Just as a very oblique teaser, here are a few topics I’ve been looking up online as research, either for fact checking or inspiration:

• Plumbing how-to videos
• Niagara Falls daredevils
• Testosterone
• List of nearest stars
• Dandelions
• The House of Commons schedule
• Michael Cowpland (founder of Corel)
• The ROM galleries
• Niagara Parks Police Service
• Dramatic Arts at Brock University
• The Canadian Top 40 from 1982

Some will make it in as background details, some were dead ends.

And below are some of the notes I’ve made for the series. I like to have some rules to go by, so I’ve chosen a fairly strict structure, and jotted down a bunch of parameters and reminders to myself, based on all the things I’ve found enjoyable or frustrating in other audios over the years.

Tone

Niagara is a science fiction comedy. It’s part sitcom and part adventure serial, with emphasis on character and humour over science fiction and plot.

I think it was while watching Buffy that it hit me – I didn’t care about the vampire stuff. Well, maybe not “didn’t care”... the supernatural elements provided structure and fuel for stories, but the real magic was in watching a bunch of fun, interesting, loveable people do their thing.

The characters are our way into a weird world. They make it real. They make it matter. Since this is part sitcom, though, they don’t always behave like normal people – they need room to be big and weird and illogical sometimes.

Niagara is light, optimistic and fairly free of harsh violence and profanity. If it were a film, it would have at most a PG-13 rating. On rare occasion characters might die, but only for really good reasons – make it meaningful.

Format

Episode length: 24 minutes long, give or take a few seconds. It’s radio-friendly, a reasonable length for a podcast, and three can fit on a CD. Keep to the right length through writing and editing. It may be necessary to draw out a bit of incidental music, but do this only if all else fails.

Cold open: A scene or sequence to set up the story, ending on a hook before the theme music. There are no other explicit breaks until the end, but act breaks can be emphasized with a significant change of scene and possibly some incidental music.

Previously… This being a serial, an intro montage may be helpful to the audience, perhaps 30-45 seconds long. In the case of a podcast, this could be a separate file so listeners can skip it if they’re listening to a bunch of episodes in a row (after all, the choice of plot points may well give away a few things about the current episode).

Outlining

Niagara is fairly naturalistic. There’s no outside narration. Characters may narrate, but only to an audience within the fictional world. Several of our characters have their own storytelling channels (Bruce’s video podcast, for example) which we can use to set the scene and occasionally describe the action. We may also use flashbacks from time to time, but these should be well signposted.

The lack of narration, of course, poses some challenges.

No one can see the setting. Set the scene using ambient sound (a beach, a cafe), acoustics, mic placement and actors’ delivery (characters calling to each other across a snowy field versus talking quietly in a bedroom) and well-chosen dialogue.

No one can see the action. Sound effects can help, but don’t lean on them. Fight scenes and lone characters are usually problematic, and it’s best to sort them out before writing any dialogue.

If a scene is going to require description, try to arrange it ahead of time so that characters have a reason to talk aloud about what’s going on – like two people admiring a sunset, or hiding from a gunman (“Is he still there?” “Shh… No, I think he’s moving”). Members of a team reporting to one another over radio or similar is another common and effective trick.

Change scenes with care, using cues like the above to tell the listener we’ve shifted, and where we’ve shifted to.

The Listener

Don’t annoy the listener. Don’t force them to skip back to catch a subtle plot point (but don’t dumb it down either). Keep the opening and closing credits economical – about 20 seconds and a minute respectively.

Keep the learning curve reasonable. Not too many characters. Make sure they’re all as distinct as possible, through dialogue, personality, situation, voice (from initial casting to things like accents and electronic treatments) and choice of name. And as with character names, when inventing names or words for things like alien planets, try to make them pronounceable, distinct and memorable.

Dialogue

No one can see the characters. Make sure that everyone in the room speaks up from time to time. Make sure they say each other’s names once in a while, especially early in a scene and when we’re getting to know them.

If appearance is important, don’t overload; use a distinguishing feature or two. The recent BBC Radio 4 adaptation of Le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, for example, used repeated mentions of Mundt’s “cold, dead, merciless” eyes, and George Smiley himself is usually some variation on “short, round, glasses, polite”. Just enough that the listener goes, “Aha, that one.”

