S2E29 - Giant Excel Sheets of DOOOOM

My computers that don't work.

And I was like, oh, yeah, we were gonna swap it up. Well, at any rate, hello and welcome to behind the Locked Doors, a Monday podc. I guess now we've switched after two years.

Monday boys now.

Yeah. And technically this is also our like one, but like we've hit the two year mark now, so we probably should do like a retrospective or whatever. But that sounds like effort, so no thank you.

Ew. I don't want to think about it.

So I am Scott Paladin. I am recording a podcast, a horny werewolf audio drama called It Takes a Wolf.

Yahoo. I'm Jack. I'm working on writing, not recording, won't be recording for probably a long time. Working on writing Azin west, which is a spinoff of the actual play Unspeakable Distance.

Hi, I'm Mike, AKA Interiority. And I'm working on having a functioning respiratory system.

Yay.

For the first time in a couple of weeks and holding out hope that those around me also are able to breathe. And then maybe we can achieve more than that.

Yeah, literally.

It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Right. Like you gotta have the health and wellness before you can work on your health breathing.

Making a podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we're gonna check in on our goals. I had like list of everything that I needed to do and I think I've been pretty good on it all. But one of my ensemble people has been recorded at this point and I already did one session with the principal crew a little bit. We have another one on Saturday and I have to follow up with one of my actors to find out if he's actually going to be there or not. But I did, you know, we, I did contract stuff. I, I think that was it. Yeah, I sent all of the giant rejection emails. So if you didn't get an email from me, if you submitted to the casting call and you didn't get an email from me, it's because your email bounced because I got bunch of those back from people who like put in the wrong address to the form, so. Or check your spam folder, I guess. I don't know. But yeah, like it's. Everybody's been informed at this point and yeah, like I said, I did the, did the ensemble stuff and already got a bunch of those recorded.

Nice.

And yeah, so we're, we're hopefully going to have the vast majority of it recorded by the end of this month and if not that, then we'll have a little bit of independent and we should be good. Yeah.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Chugging right along. Yeah, my check in is that I did bang down a couple more words, but I have not yet completed the assignment I set myself from last time, which was complete a draft of episode three. I would say I am maybe 75% of the way through a rough draft of episode three. So it's coming along. I still need to get ahold of Sam and discuss some, like, overarching B plot stuff. Oh, hi, Twig. Twig interlude, everybody. He's so cute and little. Oh, my God, look at him. Listeners, I'm so sorry you can't see this white little dog that is sitting in Scott's lap so cutely. Anyway, yeah, that's my update. I'm working on it. I. I have not yet hit the end of the draft of this episode, though.

I was going to do things, but then I remembered Twig existed, so therefore I just lost all motivation. It's just like, well, you know, why bother? Like, perfection is already here in front of us on the camera.

Believe me, living with this guy, he is not perfection. He is a little asshole. We just have to give in to his whims, otherwise he makes life hell.

He really had a lot to say when we were trying to record the other night.

That was both him and Birdie boy. Yeah, that was.

Oh, they were both saying they wanted to be on the podcast. They were like, dad, hello.

Yeah, sorry.

Please, please, Mike, give us your.

No, no, it's fine. Like, one of the great regrets of my life is I made it all the way to Colorado and didn't meet Scott's dogs for some reason. Don't know how I managed that. That was a mistake.

We were busy. We were running around. Yeah. I thought about suggesting taking them to the dog park, but I was like, ah, that's all the way up. I would have been.

I would have been well up for that.

The thing is, everyone would have been like, please.

Next time, next time, next time, Gadget.

Okay, so, yeah, I've got to come up with the actual excuse why I haven't done anything in the. Yeah. Mainly because I've been pretty ill and it's not been great. But also my producing partner has been pretty ill and also under the cost of, like, it's been a reporting month for their day job, so they've been stressed and unable to get out of bed for a lot of it as well. So all the things, the grand plans that we expected to do together have come to naught at the moment, which, you know, it is fine. It may impact some kind of deadline stuff in the future. We'll see. Quite frankly, I think what happened was Scott initiated some sort of failure ritual and basically stole all the productivity that we were going to have. Like, it all kind of like just got funneled up in some sort of like dark whirlwind of strange energies.

