Director's Notes – 152 – The Great Golden Hand

(NOTE: As always, Director's Notes contain spoilers)

Hello from summer in upstate New York. I’ve recently, for the first time since I was a teenager, started running in a serious way, and this week have finally gotten myself back up to consistently running a 10k. Which is pretty good given where I live is entirely steep hills, and the humidity is often well over 80%. This also means that I am basically sore and tired at all times, but such is the price of having a hobby I guess.

This episode was built less around a story and more around an image. I liked the idea of the great golden hand, and I liked the sound design concept. Here is the direction I put at the top of the script for Disparition:

“Note: The capitalized phrase “GREAT GOLDEN HAND” and sometimes just “HAND” should have some vocal filter or effects placed on it. This filter/effect should get stronger and stronger throughout until the words are basically unintelligible and can only be understood through context and the general shape of the sound.”

And this episode as a whole works the same way. The story becomes more abstract and strange, but it can still be followed by the general shape of the sound.

Sometimes for the side bits I’ll go back to old jokes we wrote for the Night Vale twitter account and see if I can expand them. Both the McDonalds ad and the traffic are built around these single sentence jokes. For the McDonalds one, it was as simple as continuing the joke to the logical conclusion. For the traffic, the phrase was less a joke and more the start of a poem, and so I just kept writing the poem from there. I didn’t go into the traffic with the story in mind, but gradually a story did take shape there, amongst the lines of poetry.

Meanwhile the community calendar allowed me to follow up on a number of ongoing storylines and characters. Martin McCaffrey’s journey into the world of art will be familiar to anyone who read our novel It Devours!, and the summer softball league was also discussed last summer. Leopold Toosdale was an interesting character from the Kellogg’s episode that I wanted to come back to. The final line of the calendar is another old twitter joke that never got put into the show.

Recently we finished our final editing pass on the next Welcome to Night Vale novel. This was a huge effort from us. This novel is so much bigger and more ambitious than any Night Vale story we’ve ever tried to tell, starting in the 18th century and covering the centuries leading up to today. We will do a full announcement and cover reveal next month, but I will just have you know that my wife read it and thought it was the best thing we’ve ever written. And if you can’t trust my wife on that, who can you trust?

Thanks for supporting our show. Back in a couple weeks with a bank heist.

- Joseph Fink
August 15, 2019

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