Sophinisba Solis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophinisba) wrote2020-05-24 09:32 pm
sophinisba) wrote2020-05-24 09:32 pm
Commentary on my first two podfics
One of the challenges at ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
voiceteam this week is to create a commentary on an old podfic and, as I mentioned in my last post, it's been about ten years since I started making podfic. So here is a commentary on my first two podfics!
These are pretty different fics and podfic productions but it tickles me (and did back then) that they are both mermaid femslash! I also associate both of them with my good old friends from hobbit fandom even though neither fic is about hobbits. It makes me happy to see the continuity between these first two podfics and the things I'm still making these days.
Yes I'll Go With You
So, this was a drabble and I say on the podfic post that it was my first fic for Merlin fandom, but that's pretty wild because for years I've thought that this podfic was of a drabble by my friendclaudia603! The thing is, we came up with the idea together while we were on vacation with some other fannish friends back in 2009. We stopped at a gift store near the beach where they were selling these mermaid dolls with crowns with little hearts on them.
Now Claudia has always been really into mermaids and also frustrated that so many representations of mermaids only show white women, so we were really happy to see that these dolls, even though they are sort of cheesy, including this brown-skinned mermaid, so Claudia bought them. We also thought of our friend Rubynye (akaminoanmiss, another fan of hobbits and of mermaids and of people of color. I hadn't met her at the time but some other people in the car had and we talked about how great she is.
The first season of Merlin had aired a few months earlier and I was in the process of falling deep, deep into that fandom and trying to drag my hobbit friends in with me. I didn't get very far with most people but Claudia did watch some episodes and later would read some fic, and she did humor me. If you remember, the Gwen/Morgana was strong in season 1, and one of these dolls reminded us of Gwen (the future queen!) so we decided the other should be Morgana and they could be girlfriends. Claudia also taught me a song that has a chorus like, "Will you go with me, will you go with me, will you go with me over the sea?" and "Yes I'll go with you, yes I'll go with you, yes I'll go with you over the sea." And a couple days later I wrote this double drabble.
I wasn't really interacting with other Merlin fans back then, but then I wrote a few more drabbles and then a few months later I found the Dreamwidth commcamelot_fleet, and in addition to being a space to squee about lots of different ships and minor characters, this was a community that really encouraged members to try new things, like drawing and graphics and vidding and podfic. And so, a few months later (probably while season 2 was airing) I did try to do that! I think I picked a couple of medium-sized Merlin fics and tried recording them in Audacity, and then Audacity crashed ten times and I cried and I didn't try podficcing again for a while.
And then in April 2010 I decided to try again, this time with GarageBand and a shorter fic, andtrascendenza suggested I record this double drabble and I did! I was able to get it done without too much trouble and I posted it on Dreamwidth.
Okay, now I'm going to listen to it for the first time in 10 years!
(I believe I'm good at podfic but I also find it mostly excruciating to listen to my own podfic, so I don't do this very often.)
[pause for listening]
Ahhhhh! Okay, that was honestly fine.
It is a really cute fic and to be honest the same kind of thing I would write or choose to podfic today. For podficcing purposes my favorite thing to read is probably carefully worded narration with really strong emotions (more than, say, funny dialogue) and this doesn't have strong emotions but otherwise yeah. This would be the first of about twenty Gwen/Morgana podfics I'd make over the next eight years, a few of the others also written by me, most of them by friends. It is a great pairing that I have a lot of feelings about.
The audio quality is not awesome. For ages I just used the built-in mic on my laptop. That is okay. If I were doing this today there are a few mouth noises I would edit out –– I think at the time I only cut out the actual flubbed lines, or possibly I did it until I could read through the whole thing without flubs. It's faster than I would leave it today. I've learned to relish pauses more and, even though I do sometimes still rush a bit in the recording, I'll add more/longer pauses in the edit. I hadn't figured out my rhythm back then.