I mean, I did, I did sacrifice a goat over a copper bowl and invoke.

Yeah, I knew it.

Hermes Tristras.

And you know, usually we trade the brain cell. With no brain cell to be had amongst the whole caboodle of us, it had to be productivity instead.

Yes. Yeah, yeah. Motivation and the actual ability to do things was stolen from me in a most heinous in a fell ritual.

Right.

Yeah. But, you know, like, it's. It's probably gonna result in a kick ass podcast, so I can't really complain.

Yeah, I'm not like mad at it.

But I mean, like, the, the thing is, like, I would really love to be kind of involved in the day to day of the recording, but I know that my doing that would like, negate all of the productivity that Scott's already stolen because I would just be the, the biggest menace that there was and I would just make everything worse and like, it would drag on for ages and people.

Yeah, like worse, but also funnier.

Yeah, but fun. But fun.

Yeah, I mean, like, morale would be high. The actual achievement would be fairly low. So.

Yeah, well, yeah, the truth is that I'm. What appears to be productivity is just me running on, like, vast amounts of stress. Like, my wife has several times been like, are you okay? And I'm like, are you doing okay? Whether or not I'm okay doesn't matter. What matters is that this gets done now.

Listeners. Don't. Don't run your life like that. Yeah, we're not endorsing that model of making a podcast.

That's how things get done. If we worked at the pace of Scott being comfortable, it would.

We.

We'd still be writing. It would still have taken multiple years of writing and I would. I wouldn't have made any of the phone calls I needed to make or sent any of the emails because of, you know, anxiety and all that. So this is just me being like, okay, vibrating, just vibrating like a guitar string and doing it.

I'm proud of you for fucking doing it. I'm sorry. It's scary. It's.

I. I have got to make the art. Right? Like, you got to do the. You got to do the hard part too. Yeah. So I Have a. A legitimate problem that I would love to hear Yalls thoughts about.

Okay.

Which is because I have when running podcast productions, you know, like, you just run one recording session or a couple of recording sessions. You record everything all the way through. You, like, basically are breaking just, like, by scene, by scene. This takes a Wolf is so. Has so many more moving parts and has so much more text. Overall, this is the shortest period of time in which I'm going to be covering as much text as I ever have. If not, well, actually a lot more. And I'm literally struggling with how do I keep track of everything that I've got. Like, literally, like, how? Like, to know that I have everything recorded, like, from both my principals and, like, myself too, because, like, I'm gonna have to go into a recording studio in the next week. Recording studio? My closet. I'm have to go into the closet and record, you know, thousands upon thousands of words. And I literally am not sure. Like, I get. I'm. I. The thing that is one of my stressors right now is that I'll get to the end of December and be like, oh, no, I'm missing a line from somewhere or someone and I have to go, you know, run them down and, you know, or myself go back and like, literally, like that I'll get to the edit and be missing something that's going to be relatively easy to do under two episodes. But when I get to doing the remaining seven kind of all at once again, I'm like, oh, my God, I should have a system in place. And I have kind of no idea how to do this. So if you have thoughts or if you have experience, like, if you have ideas, I will take them.

Okay. So I will say I do have experience in, like, producing. I was not the producer, but I did direct and was running down the people to pick up, do all the pickups for a fairly complex set of episodes for breathing space that had, like, I don't know, 14 actors in it or some stupid number. My own fault. I did this myself. But yeah, we were like, you know, getting to the editing stage, and Sam was like, yo, homie, we are missing three lines from this person on this page. And then I had to go, like, hunt through the files and be like, okay, I think it was from this day that we recorded this session at this time, this person's recording. And then either it was in there or Sam would go through and be like, bro, these lines are not. Like, they never said this with their mouth. And then we did have to go chase Them down tree record. I think the better way to organize that would probably have been to, like, keep decently careful notes every time you sit down to do a recording of which pages you recorded and which chunks actually got, like, locked in clean takes. Because I know, like, this past weekend we recorded some stuff for It Takes a Wolf. And we left big sections, like, just totally unread because there's going to be narration that we go back and do later. But we were like, we are just going to read the little lead in line so that when we're getting the clean takes of the spoken dialogue, they know when to come in, that all that other stuff has not been recorded. And I think probably the way that I would do it if it were me running things is to, like, have a, like, you know, Google Doc version of the script up where you can either change the text color or highlight or some way of marking. There is a clean take of this. We can cross it off the list. We know exactly which recording session it's in, and we know that it's locked and ready to go.

