Director's Notes – Episode 133 – Are You Sure?

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

I’m writing this a couple weeks before this episode comes out, as we prepare to leave for our run of the new Night Vale live show “A Spy in the Desert” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I’ve been a vibration of excitement and anxiety for about a week now, which hasn’t been great for my focus. I think this new live show is a blast, and I’m so looking forward to showing it to people. But also, since we don’t have time for a full opening weather act, I’ll be doing the one weather song myself. This will be the first time I’ve performed music in front of people in five years, so I’m more than a little anxious.

Anyway, by the time you read this, our run will be over, so it will have turned out however it turned out. Or did it? Are you sure?

This episode is a story about uncertainty. About possibility, and the problem of knowing if what happened is what happened. There is a trick to this episode, but I want to give you the option to not know what it is. So if you’d prefer to figure it out on your own, please stop reading here. At the next paragraph I will talk through what we did.

Ok, here I go, explaining the trick, like all good magicians do: About six months ago, we moved all of our Night Vale Presents shows to a dynamic ad system. What this means is that the mp3 you receive when you download the show is created specifically for you by the hosting system. It checks for an intro and for any ads, and put those together with the existing show elements, and boom, you have the file that you downloaded. This allows us to run ads that get inserted seamlessly into the show without us having to reedit the original files, and those ads only run until the amount of paid for impressions happen, at which point they won’t be added to any more downloads. It also allows us to regularly add recent news to old episodes, so if someone has just started listening, they can get information about what we’re doing now, not what we were doing in 2013. 

This has become the new standard for the podcasting industry, but, as far as we could tell, no one had ever used this powerful dynamic system for creative purposes, and that seemed like a huge missed opportunity. Because if you could seamlessly create different mp3s for different downloads, then you could, say, create an episode that has a different random ending for different listeners.

Since we would be dealing with a story that would, by nature, have a random outcome, the story itself needed to be about this problem of things turning out multiple ways. Once I had written the first half, I assigned the three different endings to three different writers. (Three endings is the most the dynamic system could reliably handle.) One ending was written by me, one by Jeffrey, and one by frequent guest writer Brie Williams. 

After the endings were created, Jeffrey went back through the first part and added some specific clues towards each ending in the first half, so that the story would feel like it was leading naturally to wherever it ended up for each listener. 

There is, even as I write this two weeks out, always the possibility that the technical side of this will just fail completely. But I hope it worked out, and I hope it led to a lot of confusion as people tried to talk about an episode without the same shared experience of it, and perhaps to some dawning wonder for those who downloaded the episode again and realized that this time it was different. 

This episode represented something that was both difficult and unnerving for us, and so we knew we had to give it a try. I hope it worked out. And even if it did, are we sure?

- Joseph Fink
August 20, 2018