Producer notes 1 – ‘The Scandinavian Connection’

Maybe I’ve been emboldened by completing my first scripts for the series, or maybe I’m just scratching an itch – either way, this is the first of an occasional (read: appearing irregularly) series of articles which I hope will give interesting insights into - and some fun facts about - the production of I is for Investigate.

Ice breaker: who am I? In brief, I’m Neil Brooker; most obviously, I play Eoghan in I is for Investigate, but really that’s just the visible part of the iceberg – behind the scenes, I work to edit the episodes, trying to make them the very best they can be as a listening experience; that involves creating realistic senses of the space our characters are in at any given moment in the series, and, if a sound effect doesn’t exist for something – for example, Mabel Sprowston’s kitchen dustbin in ‘Of Poltergeists and Pies’ – creating it  from scratch. Where possible, I record ambient audio to burble along in the background of our exterior scenes, and – less excitingly – I spend time (a lot of time, in some cases) sourcing pre-existing sound effects, either as individual items or as libraries. And to top it all off, I write and produce our original music.

Housekeeping out of the way; on to the subject of this set of notes.

Out of the gate, I want to say that I hope you enjoyed ‘The Scandinavian Connection.’ It’s one of our more unusual episodes, because it steps outside the world we’ve built for I is for Investigate; not quite breaking the fourth wall, but giving a “peek behind the curtain” of the show’s production. Well, sort of.

And, the other thing which makes it different is the extensive use of pre-existing material. I think that’s probably where I want to focus most in these notes; looking at the rationale behind that, and the challenges it presented.

So, back when the second part of Campwell Lodge was ready to go into production, I had a clear sense of how I wanted it to sound. Almost. The only thing which I wasn’t certain about was how I wanted the character of Jason Lundqvist to sound; a part of me wanted to lean into Tobias’s natural ability to make Jason sound very Swedish, but at the same time, given that Jason turns out to be something other than he is when we first meet him, I also felt that a voice not dissimilar to – but darker than - Tony Sorenson could be the way to go. So, when scripts were distributed to the cast, Tobias and I discussed how best to approach it. I gave him my thoughts on it, and essentially let him run with it to give a reading which he felt would be most appropriate.

Now, ‘Scandinavian Connection’ gives an account of how that went, but – in case you were in any doubt – that’s not actually what happened. In fact, Tobias provided both the very Swedish version and the more Tony-like reading at the same time. I listened to both of them as soon as I received them, and although I thought both versions were great, I came to the conclusion that the more Tony-sounding reading worked better in the context of the episode which acts as a pivot point in the Campwell Lodge story.

With that said, even at that point I was determined to use the rejected version, because it had so much going for it. My initial thought was to issue a “remix” version of chapter 2 in its entirety after Campwell part 2 was published, but once I’d completed part 2 and started turning my thoughts to the remix I realised that probably wasn’t a good idea – we wanted to throw the spotlight on the differences, and that wouldn’t have worked as well if we’d just re-created the whole of chapter 2.

So, my next thought was to re-edit the scenes in which Jason appears and present them in isolation – very much in the way we ultimately did, but with an introduction from me explaining pretty much what I’ve said above. But while I was coming to the conclusion that was the best way to approach it, it just seemed… lifeless. I is for Investigate always aims to be good listening, and even at the darkest moments it has an element of fun. It’s not an academic study.

I was discussing the problem with Michelle, not expecting any way around it. Then, suddenly, a couple of hours later, she sent me a Word document to look at. I opened it – and there was a draft version of the script that eventually became the framing structure of ‘Scandinavian Connection.’ I loved it from the off; it added a whole sense of fun to proceedings and after some debate about casting (which sounds far more dramatic than it actually was) we settled on Victoria (Hughes) to play the part of Nadia.

We were initially concerned about the script – after all, it doesn’t particularly present Tobias in a good light. But, as soon as he’d had a chance to look at it, he came back with some edits which strengthened the premise even more (massive thanks are due to Tobias for being such a good sport).

It was great to revisit the completed scenes from Chapter 2 – a little secret; once an episode is “in the can” I rarely listen to it again, mainly because there’s usually another job to move on to, so I have to say I was really pleased with the way it sounded. The challenge here was mainly about timing; replacing the existing performance with the “Swedish version” was – in principle – easy enough, but no two performances are ever identical in length, and as Tobias had thrown in some placeholders (“you know”, “like”) and the Swedish intonation is slightly slower than the existing version, it meant the new lines were – mostly – slightly longer, if only by milliseconds, than the “original” equivalents. So, in order to not disrupt the timing of the dialogue coming after any of the lines being replaced, it was essential to “nudge” everything following those lines slightly back in order to give the new line space, and occasionally – once the replacement line was in position – move it all back forward a fraction, so that the new lines fitted organically into the flow of the dialogue. Thankfully, the dialogue-driven scenes in CL2: Chapter 2 are quite short, and mostly only included two voices, so the work could be completed relatively quickly, easily, and with minimal impact – if I’d been working with, for example, ‘The Pub Quiz’ which, after the opening titles, is effectively one long scene with a lot of moving parts, it would have been a lot more difficult to achieve. I also took the opportunity to tweak a couple of things I hadn’t been entirely pleased with when I originally edited chapter two.

For the framing sequence, I decided to try something different to the way I work usually. Since IifI started, I’ve built scenes in my DAW (digital audio workstation – my electronic studio) pretty much as I expect them to sound when the episode is published – e.g., I place all voices, sound effects and ambience in the positions in the stereo field where they should be when the show is published. In other words, as any scene I’m working on is being edited, by the time it’s finished I’m hearing exactly what you’re going to hear when the episode’s released. This time, I decided to experiment; I panned the ambience to the extreme left and right, then panned Tobias’s lines to 90% left and Nadia’s to 90% right, with the relatively minimal (but important) sound effects being also panned to the 90% position on the left. This is more like good music production practice. However, I found it really difficult to work with initially (maybe due to lack of familiarity), with one voice in one headphone and the other in the other, with a huge gap in the middle, and as work progressed I became increasingly concerned it’d end up sounding weird when it came to mastering the scene. Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case; I simply split the mix file into separate mono channels and panned them to a position where they sounded natural. While the results were certainly passable, and I was really impressed with the way the sound effects worked with Tobias’s voice, all in all it’s an experiment I’m unlikely to try again – especially in scenes with more than two voices.

And that’s it – way more than you probably wanted to know about ‘The Scandinavian Connection!’ Nonetheless, I hope you’ve found it interesting – let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to talk about. Speaking of which – what do you think; is there any mileage in us doing a live ‘Ask Me Anything’? If it’s something people want, I’m sure we could arrange it!

Hopefully it won’t be too long before I write another one of these – at which point I hope I can give you updates on our next project, ‘I is for Investigate: The Colour out of Space.’

In the meantime...

Be safe.

Neil

Plucky little Zoom H2n, recording ambience for the final scene in 'Campwell Lodge', Part 2, Chapter 3