Yeah, that. And I have done versions of that of what you're talking about in the past where I, like, literally just highlighted, like, I literally had a PDF and I would just highlight the text as it got recorded. The only thing that. That I can. I would want more than that, which is not just that everything got recorded, but, like, you're talking about with notes.

Of where it is, when and where.

When and where.

Right. Yeah.

To match it up to a timecode or something like that. Or a file. Say, hey, look, this section right here should be in Ensemble Person Number one's file. You know, this one here should be from the Riverside recording on this date.

Yes. Which I had that type of checklist for Judah. When we were, like, you know, trying to hunt through and get everything edited. I was like, referring back to my recording schedules because there were so many recording sessions for those episodes because there were so many people and. And we had so many people's files and they all had, like, multiple dates on them, multiple sessions on them. We had some days where we recorded two different times the same day or whatever. Oh, my God. So, yeah, keeping very, very careful notes about what happened in which session and which pages you covered in which session was really, really useful for me and for Ash and Sam.

Yeah, I was just gonna say, I mean, I think Jack's pretty much hit the nail on the head, like, having some. Some way of having it in a format where you can maybe comment or do some sort of kind of like. Yeah, adding in notes, E. So if you do highlight a certain section of the script, you can know what that indicates. Like, is this something we've got in the bag? Is this something that you rode from Async? And you know, you haven't. You haven't received yet and you need to chase up that sort of thing. I will utter the forbidden word, which is Excel.

No, I'm.

A lot of. A lot of people use it in various ways to keep track of this sort of stuff. I know people who actually put their scripts directly into Excel. So line by line, they know the status of who's supposed to be recording it. Is it sync? Is it Async, what dates have been recorded on? You can do filters to basically say kind of like, you know, like, what do we have in what's missing, what status, you know, uncertain, what do we need to do, retakes, all that sort of thing. And you know, obviously you can then split it out by actor and, you know, it can help you kind of keep on top of the things as well. Yeah, it's like, that's always seemed like crazy to me, but like, you know, when I actually think about the scale of like the production for some of the things I'm envisioning doing in the future, it's like, oh, yeah, actually that might be a good idea.

That might be really helpful to keep.

On top of it.

You've reminded me that that's not line by line, but scene by scene is the break. I did like an Excel breakdown for, well, Fable of the Family, which on the same sort of scale that it.

Takes a wolf on.

Actually, I kind of forgotten that I had done something similar sort of.

It's like, oh, yeah, I did something this complicated already.

Yeah.

And. And that was enough recording sessions and that was enough people in it that I literally. Yeah, I had an Excel or a spreadsheet where I had every scene broken down. That can't. I can't use scene breakdowns for. It takes a wolf because there are no scenes. In true Scott Paladin fashion, every single episode just starts and then goes all the way to the end. But a line by line breakdown may actually be the best way to do it. I bet I can get fade in to export something that I can. I don't have to do it manually. Let me look here real quick.

Yeah, unfortunately, I don't have anything to hand in terms of like the practical way of doing it. There are a lot of conversations online in the usual sort of spaces. People have very Intense conversations about how people organize this and have opinions about who's a sicko and who's not for doing it in certain ways. But, yeah, there are people who do it. There are ways of going about it, and I'm sure there's advice to do it. There are also a couple of people who are our mutual acquaintances where I could probably point you in the direction of. I believe Daisy is an exile sicko, so he may be able to help in that sort of regard or at least point you in the direction of some sort of guide or resource to.

Thank God we know at least one exile sicko, because it's not me. I was writing all them damn notes by hand.