Yes I'll Go With You
Now, the Matter
So then May happened (I guess there was school or whatever) and then in June the second round ofkink_bingo started and, with some trepidation, I signed up for the first time. Along with camelot_fleet this would be a huge part of my fannish life over the next few years! And the first square I filled on it was the tentacles one, with this ficlet of ![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Rubynye's for The Little Mermaid. I finally got to meet Rubynye in person like a week later!
[pause for listening]
Ahhhhh! Alas, the sound quality is even worse on this one, and it has the other issue I mentioned before of not enough pauses. That said, I still think it is kind of great! I think I did a really good job voicing Ursula's sexy menace without trying to do an actual impression, and I would make really similar choices today.
Since I was learning how to edit I decided to experiment, and I found a YouTube video of Ursula laughing in the movie and figured out how to download that audio and add it to the podfic! It was a lot of work but it was also pretty neat! I tried a lot of interesting things with audio that first year or two and then I kind of stopped, and mostly just read. But remembering that I could do that with videos has been really useful for a couple of recentvoiceteam challenges!
Rubynye's writing is gorgeous and I still remember reading this and realizing omg the sexy stuff it not embarrassing to read out loud, it is a fucking rush and a power trip. It's awesome! I still love making explicit podfic so much. I talked about this experience a bit, and some (many lol) of my other thoughts about sexy podfic, in an essay I wrote the following year: kink-bingo and podfic, perfect together. I would go on to make lots of less-explicit things for Kink Bingo but I'm really happy that I chose to start out with something as daring as Now, the Matter, partly because it's noncon and partly because it's tentacles and partly because it's a fucking children's story that I watched (and probably had vaguely sexy feelings about) when I was an actual child. It was like okay from now on I do whatever the fuck I want.
I was reminded of these feelings a couple weeks ago (!) when I podficced another Rubynye Disney femslash pornlet, Tiana/Lottie from The Princess and the Frog, forvoiceteam! It was also fun to come back last week and record another fic by trascendenza, one of the first people to encourage me to make podfic! Even as voiceteam has been all about trying new things and making new friends it feels great to still have these connections and these memories.
voiceteam this week is to create a commentary on an old podfic and, as I mentioned in my last post, it's been about ten years since I started making podfic. So here is a commentary on my first two podfics!- Yes I'll Go with You, Merlin, Gwen/Morgana, written by
- Now, the Matter, The Little Mermaid, Ariel/Ursula noncon, written by
These are pretty different fics and podfic productions but it tickles me (and did back then) that they are both mermaid femslash! I also associate both of them with my good old friends from hobbit fandom even though neither fic is about hobbits. It makes me happy to see the continuity between these first two podfics and the things I'm still making these days.
Yes I'll Go With You
So, this was a drabble and I say on the podfic post that it was my first fic for Merlin fandom, but that's pretty wild because for years I've thought that this podfic was of a drabble by my friend
claudia603! The thing is, we came up with the idea together while we were on vacation with some other fannish friends back in 2009. We stopped at a gift store near the beach where they were selling these mermaid dolls with crowns with little hearts on them. Now Claudia has always been really into mermaids and also frustrated that so many representations of mermaids only show white women, so we were really happy to see that these dolls, even though they are sort of cheesy, including this brown-skinned mermaid, so Claudia bought them. We also thought of our friend Rubynye (aka
minoanmiss, another fan of hobbits and of mermaids and of people of color. I hadn't met her at the time but some other people in the car had and we talked about how great she is. The first season of Merlin had aired a few months earlier and I was in the process of falling deep, deep into that fandom and trying to drag my hobbit friends in with me. I didn't get very far with most people but Claudia did watch some episodes and later would read some fic, and she did humor me. If you remember, the Gwen/Morgana was strong in season 1, and one of these dolls reminded us of Gwen (the future queen!) so we decided the other should be Morgana and they could be girlfriends. Claudia also taught me a song that has a chorus like, "Will you go with me, will you go with me, will you go with me over the sea?" and "Yes I'll go with you, yes I'll go with you, yes I'll go with you over the sea." And a couple days later I wrote this double drabble.
