We recorded the narration of the entire tetralogy within four months, and in my naivety, I assumed we could finish the entire production by Christmas. This included all the supporting music and effects tracks. I assumed that narration was going to take the longest because of the number of takes required whenever there was an audio glitch or a mispronunciation.
We have five hours of orchestral support soundtrack music produced, along with tracks of Fable Pop and Asquith Sound Aesthetic muzak. The majority of the supporting soundtrack was going to be cinematic orchestration, with some references to specific folk songs mentioned in the narratie and more pop-oriented music being blended in as part of the Asquith Sound Aesthetic. But it turns out that matching the music to the narrative is going to take a lot longer than anticipated. We're crawling through the narrative minute by minute—or even less—making sure that the music and the emotive content fit the narrative or scene. This requires multiple instances of backtracking and reassessing to ensure that the emotional momentum conveyed by the music is appropriate and well done.
Considering we have over 70 hours of audio to support, this effectively becomes the equivalent of managing 50 feature films with soundtracks. We anticipate, therefore, that the entire next year will be required for musical production rather than merely a couple of months. Despite having done this now for 10 years, I still have the naivety that whatever aspect of production I'm currently involved in, the next step is always going to be much more straightforward—despite having been caught up in the process for several books already.
It’s only then that I listen to the rest of the production team and take on board their more realistic advice, which usually has completion dates much further out than I had considered necessary. We have over 200 episodes or chapters to produce across the four books. To ensure that we maintain momentum, it’s likely we will produce each chapter with decreasing audio length—meaning we produce the longest chapters in the books first, followed by the shortest ones—which will give us a sense of achievement as we work through each title. The advantage of doing this longer-to-shorter passage order, as well as providing a sense of momentum and achievement, is that we become more familiar with the music, which means that the music selection becomes more intuitive and will result in a more normalized and consistent production over the entire tetralogy. It was always a concern that starting from the beginning of the first book and ending with the last chapter of the last book would mean that we gained a nuanced understanding of the music over time, which might disadvantage the opening chapters when it's essential that the opening chapters of the tetralogy are emotionally captivating, especially considering the deflation, disappointment and anti-climax that can come with reaching the culmination of such a large production.
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