No, no, no.

It's.

Well, and like, I'm a. I'm like, not a sicko, but like a novice. I do use it for a lot of stuff, but, like, I don't, like. Just as a. Just as an aside, this is a. I think this is a funny story, and it'll help anybody who makes mistakes in the future. I was doing my budget the other day, and I was. I had two columns, and then one of them was this. It was, you know, certain number of words all totaled up, times, you know, pay rate. That was the total budget. And then I had another column which calculated the same thing, but differently. Right. Like, it came across a different set of columns to come down, and it should have been the same, and they were like $600 off. I said to go to my wife and be like, you know, you know, you know Excel so much better than I do. What did I do wrong?

What did I do?

And that was after I discovered, to my great joy, I guess, that I was sixteen hundred dollars overestimating what I needed.

Love that for you.

Yeah. And I was. Because I was double counting a thing, and I was like, well, here's money that I don't have to spend now. Hilarious. If anybody else gets to these kinds of point in a project and then you make a, you know, very large mistake, hey, anybody can. It's that you will make mistakes. You'll make errors that way, guys. No, thank you, Twig.

Scott's like, you will make mistakes. And his dogs are like, yeah. They're like, well, be sure of it. Hi, Twig.

Yeah, so like a. An Excel. Yeah, maybe just a line by line. Excel Doc is maybe the way to go.

It's worth a try. And, you know, you might be able to kind of experiment with the first two episodes before you get into producing the whole rest of the season and see what works with a smaller chunk of the show.

That's. That's kind of what I'm hoping is that although I, you know, like, I could probably just keep it all in my head for two episodes. That's how I would have done it In Breathing Space. Any particular episode. I could just. I just know it well enough to. To know what got recorded or not. But I can't do that with seven. So. Yeah. Using this as the model for what I'll end up doing later is important.

Yeah. And worth considering ahead of time.

I already started a Kanban board for like a larger scale of episode production. If anybody's unfamiliar with kanb. If you've ever seen a thing where they have like columns with cards underneath the. In each column. And as you do various things on the. On the project, the cards move to various stages and you can add notes to it.

Stuff.

It's.

It.

It uses. It's originally from. I think it was originally from manufacturing, but it ended up in software development a lot. And so that's just a way to keep track of kind of broadly where everything is. But the granularity of like, did this get recorded different. There's a different level of detail there. Dude, you can't stand in the lap. You have to sit in the lap.

Okay.

There we go.

Thank you.

Please. He wants Cute.

Putting his nose, like up Scott's nostrils, basically. Very cute.

He wants to lick inside people's ears. That's his greatest desire in life.

Which is.

I mean, if you're into that sort of thing, he'd be a great dog. I find it a bit unnerving when he's trying to lick my brain.

Yeah. He's like, you don't have to be doing all of that wig.

Okay. So, yeah, I. I've been. That's probably a good. Yeah. I think I may end up just having to do some sort of Excel tracking thing that might also be useful for. For phase one, I'm pretty set on doing absolutely all of the editing myself. Like everything from rough edit to assembly. For phase two, I. I think I would like to have a line editor. Somebody who could like do the rough assembly part of it. And then I come back in and do final tweaks. And something like a line by line breakdown of the whole thing where everything is. Would be very helpful when you're dealing with somebody who's not you. Right. Like you're trying to communicate to somebody else where stuff is.

Yeah.

And then also a way for them, like, you know, here's what take was Selected. Here's where the alternate takes are. Stuff like that would be probably very useful.

My God, being able to like have your spreadsheet of what has been recorded when also having the take notes would be so convenient to like have that all in one place.

Yeah. Could you. My breath isn't that bad. Okay. He's.

Twig is like nose in Scott's mouth. Like, let me smell everything you've eaten in the past week, please.

It's a very twig heavy episode today, I guess.

Okay, listen, we love him. No, no, Raggarts. I'm never mad to see twig. Yeah.

Okay, so see, is there any. Do you guys have any other, like, questions?

Like this is.

I. I want to want this podcast to be a nice picture into what's actually happening during production.

Yeah.