I wasn't really interacting with other Merlin fans back then, but then I wrote a few more drabbles and then a few months later I found the Dreamwidth comm
camelot_fleet, and in addition to being a space to squee about lots of different ships and minor characters, this was a community that really encouraged members to try new things, like drawing and graphics and vidding and podfic. And so, a few months later (probably while season 2 was airing) I did try to do that! I think I picked a couple of medium-sized Merlin fics and tried recording them in Audacity, and then Audacity crashed ten times and I cried and I didn't try podficcing again for a while.And then in April 2010 I decided to try again, this time with GarageBand and a shorter fic, and
trascendenza suggested I record this double drabble and I did! I was able to get it done without too much trouble and I posted it on Dreamwidth. Okay, now I'm going to listen to it for the first time in 10 years!
(I believe I'm good at podfic but I also find it mostly excruciating to listen to my own podfic, so I don't do this very often.)
[pause for listening]
Ahhhhh! Okay, that was honestly fine.
It is a really cute fic and to be honest the same kind of thing I would write or choose to podfic today. For podficcing purposes my favorite thing to read is probably carefully worded narration with really strong emotions (more than, say, funny dialogue) and this doesn't have strong emotions but otherwise yeah. This would be the first of about twenty Gwen/Morgana podfics I'd make over the next eight years, a few of the others also written by me, most of them by friends. It is a great pairing that I have a lot of feelings about.
The audio quality is not awesome. For ages I just used the built-in mic on my laptop. That is okay. If I were doing this today there are a few mouth noises I would edit out –– I think at the time I only cut out the actual flubbed lines, or possibly I did it until I could read through the whole thing without flubs. It's faster than I would leave it today. I've learned to relish pauses more and, even though I do sometimes still rush a bit in the recording, I'll add more/longer pauses in the edit. I hadn't figured out my rhythm back then.
Yes I'll Go With You
Now, the Matter
So then May happened (I guess there was school or whatever) and then in June the second round of
kink_bingo started and, with some trepidation, I signed up for the first time. Along with camelot_fleet this would be a huge part of my fannish life over the next few years! And the first square I filled on it was the tentacles one, with this ficlet of [pause for listening]
Ahhhhh! Alas, the sound quality is even worse on this one, and it has the other issue I mentioned before of not enough pauses. That said, I still think it is kind of great! I think I did a really good job voicing Ursula's sexy menace without trying to do an actual impression, and I would make really similar choices today.
Since I was learning how to edit I decided to experiment, and I found a YouTube video of Ursula laughing in the movie and figured out how to download that audio and add it to the podfic! It was a lot of work but it was also pretty neat! I tried a lot of interesting things with audio that first year or two and then I kind of stopped, and mostly just read. But remembering that I could do that with videos has been really useful for a couple of recent
voiceteam challenges!Rubynye's writing is gorgeous and I still remember reading this and realizing omg the sexy stuff it not embarrassing to read out loud, it is a fucking rush and a power trip. It's awesome! I still love making explicit podfic so much. I talked about this experience a bit, and some (many lol) of my other thoughts about sexy podfic, in an essay I wrote the following year: kink-bingo and podfic, perfect together. I would go on to make lots of less-explicit things for Kink Bingo but I'm really happy that I chose to start out with something as daring as Now, the Matter, partly because it's noncon and partly because it's tentacles and partly because it's a fucking children's story that I watched (and probably had vaguely sexy feelings about) when I was an actual child. It was like okay from now on I do whatever the fuck I want.
I was reminded of these feelings a couple weeks ago (!) when I podficced another Rubynye Disney femslash pornlet, Tiana/Lottie from The Princess and the Frog, for
voiceteam! It was also fun to come back last week and record another fic by trascendenza, one of the first people to encourage me to make podfic! Even as voiceteam has been all about trying new things and making new friends it feels great to still have these connections and these memories.
no subject
no subject
It was like okay from now on I do whatever the fuck I want.
Hahaha, that's awesome!
And I feel so honored that I could be one of the first to encourage you to podfic, it's been so fantastic to see how much you've grown in your abilities over the years! *filled with warm fuzzy feelings* :DDD