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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