I'm a little bit in the weeds right now to know what people might want to know about production.

I can't.

I'm not gonna do spoiler things. Like we haven't announced who the cast is yet, so I'm. Some of that stuff I'm gonna, I'm gonna hold off on. Although I guess, Jack, you gave away a little bit of that.

Sorry.

Yeah.

Which is fine. I think was a pretty safe guess that I was gonna put somebody from this part of the podcast in it.

Yeah, I'm in it. I won't tell you who. You'll find that out later.

I will say that the cast is amazing, but if you guys have like questions about how things are going or stuff in the. I you think would be useful as.

As the outsider, I guess. Like, I do have some questions about kind of like. Yeah, like how things are proceeding. Like, mainly like, how have you been able to rein in Jack? Because I've been in multiple recording sessions with them and I've been in conversations very recently about kind of like how. How much Jack's just upended, like recording. Just generally it's always my.

Okay. To be fair, Mike, I do upend recordings often, but it's always my computer out on me or my microphone or some combination.

Personality wise, Jack's not in my top five of top disruptors. I have people who are way higher on the like causing bullshit train, some of whom are. Are going to show up later in the podcast.

But. Okay, okay. Yeah, I was going to say kind of like.

Yeah.

Have you encountering kind of like what level of bullshit have you encountered so far in the initial recording session?

Like, well, yeah, my mic wasn't fucking working immediately.

It's mostly been technical stuff.

Yeah.

And this is Also, the first time that I'm using Riverside as our, like, primary thing. And so I've been doing that with a lot of the ensemble people as well, where they just come in. I, you know, we sit across. I hit record here and then I get it run.

It's.

Those have been running really slick. We've only had one, like, principal cast recording, which went quite well. I mean, like, the amount of disruption from that was not. It was not particularly high. It was a fun recording session. We got a lot of good stuff done and there was enough. Like, it's weird. You do want a certain amount of disruption. You bring this up like it's a. It's a jokey thing.

But, like, you do want, like, you.

Want to be able to get to know people and like. Yeah.

You want to feel comfortable with the other actors. Yeah.

It's not feeling. Sometimes it's not about Rainy and sometimes it's a. Making sure that you get the joke. You say the joke that you think of at the time too. So that's been good. The ensemble stuff has been. Has been quite fun. Like, about 50% of the people are ready to record on. When I meet them on Revsykes, I want to talk to. Every one of my rules that I have said for myself for It Takes a Wolf is I will never let anybody record unless I have talked to them about the. What they're going to be recording.

That's a slick way to do it.

Yeah. Rather than I. There's a. There's a real thing in some more professional spaces where people just hand you a script and say, here's the part. Do it. And my thing is like, no, I want to. I want to talk to everybody about it. Even though, you know, the four line people who are, you know, you know, guard number one who, you know, like, reasonably, you could probably just. Just hand somebody a script. But I want to have everybody talked. I want to talk to everybody. And so I'm using Riverside for those conversations. And about half the time people are like, oh, yeah, I'm in my recording school. Let's just do it. And it's been very good for me because I haven't record. I haven't directed in a year or so to have a little bit of. Of quick. A quick chance to get back in and say, oh, yeah, this is. This is how I. I give people direction. This is the correct way to get people to do what you want. If I'm a little distracted because Sam is Now in our DMs telling us that that he can't come. Fuck.

I forgot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was predicted.

As foretold.

Yeah. As foretold. Yeah. They. So it's. It's. Jack has been remarkably well behaved. Their technology has not. If that's the real. If that's the answer to that question.

Well, everybody share. Also, thus far, I have worked only with actors I've never met before. So I feel like I'm on better behavior when I'm meeting new people than if you put me with, you know, Vic or whoever. Like, we just become a nightmare. I'll try not to be. I will try not to be a nightmare, but.

Well, hey, man, you're getting paid a flat rate. Not by the hour. So as long as, you know, if it takes forever, it doesn't bother me.

Yeah. It only bothers, like, all the other people who have, like, probably other shit to do and, like, lives to live.

