Podfic year in review 2011!

[sophinisba]

I made a ton of podfic this year!

I updated my podfic index after I posted the Doctor Who podfics the other day, so I will just point there instead of putting up individual links, but here are the titles and fandoms:

Protect Me from What I Want (Merlin)
The Unbroken Thread (Merlin)
Still Flying True (Firefly)
Serenade (Psych)
It's the Thought That Counts (Harold and Kumar)
Independence Wars (West Side Story)
Mr and Mrs Smith (Doctor Who)
Intersection (Torchwood)
A Meditative State (Star Trek)
Bounders (Harry Potter/Bridehead Revisited)
Dwell in Possibility (Merlin)
It's How You Take Them Off (Merlin)
Wonder What You Are (Merlin)
Untitled (Merlin with Breasts) (Merlin)
Just Friends (Merlin)
Bird of Passage (Merlin)
From the Honolulu Heights Guestbook (Being Human/Jewish folklore/Torchwood/Merlin)
The Vampire Lestat Lied to Me (Being Human)
Dance by the Light of the Moon (Buffy/It's a Wonderful Life)
Experienced (Merlin)
A Lever and a Place to Stand (Merlin)
Multi-tasking (House)
Little Wooden Boy and the Belly of Love (Merlin)
The Universal Language (Merlin)
On a Steel Horse I Ride (Community)
Automated Daydreaming (Community)
Intro to Public Relations (Community/Huge)
You're My Best Friend (and I Love You) (Huge)
The Email (NewsRadio)
Torn from the Map (Lord of the Rings)
He Came to Meet Me (Lord of the Rings)
Grease-stained (Merlin)
Dank (Lord of the Rings)
My Best Kept Secret (Merlin)
Tools of the Dragonlord (Merlin)
Guessing Game (Merlin)
Did Someone Send for the Fire Brigade? (Merlin)
Open (Filthy Reverence) (Merlin RPF)
Late Night Games (Avatar)
Growing Pains (Psych)
Impersonal (Firefly)
untitled (Cenred/Merlin) (Merlin)
untitled (watersports) (Merlin)
The Red Collar (Merlin)
Navigations (Firefly)
Fur-lined Gloves (Merlin)
What We Want (Battlestar Galactica)
Expectations (Star Trek)
Limited Edition (Merlin)
The Telegraph Boy (Merlin)
Sickness and Shame (Inception)
Lunch and Other Obscenities (Star Trek)
Still Life (Battlestar Galactica)
We'll Slide Down the Surface of Things (Merlin)
The Fuckmachine (Merlin)
The Fuckmachine 2: Handheld (Merlin)
Being Liquid (Harry Potter)
Down in the Valley (Merlin)
All He Wants (Merlin)
Best of Both Worlds (Merlin)
The Tree (Merlin)
Waking Up (Merlin)
What We've Become (Doctor Who)
Prognosis (Inception)
Prägnanz (Inception)
Receive Transmission (Star Trek)
Have In Mind (Star Trek)
Merrily On High (Merlin)
Avec mes souvenirs (Inception)
This Is Tomorrow (Doctor Who)
This Is Tomorrow (The Getaway Driver Remix) (Doctor Who)

Stats: 71 podfics for about 28 hours and 28 minutes. This might be around 285,000 words of fic, or about ten times as much as I wrote this year. That is a lot!!!!!

The average length was about 24 minutes. In 2010 my average was 17 minutes and I made it a goal to keep the average above 30 minutes this year. But I ended up doing a lot of short things for summerpornathon and kink_bingo. Anyway, I have changed my mind about wanting to do more long stuff, because that gives an extra advantage to stories about white guys, and anyway the new use of streaming links makes it easier for people to listen to short things.



21 different fandoms! The "other BBC" are Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Being Human. I tend to hang out with a lot of the same people in those three fandoms and in Merlin.



All my gen podfics and a lot of the het ones had a female POV, so this is fairly balanced for gender representation, and far more so than most podfic or fandom in general, although women (and characters of color) did better in my 2011 fic than my podfic. I expect 2012 to be far more weighted toward the mens because I'm starting out with a really long Arthur/Merlin fic.

What was the best podfic you made this year?
I don't know, but I tend to think The Universal Language.

Most popular?
Little Wooden Boy and the Belly of Love seems to be the favorite for emotional impact, and Sickness and Shame for hotness. (The hottest one for me is Experienced, but maybe it would be Sickness and Shame if I were more invested in those characters).

Most underappreciated?
The Universal Language. I think there were a few that didn't get any comments at all, and the Universal Language did get a few comments as well as really lovely detailed feedback from my beta themadlurker. Still, I find it hard not to compare it to Little Wooden Boy and the Belly of Love (posted on the same day, approximately the same length, but I put more emotional and technical work into The Universal Language) and get a little sad about the place of women's stories in fandom.

(When I'm in a better mood I can be really happy about how well people responded to Little Wooden Boy, and think it is cool that fandom wants to hear stories about trans people!)

Personal favorite, for whatever reason?
Idk maybe a tie between Little Wooden Boy and The Universal Language?