Production

Make the best recordings possible. A scene set on a street corner shouldn’t sound like it’s taking place in a living room. A fight scene shouldn’t sound cheap because the actors’ shouting overloads the microphones. Sound effects must be carefully matched to avoid breaking the illusion of reality. Mix for headphones and car speakers.

Meet Petra and her family.

Petra was a singer back in the ’70s and ’80s, but these days she works at a bed and breakfast near Niagara Falls. This weekend her kids are dropping by: quietly neurotic Emma and bratty, flamboyant Dayle, as well as Emma’s boyfriend Bruce. And she’s got a couple other guests who might be giant bugs from outer space.

I’ve had a bunch of stories simmering on the back burner for a long while, mostly in the science fiction-comedy vein. As I’ve alluded to in previous years, I’ve been flirting with presenting them different forms, mostly radio plays, online video, and comics. As they’ve percolated, I’ve discovered I don’t have the patience for prose – I’m all about the dialogue. I can draw well enough that I don’t cringe at my own work, but I’m too slow at it to do more than a couple pages. And video – let’s not even go there.

So it’s back to audio plays, delivered via podcast or download. I’ve always loved the form, and had the chance to produce some during my time in campus radio, but until recently I really didn’t have a clue how to use it to tell a story – or to tell a story in any medium, for that matter. And now, it’s all starting to come together at last: plots, background, character arcs, dialogue. The first three-episode story is plotted out and this week some friends came by for a read-through of the first two draft episodes. The thought of actually recording and producing them is a bit daunting at this stage, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

EMMA.   (hushed) Bruce, there’s a… giant bug in the bathtub.
BRUCE.   Ooo, scary. Do you want me to catch it for you?
EMMA.   No, no, like giant. Man-sized.
BRUCE.   Ouch! What did I ever do to you?
EMMA.   Like, literally, the size of… in the bath. Taking a bath.
BRUCE.   Well, let’s get a glass or something and scoop him out and then…
EMMA.   No, no, we can’t go in there, he’s… I mean, he’s using the bathroom.
BRUCE.   You know, for all your claims to be the sane one in the family…
EMMA.   He spoke to me. It sounded like… I think it might be the guys. One of Mom’s guests, from the museum. No, don’t go in —

A couple of my favourite writing resources of late:

Jane Espenson: writer and/or exec on a dozen-plus shows including Buffy, Gilmore Girls and BSG. Her blog archive is a treasure trove of really useful advice, mostly geared to TV work but quite applicable to audio and other forms.

Writing Excuses: three genre writers and occasional guests chat each week about theme, structure and other topics. Lively, useful and to the point (“fifteen minutes long, because you’re in a hurry and we’re not that smart”), it’s one of the most consistently listenable indie podcasts out there.

We released the first full-length Flickershow CD, entitled Drawing A Blank. Ten songs; I played bass, sang harmony, did arrangements and other odds and ends. We’re quite proud of it, and the CD release party was a blast. There’s a link to buy it online from our website, and it’s also available through that music store Apple runs. Things have been a bit quiet since the CD release, since Julian’s just got married (check out their awesome first dance on the YouTube) but there will be gigging in the new year, and with luck some out-of-town gigs in the spring.

All other music ventures have been on hold, meanwhile. I’m starting to plot my return to action, but it’s been nice to take a break for a few months and mess around with other things like writing and drawing (including the cover art for our CD) and catching up on comics.

I haven’t been a big follower of comics, though I was dimly aware that there were amazing things going on in the medium. The whole field just seemed too big and daunting. Where do you start reading?

I heard about Scott Pilgrim from all sorts of people at once. It’s a breezy, lovably dorky romance packed with Canadian indie rock in-jokes, ’90s-style video game showdowns and Toronto landmarks including Honest Ed’s, Lee’s Palace and the Toronto Reference Library, among others.

I was through all five volumes before I knew it. Volume six is on the way next year, and so is the movie, directed by Edgar Wright of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead fame. And having finally watched Spaced, the Channel Four sitcom Wright directed (written by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson; check out the first episode, also on the YouTube), I’m jazzed. It’s a match made in nerdy heaven.

From there, it was on to some more Canadiana – Seth’s It’s A Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and Jeff Lemire’s Essex County trilogy.