Yeah.

And whatnot.

I will say we. We said in the past, guys, we said in the past, like a thing that we. We had a whole, whole conversation about never, ever try to schedule recording during November and December.

Yeah, we did talk about that, didn't we? What happened to that?

I was like, I am never going to do that again. I'm going to do whatever I can not to make sure that doesn't happen.

Yeah.

And that's also what I'm doing right now. Now scheduling has been a particular headache there.

Yeah. Scott sent out the, like, let us meet, whatever, and I looked at it and I went, okay, well, so I could do like three hours this one weekend and two hours this other weekend and not at all this weekend. It's November. I don't know what to tell you. I'm a retail worker.

Yeah. So that's been fun.

Sorry.

I'm hoping that we have another. We have another one scheduled this weekend. I'm hoping that one goes through. If it doesn't, then I'm probably gonna have to break and do everybod. Be on one on one or independent, probably, which I was really hoping not to do. I was. I was hoping to get at least all of my. Because there's a scene with, like five people in it. In.

Would you consider running that scene with, like, three or four? If we don't have the entire crew.

That'S what we're doing. If that's.

That's the.

That we're already at that spot.

We're already at it.

Yeah. We're already at the, like, three or four people who can make it, other people who just can't. Because it's life.

Yeah. Because it's.

And if we lose. Basically, it's like, if we lose any more. One more person that I'm like, I. I'm not gonna. Like. There's just so much back and forth that, like, you can't. Like, of the care. What percentage of characters in a scene not being there makes it not worth recording. Like, you no longer getting the benefit of it being a full cast. Yes. Asynchronous recording. If ever. If. If more than half the people are gone. So if that's the case, then I'm gonna have to break and do one on ones probably, Or. Or meet with people and then have them do independent. And we'll do the back and forth there. Which I was. I was really hoping not to. I wanted my blackwoods all to meet and, like, hang out and, like, get some.

You know, have a rapport with each other.

Rapport. But that's. That's life. That's November. If I was. If I was smarter, I would have finished this six months earlier and we could have done it during the summer when everybody was. I had this thought back in August of, like, oh, shit, should I push it to 2026? Should I just push the whole thing to next year?

Sure.

And I was like, I can't. I. I can't do that. Like, my. My soul would not allow me to, like, sit on it for what felt like six months.

Yeah. You want the momentum because, like, you finished writing and you were. I wrote it now. Like, we have to make it. Like, I have to make it asap.

Yeah.

And. Well, it did take long. Like, I. I held off on for personal reasons. I held off for one month, and then it took me longer to cast. And so, like, it is. I wasn't trying. I thought we were gonna be recording on October. Turns out, no, but that's. That's life. Yeah. So the. Yeah, the. Yeah. My biggest stressor right now is other than the fact that just, you know, general in life is. Is keeping track of everything at this point. There's so many plates in the air. I can see why in. In lots of ways, it takes a wolf. In a lot of ways was me wanting to do something that I owned kind of 100% after working on such a collaborative project for so long, I was like, I need something that's just Scott. That's just me. Because I want to a. I want to prove I can do it. And also, I want to have something that's un. Unalloyed. An unalloyed version of my own voice.

Yeah.

And I wanted to do. And those are very important to me. But it also very much indicates how hard it is to do something on your own. Right. Like where if I'm doing all. If I do everything that I can do, that puts a lot of pressure on me and a lot of things that I have to keep spinning. And that is. That's hard. That's stressor. It's. I think it's going to work out okay for this first phase, at least. But it does make me appreciate how many hands shared the work on previous projects.

Yeah. The problem with doing everything yourself is you have to do everything yourself.

Yeah.

Fuck.

And sometimes that's great. You know, I. Like I said, I really do value that it takes a wolf is my voice all the way through. Like, it's a thing that is from me. And I got to say things in it that I wouldn't have been able to say if it wasn't just me doing the writing. And I will feel incredibly proud when it's done. I feel incredibly proud to have gotten as far as I have.

But literally, as you should, being the.

