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Learn Audio Fiction with Fred

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    • Behind the Scene: Of Fae & Fiends
    • Behind the Scenes: Recording Locke & Key
    • Behind the Scenes: The Troll of Stony Brook
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    • An SEO’s Perspective on Google Rankings for Podcasts
    • Audio Drama Needs a 21st Century Business Model
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Behind the Scenes of Of Fae & Fiends

Fred Greenhalgh recording OF FAE & FIENDSPublished in February of 2020, Of Fae & Fiends is my most personal work to-date, which is a bit odd to say given the fact that it’s a faerie tale.

The story evolved from various walks my daughter Nyana (7 at the time) and I would go on in the woods, and the prompt “Dada, tell me a story,” which at some point became hooked on a large, moss covered boulder behind our home, and the possibility that underneath it was a tunnel to a fantastic world beyond. It all kind of spiraled out from there.

When we got to the production process, we (longstanding collaborator Bill Dufris and I) decided to do it in our emerging “Studio-Location Hybrid Style” which we pioneered in The Dark Tome, Season 2.

All of the scenes in the realm of Fae were recorded in our world-class audio drama studio located at William Dufris’s Mind’s Eye Productions facilities in South Portland. This allows us to record everything clean and to polish it in post-production and have fun with weird creature voices and other effects.

All of the scenes in the “real” world were recorded at my friend Jeremy Kasten’s farmhouse in Berwick, Maine, which was as perfect a set as you could imagine for this show. We stopped short of trying to train one of Jeremy’s goats to work in the show, but otherwise our location was pretty much identical to what the script called for.

Some people may think it’s a tremendous amount of work to do it like this, especially when we have a perfectly good studio to work with, but there is nothing quite like the sound of — for example — speeding down a country road, twisting onto dirt, slamming a car into park and bursting out yelling into a great big field.

An audio drama is only as good as the sum of its component parts.

That starts with the script itself, which — while I’m biased — I think is very strong. I tried to harken back to works I love (Neil Gaiman’s memory that childhood is a terrifying place, and the sharpness with which 1800s faerie tales are told) while also subverting and adding to the fantasy genre. This is not a ‘black and white’ world, Faerie is multi-colored and vibrant, weird in the best way possible and the script remembers that monsters are always the hero in their version of the story.

And this cast – WOW! – we had an extraordinarily strong response to our first casting call and put together an incredible mix of talent, inclusive of returning close collaborators, as well as a number of performers we’d never worked with before.

full cast of fae and fiends

One of the last projects I ever worked on with William Dufris. And it was a good one!

I could keep on going… The production itself has a strange magical energy to it in that the news was just breaking that Bill Dufris’s cancer had returned, and Bill had to limit his involvement due to physical restraints (like, his body couldn’t do it, not that we had to put Bill in a straight-jacket or anything). Bill makes a few brilliant cameo performances in the show, and when he’s in it, he’s IN – larger than life, the Bill Dufris that everyone know and loves, that steals fire from the gods, that has a consistent record of doing things that people tell him are impossible.

The final stage to this – MUSIC and SOUND EFFECTS. As of this writing, we’re still deep in this process, but we had the pleasure of working with Rory O’Shea, who did sound design for LOCKE & KEY and last year’s HOMEFRONT, and Peter Van Riet, the Belgian-based composer who has created music for our projects LOCKE & KEY, A JOURNEY WITH STRANGE BEDFELLOWS, and THE DARK TOME. Finally! We committed to underscoring the entire show, and brought on Frank Schulmeyer (a friend of Bill’s from the London days).

All of this is a way of saying… Don’t miss this show!

full cast of fae and fiends
One of the last projects I ever worked on with William Dufris. And it was a good one!

Behind the Scenes of The Dark Tome

agents of evil in the dark tome

James Herrera and Lisa Stathoplos as the agents of evil

We pioneered our ‘studio-field recording hybrid’ approach here, utilizing on-location shoots for the scenes that take place within Simpson Falls, Maine, and the studio set-up (learned from The X-Files) for scenes that take place within the interior of the book, The Dark Tome.

For Season 1, we had a fantastic opportunity to produce a story by Joe Hill and came up with the conceit of Cassie, Gussy, and the magic book, but only had a vague idea of how the overarching storyline would develop. By the end of Season 1, where we reveal how Gussy got the book and start painting out details of his personal life, we knew a lot more about the fictional town of Simpson Falls, Maine, and spent the next year fleshing out the larger mythos of the Dark Tome.

For Season 2, we arranged all stories in advance and wrote the script as a single through-line story, and recorded it as a cohesive event; meaning, the stories are much more interconnected than they were in Season 1, and Cassie’s story arc becomes much more important as she starts to really come into her own as a character.

Whereas in Season 1 Cassie was a youth who was playing around with magic and without much control over her situation, in Season 2 she finds herself without her guide, Gussy, and forced to face an insanely hostile world. Only through true friendship and by finding her inner strength, does Cassie have any hope of staying alive and saving the multiverse.

Since Cassie’s throughline takes place in the ‘real world’ (whatever that is), we decided to go back to our roots, recording this section of the storyline on location, as we did for Locke and Key.

So yup, back to shoving actors into the backs of cars, running around outside, up into bedrooms, etc. as we create a visceral, immersive sound environment constructed similarly to how a film is made.

For the interior of the Dark Tome stories, we stayed with an in-studio approach, allowing us to make the adapted stories feel ‘super-real’ with a constructed reality that is less gritty than the real world. The extra fun part about the Dark Tome is that we get to have a guest cast on every interior story, so the breadth and diversity of acting talent is really impressive, as we leap from dystopian Toronto to a cul-de-sac suburb in anywhere America to a post-apocalyptic Caribbean island and to stranger places, indeed.

We hope you’ll enjoy going on the ride as we much as we enjoyed building it!

– Fred Greenhalgh and Bill Dufris, Dagaz Media

agents of evil in the dark tome
James Herrera and Lisa Stathoplos as the agents of evil
field recordist fred greenhalgh on location in a car
Fred stuffed in the backseat with Lilly Thorne and Casey Turner - field recording at its finest!
recording the dark tome
Recording THE BACCHAE by Liz Hand
Recording the VISHAKANYA's CHOICE by Roshani Chokshi
Recording the VISHAKANYA's CHOICE by Roshani Chokshi
Lilly Thorne as Cassie Pinkham
Actress Lilly Thorne plays the lead, CASSIE
From left, Fred Greenhalgh, Tim Sample, Lilly Thorne, Bill Duffy (center)
From left, Fred Greenhalgh, Tim Sample, Lilly Thorne, Bill Duffy (center)
Recording audio drama based on Tananarive Due's story, TRIAL DAY
Recording Tananarive Due's story, TRIAL DAY

Fred also did an in-depth breakdown comparing different mic choices against each other (mono mic, X-Y stereo, binaural stereo) at Podtales 2019.

Recap of Fred’s Podtales 2019 mic workshop

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Fred’s Production Company

Dagaz Media High End Audio Drama

Looking to hire Fred for an audio drama project? See the website for his award-winning production company, Dagaz Media, co-founded with audio drama legend William Dufris.