The most fascinating book I’ve happened on lately, though, is Alison (“Dykes To Watch Out For”) Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a memoir of her rocky childhood through to her coming-out – and the turmoil that followed soon after, first with the revelation that her father had had affairs with numerous young men over the years; and then his sudden and suspicious death. It’s twisty and intricate, full of literary allusions and dark, deadpan humour, as might be expected from someone whose parents were English teachers who also ran a funeral home. (“It was somewhere during those early years that I began confusing us with the Addams Family.”) Just wow.

I’ll have to wander up to the Beguiling soon to grab another armful of books. However, after Fun Home, I might just take a detour into classic literature.

A few first impressions:

Decent sized keyboard, but weird key placement: there are in fact two backslash/pipe keys, both placed for maximum annoyance where my fingers expect the Enter and left Shift keys to be; more on this below. Included battery is a bit clunky but packs several hours’ worth of power. The camera (see right) is possibly worse than my cheapass phone, but I’m not too bothered about that.

The model I have came with Windows XP, which I have no use for on a daily basis - Windows and I simply do not get along. However, it may be of some use for, say, previewing websites, and in any case this machine has more than enough drive space to keep it around. So I’ve loaded on the latest Ubuntu Netbook Remix (version 9.10, codenamed “Karmic Koala”). The installer conveniently partitioned the drive and set up dual booting. It’s snappy, no-frills and wakes from suspend mode in an instant, and features a simple launcher app that provides access to your programs. However, there are numerous quirks and pitfalls, even with this most user-friendly of Linuxes. I’m no Unix expert, so it was a good day or so of Googling and gritting of teeth to get everything in order.

In particular, it took ages to get wireless networking going. The basic procedure turned out to be something like: download the drivers for the Broadcomm wireless adapter and extract to a handy directory; install ndiswrapper and ndisgtk using the Synaptic Package Manager; launch ndisgtk and tell it where the driver .inf file is, and things should work—however, your proverbial mileage may vary; I found the solution through much trial and error and online forum-digging.

Likewise a hack to make those ridiculous backslash keys behave like Shift and Enter. One solution turns out to be simply: create a file called .xmodmap in your home directory and put the following in it:

keycode 51 = Return NoSymbol Return NoSymbol Return
keycode 94 = Shift_L NoSymbol Shift_L NoSymbol Shift_L
add Shift = Shift_L

There are some hiccups with Javascript under Firefox, notably Gmail’s labeling system (rather than opening a dropdown, it just sent everything to my Drafts folder).

The standard codecs for audio and video don’t seem to work. There may be fixes down the road for this, but again, I’m not too concerned; I have an MP3 player for that.

UNR has a background app that makes sure programs launch in full-screen mode, which is great most of the time—there’s no room for multiple windows on something this size. However, it has odd effects on some programs intended for a windowed environment, and it helps to know that Alt-F10 switches the current program in and out of full-screen.

And speaking of that little screen: surfing, reading or doing pretty much anything else that requires staring at it for too long is a recipe for a stiff neck and a headache. (For similar reasons, I’ve decided my hand-me-down iPhone is a lousy game machine.) But that’s not such a handicap—all I wanted, after all, was a fancy word processor. So if you ever see me touch-typing and staring off into the distance, you’ll know why.

One particular aspect that interested me was Pärt’s use of process, following simple, deterministic procedures to generate stirring music from extremely limited material. It’s similar in some senses to Steve Reich‘s phase pieces, or Brian Eno‘s loop-based ambient works, but there are big differences.

Reich’s phase music uses short loops, whether that’s physical loops of recording tape, percussion or piano figures that are simply repeat throughout the piece. These fall in and out of phase with each other, shifting from unison to a subtle echo to cacophony to tightly interlocking patterns, and finally come back into phase again, bringing the piece back to where it began.

Eno’s ambient pieces, such as Music For Airports, were inspired by Reich’s work, but use loops of uneven length that will practically never repeat. Eno’s self-stated goal was to create pieces that were effectively infinite, something he was able to explore further once computer music technology allowed it—he coined the term “generative music” to describe it. It comes as no surprise, really, that Eno’s designing the chimes to be sounded by the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now.