Sole guy behind it is. Is. Is stressful. That's not. I'm gonna deny that. And so, yeah, just keeping track of everything and making sure it all happens. My nightmare is that, like, you know, we get. Well, I got a bunch of nightmares, but one of them is that, like, you know, two months from now, somebody's like, oh, by the way, I never got paid.

Yeah, I need that to.

I need that not to happen. Yeah, stuff like that. So, yeah, it's fun, though. I mean, like, I. I'm. I sound like I'm complaining. I am complaining, but, like. And everybody's allowed to complain.

Point. But, yeah, you're lying.

I am excited that things have gotten this far. Getting to hear dialogue that I wrote two years ago come to life. And like, for things that I. That ne. I never really heard aloud until somebody said them. And to hear the joke work, to hear the, like, the way that the line is supposed to read come off the way that I expected it to and for. To like, for just hear somebody else put a little bit more spin on it that I knew and then like, to make it, like, have them make it work.

That never gets old, like, ever.

So rewarding. So there. It's an intense time of right now, but it's. It's. And I am stressed about it, but it is also good. I want to make sure that people are aware that I am aware how good it is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Hopefully the show is good too.

Yeah. Mike, I'm so excited for you to be in that spot. To be like, oh, my God, we're recording the thing. People are saying the stuff aloud. Holy shit. It's a thing that exists in the world.

Well, and you've been there with. With.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah. And yeah, I fully agree with everything that said. Like, it's. It's my favorite part of the process. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I excited you to be there on your, like, baby. The, like, thing that, like, you're in Scott's position six months earlier or whatever. Like.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

On the cusp of, like, recording the thing that you wrote from start to finish.

Yeah. So, yeah, fingers crossed. It still continues to happen at some.

Point, but yeah, once everyone's less. I got a lot of confidence in you, man. Yeah, you'll get it done.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The excitement is a little bit there. I'm allowing myself a little bit. Only a little bit.

That is cool, dude.

I cannot. Okay, this is a dog episode.

Twig is telling me that we're done recording because he is.

Well, so Scott has these, like, big over ear headphones on right now, and I can tell that Twig is like, father, how can I lick your brain under these conditions?

Yeah, that's.

Why.

Why are you. Why are you upset with me?

Because he can't lick your brain. He's so upset.

Okay, all right, well, let's. Let's set some goals. It looks like we'll be meeting again. Wait, wait, wait. I have to check. Is that Thanksgiving week? Because if it's Thanksgiving week, we're probably not meeting then, right?

Yeah. So, okay, when I look at. Oh, no. So when I look at my calendar, it looks like December 1st is two weeks from now.

Okay, we'll tentatively say that we're still meeting that week.

Okay.

Yeah, so we'll talk to the audience. Wait, wait, we have to do our update or set our goals. Okay, so.

Make a podcast.

December 1st, we will. We'll be still recording at that point. So I will have either done this one. That's next weekend. We will have rescheduled it, or everybody will be on independence and I'll start rescheduling those. So that's my big thing by then is just to have to be on the path towards having everything recorded. My official due date is. Is December 15th for recordings to be done. So it's the neck. It's two weeks after that, but hopefully we'll have a big chunk of it done. Me personally, though, I will have at least, probably 60. I'm hoping 60, 70% of my record done for it, because.

Nice.

I should have that Thanksgiving week by myself. Basically. My wife's going off the family, so I should. I'm going to be like, just buckling down and trying to get all of that recorded. Ruining my voice with the gravel of the narrator and lots of honey tea between takes and taking breaks. That's the big thing is like, yeah, whenever you're. I don't have a lot of advice. I have a lot. I'm a white dude. I have unearned confidence. So I do have a lot of advice to give. But one of the few, like, things I know is true is if you are doing something with your voice and it starts to become uncomfortable, you have to stop. Never push yourself. If you can at all help it. You can absolutely cause real damage to your voice. Things that you know will forever, like, forever change your ability to use it as an instrument and your own comfort. So take breaks if you're ever doing anything strenuous.

Listen to your body.

Yeah, listen to your body. So, yeah, next, in two weeks, I will have the vast majority of my own narration recorded and we'll have hopefully a big chunk of everybody else too. So.

