Tartarus

Trailer for Batch 2 (Eps 5-8)

The second batch of Tartarus episodes follows our skeleton crew through four new adventures, wrangling and reckoning with strange new creatures...

Hello all! It has been a while. I ended up struggling with the blog and decided to let it go for a while to focus on making the episodes. I think one problem was setting my expectations too high. Making time to write a post once a week was alright, but making time to make enough progress on the show to be worth writing about was another issue! Work has been continuous but gradual on the next…

A lot of auditions have come in for the first round of casting, I’m looking forward to reviewing some today. I’m still burrowing my way through ep 10 sound design. I’m at the start of probably the most intensive scene in the script for sound planning. There’s a lot of distinct overlapping actions going on. It’ll demand a lot of pacing work, deciding how long actions take and how soon after one…

I’ve carried on chipping away at Episode 10 sound design, and I’ve posted a casting call for this batch’s larger new characters. In sound design, one challenge that arose this week was in an action sequence with an insectoid monster. I was trying to put together a sound for the monster moving across the space, but the footsteps I was working on were proving difficult: their movement wasn’t clear…

a melange of progress

It’s been a little longer since the last post, so now there’s a whole mess of tasks to talk about! I’ve continued with designing sound effects for Episode 10. I’m sometimes worried I’m overdoing it with layering up sounds! My most common technique has been to import at least 3 or 4 versions of a sound (e.g. a door open or a gunshot) and then merge everything together, shifting volumes and…

happy new year everyone! new year, new blog :D

Happy New Year! The title says it all! I wanted to have a draft of the casting notice ready early, so that in a few weeks when it’s time for it to go out, I can re-read, review, and make edits to it having had some distance from it. It just gives me time to come back to it in a different mindset: more likely to catch anything major that I left out or didn’t explain properly in the first…

breaking ground on sound effect mixing as christmas approaches...

Ground has broken on mixing Batch 3 sound effects! Here you see “10×01”. The first reaper file for next year’s episodes. I’m populating it with sfx choices for Episode 10 Scene 1 (one scripted sound cue per track group). Right now I’m just making selections, noting down what I need to record to fill gaps, and doing some bits of quick mixing if that seems like the best way to get what I’m looking…

sound effect prep continues. Plus I've posted some batch 1 sounds for free use: freesound.org/people/vestibule-door/

Time-consuming tedium, sorting more and more sounds into my library. When I made Batch 1, I began work by mixing sound effects. Each scene had its own Audacity file with sounds laid out chronologically on a single track. When it came to building the final mix, I’d copy-paste sounds across Audacity projects without ever exporting the sound effects on their own. So in the spirit of getting ALL my…

I always end up writing about 5x more than I plan to with these blog posts! This week's focus was scheduling...

A very productive, somewhat intimidating weekend. I’ve begun laying out my Tartarus to-do list for all of Batch 3. Seeing each week’s work for the next 6+ months laid out concretely in a spreadsheet did put the wind up me a bit – it’s a lot to do, putting a Batch together, when you look at it all at once! The thing is to ultimately focus on one thing at a time and not get overwhelmed by what’s…

more and more filing!

This week’s work was completely overtaken by the task of unpacking all my new sound files and figuring out where to sort them in my new Universal Category System library. With Christmas beginning to really loom on the horizon, I made less time for Tartarus this week, and focused on personal time (buying presents, making plans, catching up on chores), to prepare for December and make sure I have…

opening sfx, re-reading, making lists

I had an afternoon put aside on Tuesday, and was hoping to open all the new sound packs I’d bought, and sort them into folders following the Universal Category System. Unfortunately it took me so long just to unzip all the sfx packs I didn’t get around to sorting them, that’ll be a job for the upcoming week. I was really happy when I found out about UCS, because I’d been despairing of where to…

new script drafts, new plans

If i’m spending a day working on Tartarus, I’ll put aside the morning to study up on sound design. I’ve been getting a lot out of the A Sound Effect website this week. They have great articles like this one with Nia Hansen about prepping for film sound design: https://www.asoundeffect.com/sound-design-for-film/ and I bought my first sound effect packs there on sale this week! Tartarus happens on…

Podlink: https://pod.link/1571079687