rustyquill

Enter Cleopatra

Added 2023-06-05 15:00:10 +0000 UTC

Hi folks,

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone who has supported our new show, Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later during launch week: your support, comments and reviews has been wonderful to see. Thank you so much to everyone who listened in the first week. We’d also like to thank all of the Rusty Nobles who joined us for the launch party last Friday! We had a great time chatting with you all about the show, even if Alex and David did spend a lot of time discussing Star Wars.

If you haven’t listened yet, episodes one and two are available to listen to here, ad-free for Knights and Nobles, or with ads on the public feed wherever you like to listen to podcasts, including on YouTube.

We say this a lot, but if you enjoy Cry Havoc please consider leaving a review or rating the show (Spotify, Apple and Podchaser are just some of the podcast players that have this functionality). It really is the best way you can help us to help get the word out about a new show. Merchandise for the show is also now available on all our official stores. You can find it at the following links, including this gorgeous portrait of Cleopatra by our very own April Sumner.

(Image description: A hand-drawn portrait of Cleopatra, a character in Cry Havoc: Ask Questions later. This image shows a woman with long dark curly hair, looking off to the right of the image. She is wearing an ornate headpiece and earring. The portrait is drawn using a single dark brown colour. The woman is frame with a rectangle with wings on either side.)

At the end of this newsletter, we’ll be sharing a blog post from Cry Havoc’s director, Amani Zardoe, taking us through a week in the life of a director. This goes hand in hand with the interview that creator David K Barnes shared with us last week, and the new behind-the-scenes series that is the Friday bonus this week for Knights and Nobles. In the first episode, host Lowri Ann Davies chats with Amani and David about the original inspiration, the historic context and how they both came to work on the show. This show is early access exclusively to Patreons – it will be shared publicly once the main series of Cry Havoc has finished.

Meanwhile in episode three of Cry Havoc, Gaius, Mark and Lepidus scramble to get everything ready as Cleopatra arrives early. But will their plans go off with a bang, or are they all at sea? Find out at 4pm BST on Tuesday for Knights and Nobles and 4pm BST on Thursday everywhere else.

As a quick, non-Cry Havoc interlude, earlier this week we shared a June update to our Kickstarter backers about progress on The Magnus Protocol. Work continues behind the scenes on the early stages of production, as Jonny and Alex are feverishly writing and beginning to work with our guest writers. We’ve also made great headway on developing a The Magnus Protocol ARG – which was promised as a stretch goal during the campaign. This is one of the most complex projects we’ve ever put together and involves people across the company using their extensive and varied skills to create an experience we think you’ll love. We can’t say much more to avoid spoilers, but we can’t wait to share it with you all! You can read the full update, which also discusses fulfilment of rewards and add-ons on the Kickstarter page.

Finally, as we mentioned earlier, here’s A Week in the Life of a Director. This is a typical week of Cry Havoc related tasks that Amani has described for us, though it condenses a few things that might take a few weeks into a shorter timeframe, to be illustrative rather than 100% accurate to the truth of how long things might take!

Hello! My name’s Amani and I’m the director of Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later. To give you an idea of what a director does on a show like this, I thought I’d give you a little sneak peak into a not so typical, uh, ‘week'.

Monday:

I have a recording this afternoon with the cast of Cry Havoc so I spend some time prepping the scheduled scenes. We’ve been recording out of chronological order to accommodate the cast’s availability, so I’ll always start by reminding myself of any key plot points and character developments leading up to the scheduled scenes.

We’re well into production this week and our actors are already very familiar with their characters, so the most important thing is having a clear idea of how each scene needs to come together to move the story forward. Recording a podcast is similar to TV or Film in the sense that you don’t have any rehearsal time, so prepping this way allows me to guide the actors effectively.

How antagonistic is Mark and Gaius’ relationship in this scene compared to say the first or last episodes? How confident is Octavia about this new play she’s written? Cry Havoc is a comedy but with dramatic elements, so Tone (with a capital T!) is something I think a lot about and I need to be alert as to when to encourage the actors to lift the humour or lean into a darker edge.

Rusty Quill record remotely which means I was able to cast actors who lived outside of London or had family commitments (newborns! Toddlers!) which would have made long days in the studio impossible.