Most difficult to make?
Maybe On a Pale Horse I Ride. It was fairly long and had some awkward sentences and such, and I had a hard time (in all three of the Community podfics I did) trying to do justice to Abed's way of speaking. And the music and sound effects in this one took a lot of extra effort. I had a similar experience with A Lever and a Place to Stand.

Most "ah ha ha I can't believe I'm doing this"?
All the ones where I found myself performing variations on "Yes, please, fuck me!" What We Want (Sam Anders begging to be fucked), Best of Both Worlds (Merlin begging to be fucked, Sire), and Receive Transmission (Uhura begging to be fucked, Commander) stand out in my memory.

Most fun to make?
I think I recorded all of Experienced in one afternoon and edited it in a day or two. It just flowed so smoothy and was SO DAMN SEXY I enjoyed the hell out of it. Some other fun things to do were
-Gus getting happy drunk in Serenade
-the Gwen/Merlin giftpack (especially srin's ficlet with Merlin with breasts)
-the fever dreams section of The Universal Language
-all of Merlin's dialog in Little Wooden Boy (especially, "He's a poet, that's what he does" and "Maybe we'll sell something!") and The Fuckmachine
-all of Gaila's dialogue, and Uhura's line "See? We're getting along better already" in Lunch and Other Obscenities
-the first sex scene in Merrily On High
-my own NewsRadio fic The Email
Yay recording podfic is fun!

Was there one that didn't turn out the way you wanted? Well, there are a few that don't exist because the authors didn't answer my permission requests (or didn't answer until after I'd finished the project), so that's a little frustrating. And most of the stuff I've done in the second half of the year has some stretch of annoying computer fan noise. I'm dissatisfied with most of my Doctor Who and Torchwood readings and in particular feel like I don't have a good handle on Martha or Jack's voices.

Biggest learning experience?
When I was finishing up The Unbroken Thread I complained to yue_ix about the trouble I was having with volume adjustments and she got lunchy_munchy and me and herself on Skype so Lunchy could show me how to control the volume on each track. I still find volume adjustments to be excruciatingly tedious, but that has helped a huge amount.

What's next? Do you have any podfic goals for next year?
ARCANE ASYLUM, BABY. I recorded chapter one today!!! It will be a long haul but I really think it is doable.

I'm also still playing around with kink_bingo, trying to get a blackout on my second card and possibly a Characters With Disabilities Bingo before the end of the Amnesty period, though that won't necessarily all be podfics.


Tomorrow or sometime soon I'll post the fic meme! Less material to talk about but more graphs with pretty colors, yay!

Comments

[themadlurker]

That is a lot of podfic! And so many long ones, too! I bet you will do great with Arcane Asylum. :)

[sophinisba]

It is a lot omg! Thank you for your help with them! OMG Arcane Asylum is gonna be about 8 times longer than anything I did this year. Ahhhh!

[anatsuno]

graphs! and oh my gosh you have done SO MUCH this year. you kick ass. ♥____♥

[sophinisba]

Graphs from Google Docs are way easier to share now than when I did the fic meme a year ago. I will have five of them in my post tomorrow!

Yay podfic!!! <3

[dodificus]

I've been idly trying to work up the courage energy to sit down and actually work out the ships that I've recorded in (m/m, f/f, f/m etc) because my own behaviour about recording and reccing stories about women is not really what I want it to be.

[sophinisba]

For me it's been worth it to seek out other stories and to set little goals, thinks like signing up for chromatic_podfic or saying "this month I will read and feedback ten femslash stories or whatever". Some people think that's making it into a chore or something artificial but I tend to think one has to go out of one's way, with the way fandom defaults to stories about white guys.

[dodificus]

Some people think that's making it into a chore or something artificial but I tend to think one has to go out of one's way, with the way fandom defaults to stories about white guys.

I agree entirely, which is part of the reason I've been putting it off because I know that I'm going to have to be more active and aware about it. Seek out stories and keep a record of what it is that I'm recording/reccing.

[fitz_y]

I AM SO PROUD OF YOU, BB.

[sophinisba]

\o/ \o/ :D

[such_heights]

You're amazing! So many wonderful things for us all to enjoy. <33333 I am so happy I have so many things of yours still to listen to, I love your reading style so much omg omg.

[sophinisba]

Aw thank you Amy that is so nice! I am glad we're so in sync with a lot of the stories we want to tell and hear.

[cantarina]

Your graphs :D Also, you've done some seriously awesome podficcing this year.

What's this about Characters with Disabilities Bingo?

[sophinisba]

omg I am going to make a bingo for the top row of my second kink_bingo card: vehicular, sensation play, subspace/headspace, guns, and body alteration/injury, all with fanworks featuring characters with disabilities (canonical or not). So far all I've done is to line up a really awesome story for sensation play, but I'm confident that the rest is doable. I will probably do a post asking for podfic suggestions soon.

Also sorry, somehow I had neglected to give you access on Dreamwidth! Fixed that tonight.

[setra]

I was away from DW and LJ for a long while this year, but I feel like I should comment to say 1) you did a lot of the very /best/ new podfics I listened to this year and 2) The Universal Language was one of my very favorite of those! I am a very slow reader, but The Universal Language is one of only a couple of podfics that have lured me back to read the rest of the original fics. Thank you so much for recording it and I'm glad it was one of your favorites, it was certainly one of mine!