But where Reich’s pieces are cyclic and Eno’s aspire to being infinite, Arvo Pärt’s music is more fatalistic. We heard a recording of his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which uses as its basic material a descending A-minor scale, with violins moving fastest and lower strings progressively more slowly, but all moving toward the tonic—their ultimate destination. The whole piece is relentless in its finality, moving inexorably downward until at last the high strings linger on their notes, waiting for the basses to catch up, and the long final chords boil with a kind of dread—fitting for a meditation on death.

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir close out their North American tour with a stop in Toronto tomorrow night, but sadly, I won’t be there. My consolation: we’ll be in the studio mixing the new Flickershow CD!

I’d been avoiding the issue for a long time, but today we had a truck rented to do a Goodwill run, and I made the decision to let them all go, pretty much on the spur of the moment. It was actually the first time I’ve been in a CD store in years, and aside from the occasional gift, I don’t imagine I’ll have any cause to do so again. I felt more than a little awkward walking in there with all my boxes — while I was giving them a lot of good stuff (several hundred dollars’ worth, in fact), I was essentially renouncing their services as well.

Aside: my first musical purchase, to my memory, bought at a little shopping mall music store: a cassette of 1000 Airplanes on the Roof by Philip Glass (having been mesmerized by a clip of Koyaanisqatsi on TV).

I don’t remember what the first vinyl I bought was. My mother and I used to park at Yorkdale and ride the subway down to Osgoode to shop at the book and music shops along Queen West, and I picked up lots of Eno, Tomita and Jean-Michel Jarre at Driftwood Music.

First CDs: Electric Cafe by Kraftwerk, The Shutov Assembly by Brian Eno and a 4-track sampler from Hi-Tech/No Crime, an album of YMO remixes by contemporary (ca. 1991) UK electronic acts. The last CD I bought for myself was Komeda’s Kokomemedada.

The hardest part: letting go of all the vinyl box sets of classics Sean’s late father collected and treasured, which we’d had for ages but never played. In the truck, we agreed we’ll have to download some of his dad’s favorites — he was fond of the Russians, especially Shostakovich, and loved opera too. Perhaps something to listen to as we unpack and settle in.

I’ve been making up some patches for my Evolver synth to use it as an effect on guitar or bass, and thought it’d be nice to have some sort of pedal to control it, along the lines of a wah or volume pedal. The desktop model of the Evolver lacks a pedal input, hence the Express (for “expression”, both of the musical and genetic kind - evolution, geddit?). Currently, it reads one analog pin and spits out continuous controller data. Nothing particularly spectacular there, but it did fit wonderfully into the sturdy steel case from a computer keyboard A/B switchbox. There’s room for lots more inputs, and eventually I figure it’ll sport an additional analog in and some footswitch inputs which will send things like note on/off messages.

I’m still new to making enclosures, and to working metal in particular - instead of grinding out a hole that was slightly too narrow, I used a drill, which grabbed hold of the edges and warped the heck out of the front panel. Panic set in for a moment, but I managed to bash the thing back into shape using a busted old hard drive(!) as an anvil.

Word to the wise: there are two incompatible standards for the wiring of expression pedals:

1/4” - tip to wiper / ring to +5V / sleeve to ground: Clavia, CME, Electrix, Emu, Kurzweil, Oberheim, Roland/Boss
1/4” - ring to wiper / tip to +5V / sleeve to ground: Kawai, Korg, Yamaha

The former arrangement allows you to use a standard normalling jack to connect the tip to ground by default, so the input doesn’t float if nothing’s plugged in. I’m using a Boss pedal now, but my other pedal is a Yamaha, so if I want to use it as a second input, I’ll have to wire up something to cross those connections.

Being easily distractible by possibilities - giant trackball! LED matrix! stepper motor-controlled time-lapse photography! - I’m desperately trying to focus on a couple of projects at a time. Arduino project number two at present is using it for ultra-cheap and dirty sound generation, with piezo disc speakers plugged directly into the digital outputs. A little hacked-together code, and voilà:

The Bee (MP3, 640k)

I call it the Bee, though “Mosquito” might have been more appropriate. Modulating the pulse width creates some nice motion, but there’s a lot more to do, like getting R/C filters to tame some of the harshness - it really is annoying after a while. Oh yes, and putting a switch on it to shut it up between tests. And, of course, buttons and knobs to play it with… maybe even some sort of acoustic treatment, like a resonating soundbox or a spring reverb.