I join the video call and give the actors a recap of what’s happened earlier in our story, which primes them for any emotional encounter coming up. The first take gives the actors the lay of the land and then I’ll dive in with notes. These could be about energy, subtext, tactics the characters might employ to get what they want within the scene, or a nudge towards a vocal style one of the actors has developed for their character. We talked a lot through this process about employing ‘gymnastics’ in performance, finding ways to move fluidly from one emotional vantage point to another, e.g. high status fury to boyish sheepishness (a great moment which always makes me laugh is in episode 2 when Gaius puts the fear of Maths into Mark). The cast do this brilliantly and with the downright fantastic scripts that David and the writers provided, directing this show has been endless fun.

Tuesday:

Post-production! I’ll start the day off by reviewing a vocal cut of an episode, Lowri and Nico (our Vocal Cut editors) have got a really clear idea now of the pace and style of the show, so the few notes I have may include requests for alternative takes (e.g. is there a version of this line where Charmian’s more playful?), or minor rhythmic amendments.

Afterwards, I’ll work ahead making sound design notes for the editing team regarding location atmos (things like crowds or nature), specific action FX (drinking! Footsteps!) or blocking (where the characters are spaced in the ‘room’, or how a bustling marketplace moves around our characters). As a visual person and coming from a film background, I find it really hard to listen without having something to watch as well, so I’ve often found podcasts or audio dramas really disorienting. I wanted the series to be as cinematic as possible and so it was very important to me that locations be familiar, characters instantly recognisable and for our listeners to always know where everyone is and what’s going on at any moment. This was particularly important with such a big cast of characters and so many different locations!

Wednesday:

Today I’ll review a couple episodes that are at the first and second SFX edit stage and send notes over. Katie (one of our Sound Designers) and I like to have a back and forth dialogue so I’ll add comments to our notes document with any tweaks I’m requesting. These might be things like changing a specific FX (e.g. a lion roar) or adding some background atmos detail.

A hilarious thing I’ve discovered working in audio is that often the way something genuinely sounds doesn’t come across like it’s meant to. Today, liquid sloshing into the back of a bottle as it’s tilted up to drink actually sounds like a pebble being dropped in a bucket of water! Why are there buckets and pebbles in Gaius’ dining room! I ask Katie if she can make it sound more ‘sloshy’ (yes, that is the technical term) and compliment her on some very convincing dead fish sounds!

Later I’ll listen to a couple pre-master episodes. I love this stage because all the world-building Katie’s done on SFX gets oh so delicately nudged and shaped by Cathy (our Mastering Editor) so everything has it’s perfect place creating an audio 3D world that my filmmaker brain just loves.

Thursday:

Today I’m heading over to RQ’s in-house composer Sam Jones’ studio for a ‘spotting’ session. This means we listen together to yesterday’s pre-mastered episodes scene by scene and discuss which moments we think would work well with music, and if so, what kind of music would be best (you can listen to Sam’s whole album on Spotify - full disclosure, it’s amazing).

Once again I’m thinking a lot about Tone. For example, when we meet Mark’s wife, Fulvia, in episode 1, the scene needed to feel tense as there’s some proper plotting and scheming going on, but it couldn’t sound too ominous or dark as we didn’t want Fulvia to come across as the show’s ‘bad guy’. Cry Havoc’s characters are super nuanced and they all have moments of light and dark!

I was really keen for the series to be scored in the same way you’d score a film and this means a helluva lot more music than is common in audio drama, which felt really fresh and exciting! That said, both Sam and myself have been really wary of overloading the series so music is only added if we both feel it absolutely enhances the scene.

Friday:

Phew, it’s been a busy ol’ week! Sam’s worked ridiculously fast - in this hypothetical space where the usual rules of time are flexible - and sent me a first dub this morning.

A comedy theme he’s put under a section where Octavia makes Gaius feel awkward works so perfectly it makes me laugh out loud every time I listen to it. If I do send notes these might include things like: asking for something that has a different feel (more pompous, less grand), or a more stripped back version in a scene that perhaps has a lot going on already.

To finish the day off I’ll make myself a cuppa, put my feet up, and enjoy a fully mastered episode of Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later. After so much time and work, it’s thrilling to be able to share this gem of a series with the world.

Here is our full schedule for this week: