“For every light that shines… a SHADOW FALLS…”

I’ve spent nearly all of the last 2 decades getting paid to create stuff. I decided today I should do a better job of archiving some of that stuff in a way that allows myself or any of you to find it easily. I also have some interesting things here and there that pre-date my entry into the world of new media that I’ll try to dig up and share as time allows.

I thought I’d kick start the “Stuff From the Vault” category with something a goodly number of you who’ve been there with me the past few years already know about, SHADOW FALLS.

Shadow Falls was an audio drama series I cooked up right after I got hired at Podshow. Video hadn’t really taken off yet (hard to believe now, right?) and we were all trying to figure out ways to make the audio experience more exciting. I decided I wanted to create a fully-immersive mystery series that really felt like a big budget “audio movie”. Really, I wanted to create the audio world’s version of TV’s “Lost”.

Podshow greenlit 6 episodes to start with at well over $2K per episode. I spent 6 weeks writing the scripts for all 6 episodes in the initial story arc. I was fortunate to find a very established radio theatre troupe here in L.A. and after a quick polish by their producer James Napoli to make sure all the right emotions were presented correctly for audio (I am more used to writing in a “visual” format so “looks” and “glances” had to go and certain emotions and thoughts had to be telegraphed more as exposition). It was an important revelation (no pun intended) and I made the decision to give James a co-writing credit on the episodes because I wanted to recognize his important contribution in getting it over the threshhold to where it needed to be to come across in audio.

We cast from the group, all theatre, tv and film veterans. All very talented actors. Matt Johnson, the director did a great job prepping everyone and we did a big full-cast table read at his house. After a couple more tweaks to the script we went into Ben Vaughn’s Venice Beach recording studio and with engineer Kevin Jarvis at the helm, recorded all the voice tracks in 3 long and hot sessions. Being by the beach, the studio had no a/c but we were in the midst of a heat wave so it was pretty stuffy and we had to turn the fans off during takes. The cast were all total pros and we got through them with some amazing work. What was really cool was that Matt made them do entire long segments of the script in a single take with different actors stepping up to the mic to do their parts just like as if we were doing live radio.

Sometime during this Matt, James and I did a foley session at Matt’s house. Being a live radio drama vet, Matt had all these great sound effects props like a tiny door to open and shut and different surfaces to do footsteps upon. Anytime you hear someone walking through or over leaves in Shadow Falls it’s actually Matt crunching his fists in a big mixing bowl full of corn flakes.

Once voice tracks were done and cleaned up digitally by Kevin so began the exhaustive post-production work. Early on I had envisioned a very dark orchestral score (I’d been enamored by Hans Zimmer’s then-recent “Batman Begins” score) and very authentic sound effects. Long before becoming a writer, I was a professional composer for TV, Video Games and a couple of minor film projects. I’d written big, dark orchestral scores before and knew it would be a lot but I decided to do it myself. I phoned up my buddy Munk and asked him to write the opening and closing themes at least and he also gave me a number of orchestral cues which made it into the many, many layers of instrumentation in the overall score so I can’t really take all the credit. Scoring and adding the sometimes 6 or 7 layers of SFX along with editing, mixing and making sure each scene had the right ambience took an insane 40 hours of work per episode.

I once sat down and figured it out. Given a week to write each first draft, the table reads, prep time and recording and mixing, each episode of Shadow Falls represented at least 120 hours of my time. Was it worth it? Hell yes.

Shadow Falls came out in July 2006. With all the post production, it took 2 weeks to complete each one working on my own. The audience numbers were pretty big. Once the last episode dropped a new era, marked by the introduction of the video iPod had begun. The powers-that-be at Podshow didn’t want to spend that kind of money on an audio-only project. I had lots of people ask me to do more full-cast audio drama episodes but those actors weren’t going to work for free and neither was I. In the end, I did an audiobook prequel called “Badlands” (more on that at a later date) that ended up pretty well if I do say so myself.

And still people ask me when “Season 3″ of Shadow Falls will come out. The answer to that is something I don’t know as of yet. However, there is something cooking that I think all Shadow Falls fans will like… but again, more on that at a later date.

So for now, kick back, relax and listen (or relisten) to Shadow Falls (or as some know it “Shadow Falls: Season One). At the very least listen to the first minute of episode 1 and be ready to enter the world of Shadow Falls.

SHADOW FALLS – Episode One – Click here to listen

SHADOW FALLS – Episode Two – Click here to listen

SHADOW FALLS – Episode Three – Click here to listen

SHADOW FALLS – Episode Four – Click here to listen

SHADOW FALLS – Episode Five – Click here to listen

SHADOW FALLS – Episode Six – Click here to listen

CAST:

Weston Blakesley as Brier Ghent, Traci Crouch as Jenna Hammacher, Jeff Hohimer as Jakob Faire, Matt Johnson (Co-Producer, Director) as Deputy Crane and Timothy, Holly Jenkins as Karen Varras and Edna Hurst. James Napoli (Co-Producer, Co-Writer) as Leonard Faire, Tom Mesmer as Capt. Red Van Stark, Todd Sherry as Galen Altos, Biz Urban as Sienna Van Stark, Kappa Victoria Wood as Molly Hammacher. Victoria Wright as Chloe Varras