrasing that does our source material no justice. So we have to rephrase entire sections to give them the same resonance, meaning, and clarity while also getting rid of all the things that are now extraneous in our medium. The third main type of edit is bringing it more in line with what comes later. Godfeels has been running a long time and has become a very different beast from where it began. I love this about it, but some ideas have ended up with insufficient preparation, and some thematic resonances are easy to see looking back but may be partially unintentional. We can take advantage of hindsight and bring certain things more in line with the workās modern philosophies, such as putting an additional focus on the citizens of Earth C, introducing X as its own entity, playing with Dirk more as a villain, and introducing the question of āwhat happens to the leftover Junes in a retcon?ā, all during Episode 6.Ā
Iāll be releasing a few other posts soon with detailed adaptation notes for every episode in the coming days, but Iāll leave it here for now and bring us to our final section-
Portr8s, 8ackgrounds, and Sound8ites
While the idea for video versions was a relatively late addition to our process, Iām very proud of the work everyone has put into making them what they are. Our art team and video editor do wonders. First up, weāve got the talkpogs.
The talkpogs were my own invention, but I can hardly claim theyāre an original idea. Iām sure something almost identical has been done before. What directly inspired me, though, was the old Polygon podcasts, where theyād have the hosts faces made out of polygons, with one loose and separated, synced to that hostās audio track. It was the first time Iād seen something like that and I knew I wanted something similar to indicate who was talking. From there it all fell into place pretty easily. The outer ring and the waveform is the characterās text color, and the background is their name color. If those two are the same (as they usually are), I apply a slight darkening to the background just for differentiation. The sprites, though, were all the art team. Unfortunately we didnāt have a base early on, so different artists drew to different scales.Ā
For the art style I told the artists to try to strike a middleground between Homestuck classic and girlpillzās style which had just been shown in GF3.1.8.E, where godfeels got its first spritework. Otherwise, designs were largely up to the artists but we had conversations about them as a project. Overall Iām very satisfied with the work everyone turned in.
Backgrounds were a more complicated beast, but paradoxically also have less to talk about. We started out with one background per episode, which was pretty doable, but with the season 1 finale, and our expanded art team, we opted to expand out into a background per setting. The first two are just Pesterquest backgrounds I edited by hand, but after that we started having custom art. That was largely due to restraints lifting as the team grew, but it also turned out pretty good thematically, as the first episode with custom art was Episode 3, where Juneās egg cracks. We left official art behind as June left the officially plotted course. I think itās resonant.
Now we come to our latest introduction. KEY ART. We started doing this in Episode 6 and itās so sick. Donāt expect these inclusions to be TOO common, butā¦ we have some cool things in store here, and I think youāll all be really excited to see āem. For now, hereās our first and so far only public piece of key art, Dirk menacing June against the tree. The final piece of art of Season 1, and the final piece of art of Season 1ās retrospective. It only seems fair.
Which now brings us to my own inclusion: sound assets. Iām very proud of the work Iāve put in to giving each character and concept their own unique aural profile. From the magical girl burning radiation of Jadeās magic, to the shattering static of Juneās retcon, to threading the needle of Hammer, Sword, Plastic Toy, Dice, And Doomsday Device in Juneās vrillyhoo.Ā
Thatās all for today. In the coming week or so Iāll put together a few more posts, going over each episode in more detail, from point by point script edit notes, to specific art discussions. I also plan to bring in a few people who have been around since day one to talk about our experience setting up the project.
But for now, look forward to seeing more from us soon. Both in the upcoming devposts, and in Season 2. We've been on a hiatus to get our preproduction pipeline settled, and because we wanted to get a few episodes prepped so we can try to maintain a monthly schedule. But we're getting to the end of this phase now, and will be announcing Episode 7's release date very soon.
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