Narration Complete

Yesterday we had our sixth recording session, the forth session of only narration, performed by Jacob Sidney as Gabriel.  All together it took about ten hours to get through itl.  The average takes for each line was three, with many coming at two, and a few coming in at eight.

One of the most enjoyable parts of the book is Chesterton’s voice when it comes to his description, which when adapting the story to radio, I knew would need to be translated into narration.

The book is told in the third person, though only from the perspective of Gabriel Syme. Adapting it to the first person, with Gabriel as the narrator was fairly simple. The difficult part was resisting the temptation to not include everything. There are so many great passages that Chesterton frames the story in terms of a larger battle between the forces of good and evil, with Gabriel as humanity’s chosen vessel to hold back the devil.

I’ve kept at least a part of  every thematic block of description, but had to shorten some of them drastically, in order to keep the action moving forward.  Most are intrinsic to the story, bringing out important themes, and others are just way too clever to lose.

Some highlights from our last session:  “having been first forced to fight for two factions that didn’t exist.”  Describing the Colonel, you don’t realize until you’re reading it aloud the repeated “F” sound.   It sounded great, though.  There are also a few repeated word gems, for example “we six tireless, though exasperated travellers broke through black thickets and ploughed through ploughed fields till each of us was turned into a figure too outrageous to be mistaken for a tramp.”

Chesterton nearly always includes two adjectives in each sentence that he’s describing something.  A favorite from yesterday:  “The next morning the five of us bewildered but hilarious people took the boat for Dover.”  Hilarious is a great way to describe the way the detectives feel once they realize how duped they’ve been.

Next we’re moving on to the scenes between Gabriel and Professor de Worms.

Scriptshadow Book Review

Scriptshadow.com’s Matt Bird recently included The Man Who Was Thursday as one of six books that have yet to have a movie made (or have one in serious development).  The book is cool, what can I say?  There probably is a head-trippy contemporary version that could make a smash at the box office.  In fact I tried to write one myself, but I never was happy with it.  I cane to realize that the book itself is extremely engaging as is, in the time period it is and with the dialog and characters in place.  Why mess with a good thing?

This audio play adaptation of the book remains faithful to the original that everyone fell in love with.  Of course there are liberties taken, and I’ve inserted a couple of surprises that I think the fans will like.  Oh, and the ending will be just as surreal, so no Hollywood-ization there.

We’re only a few couple sessions in, so there’s a lot of work to go.

Here’s the link to the article.

Recording Begins

This is the humble beginnings of a long journey of recordings.  We’re borrowing a quiet classroom at our local church, doctoring it up with a little sound absorption to dampen reflections, and giving ourselves room to move around.  In this scene Lucien Gregory introduces Gabriel to the underground lair of the London anarchists movement.  We’re using a Zoom 4-track recorder, which records a stereo matrix of the room sound, as well as two shotgun microphones that follow the actors movements.

Welcome to the lion’s den

“Oh, believe me you are not dreaming. In fact, you are close to the most actual and rousing moment of your existence.”

Reading G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday was kind of like that for me… the most actual and rousing moment of my experience reading fiction.  On one hand a detective mystery, on the other, a metaphysical thriller with a heartbeat of philosophy.  This is a line from the character Lucien Gregory before he introduces Gabriel Syme into the underworld of anarchy.

It’s London, turn of the century.  Bombs go off in the street, destroying coffee shops and the innocent lives that happened to be there.  Who is behind these random acts of violence, this deep pain handed out indiscriminately?  Is it people, embodied by the anarchist movement?  Or is it something bigger than ourselves– perhaps the universe itself.  These are big questions to be grappled with, and vital even today.

I’m a filmmaker based in Southern California, and I’ve made it my goal to bring this story to life.  Someday there may be a full-fledged feature film, but I can’t accomplish that right now.  What I can do is produce a radio play featuring the best acting talent and dress it up with music and sound effects to put the listener inside the story.

I held out for awhile, but eventually we became a two iPod family, and haven’t looked back.  In Los Angeles we spend a lot of time in our cars, and the wonderful podcasts and audiobooks we’ve found keep transportation interesting.  There’s a built-in distribution network, and a high demand for quality work.  This project will be released as a four part podcast, for free, online.

There isn’t any money to do this, and it’ll take the majority of 2010, but slowly and surely we’ll get this done.  This is the website home for it, and this is the first post, so welcome.

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