Nice.

How about you, Jack?

Maybe I'll actually finish the draft of this episode that I'm working on. Who could say? I'm also, like, preparing. I'm a. I'm an artist locally and there's always, like art fairs this time of year. So I'm like scrambling around to prepare for those. And those are all at like the beginning of December as well. So I'm like. But I'm gonna. I'm gonna try to finish that draft. I'm gonna try to, like, find a half an hour somewhere to get on the phone with Sam and talk about some. Some B plot stuff for Azen west and also do a bunch of recording for. It takes a while.

How about you, mate?

Well, I think I've got three things I need to sort out. One is I need to kind of touch base with my producer again because we haven't actually talked in a while because we both haven't had the ability to talk for a few weeks. So a lot of what's gonna happen after that is gonna be dependent on kind of what comes out of that meeting in terms of, like, timelines, if we still got the same aims or not. So we'll see. Second thing is I need to do another pass on my first script because certain people have been requesting the opportunity to have a look at it and pull it apart. And I have not been confident, so I've been really scared. Yeah, I'm hopefully going to get a chance this weekend to kind of sit down and just kind of do another pass and just kind of get myself in enough of a frame of mind that I'm kind of like, you know what I'm prepared for, like a paladining.

Thorough paladining.

If a prospective paladining is in the future. Paladining, palading. Anyway, know, if that works, then maybe you, you would want to have less investment into it. Maybe you want to prepare.

Maybe.

Maybe, Maybe.

Possibly. Possibly. But yeah, like, you know, like, I've not really kind of invested a lot into it for a while. So I, I, I, I feel like I need to completely understand.

If you've not looked at it for a minute, having a little read back through it before you someone, sometimes you'll just see like, some random, glaring error that you're like, how did my eyes, like, Skip over this 80 times before? I didn't look at it properly.

There was a, there was a time we went to a script. I can't remember what episode it was or what it was, but, like, literally it got to the point where the actor got to it and they went, this sentence doesn't make any sense. And I was looking at it and I'm like, I don't know what I was trying to say.

What the hell was I talking about?

It doesn't. Like, it was like three sentences. Like, like it was, it was one third of three different sentences smashed together somehow. Yeah. So, yeah, there's always a, it happens. Always another draft in that could happen. So understandable.

So, yeah, so it's like, yeah, you know, there's a few people who want it as well, so kind of getting it ready and then sending out would be good, but it also would prepare me for point three, which is like trying to take a little bit of this process into my own control. So what I'm going to do is take a leaf out of Scott's book and I'm getting together eight or so friends and trying to do a table read of it.

Oh, my God. Yeah.

Hear the words being read out, which is going to be helpful for me and also helpful for, I think, a few of my friends, a lot of whom are having a really crap time at the moment. And the idea of a table read sounds kind of quite interesting and enjoyable to them.

So that is so cool.

I'm going to attempt to get something scheduled. I don't think I've got many free weekends between now and 2026, so it's debatable whether we'll actually get that in the calendar before the end because it's that time of year. But, yeah, it would be kind of good to get a few people together and do it, so.

So, yeah, it was so fun to do it for. It takes a wolf. It was just like, such a. It was like a party. We all just sat down on a party.

I really hope you get a chance to do it. That is. That can be so useful, and it can be a huge morale boost. So I really hope you can do it. I'm. I'm sending you positive energy.

Thank you. Yeah. But it was a really good example to see, like, you doing it. And, like, I. I instantly recognize the value of it. So, yeah, I want to do it myself.

Cool. All right, well, those are some good goals. I have to go to a day job meeting.

Ew.

So, yeah, let's let everybody go. We'll catch y' all in maybe two weeks, maybe more. I don't know. It's the holiday season, so sky schedules are. You know, it's gonna be what it is.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you for listening to behind the Locked Doors. I'm actually doing an outro this week, so, you know, if you want to find out more about the projects, head over to www.library.horse. you can find us on social medias as either Cursed Knowledge or Library of Curse Knowledge or whatever. I don't know.

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