Doctor Who, Games & The Tower Part III
Greetings everyone!
My name is David Devereux, I'm a writer, musician, sound designer and audio producer here at Tin Can Audio, and I'll be sharing a little bit on what we've been up, as well as some thoughts and ramblings on sound design, music, podcasting, writing, and, it seems, other stuff as well.
So it's been a while, and by a while I mean nearly a year. But with the impending possibility of the worst person buying Twitter maybe I thought it was time to boot up the newsletter again. I'm now a full time freelance audio producer, so I actually have the time now!
That's very much why the newsletter stopped last year. Balancing multiple freelance jobs while working evenings and weekends in hospitality during a pandemic was not great, and some stuff fell by the wayside.
Thank you for still being here!
I do have some big chunks of news for you this month. The last few weeks have been a bit of a whirlwind.
Let's start with the big thing:
I Made Some Music For Doctor Who!
I was very fortunate to be asked to make some music for an upcoming official BBC Doctor Who audio drama, starring Jodie Whittaker and written by Juno Dawson.
From the press release:
'Doctor Who: Redacted follows Cleo, Abby and Shawna - three broke university drop-outs from different cities across the UK who remain connected via their paranormal conspiracy podcast, ‘The Blue Box Files’. The trio speculate over Abby’s favourite conspiracy theory – intent on finding out the truth behind the mysterious ‘Blue Box’ that keeps cropping up across history. What if this random police public call box was actually an alien ship?
They don’t know who the Doctor is, or if aliens are real, but soon find themselves caught in a supernatural conspiracy as they learn that everyone who’s ever met the Doctor is disappearing and being forgotten. Essentially, they’re being redacted from reality. The Blue Box Files is so unsuccessful that our heroes are the last ones to be affected by the redaction, making Cleo, Abby and Shawna the world’s only hope. Now it’s a race against time to uncover the truth.'
This was something of a dream come true for me. Anyone who's listened to Middle:Below will be able to spot the Who influence on the music, and I've had a little bit of an obsession with the Radiophonic Workshop and Delia Derbyshire for a good while.
It was a privilege to work on this show and to be a part (albeit a very, very small part) of the Doctor Who universe and to add to a rich lineage of music and themes.
The first episode of Doctor Who: Redacted will be released Sunday 17th April on BBC Sounds, there is also a trailer available now.
Also, keep an eye on our Twitch channel for a stream where I'll go behind the scenes of the music of the series and talk about how it all came together.
OSTs, RPGs, TTRPGs
At the start of March I took part in a special edition of the OST Composing Jam, run by LoneRabbit, an online soundtrack competition for imaginary games. This special edition was called 'Crunchtime' and instead of being given a week to think of a game and compose a soundtrack for it, we were given 48 hours.
I streamed the process of putting my entry together and the end result was Valley & Mountain, a Stardew Valley/Rune Factory inspired soundtrack for a chill town management sim.
Also in March, the episode of Realms of Peril and Glory that I took part in with Katrina Allen and Cameron Clow was released, in which we played a truly chaotic game of You Awaken In A Strange Place.
(I really need new headshots)
I can't adequately describe the episode, other than Cameron brings his best Dungeon Economic Model energy, and Katrina came into the studio having chosen violence. It was a very fun recording and the episode is a chaotic romp of a spy film set in a haunted house...yeah...
I've also been making some music for TTRPGs too! I made some music for MacGuffin & Co's upcoming game PITCRAWLER, in which I got to live my best prog rock life.
(There'll be some more news about this soon)
I've also spent the past couple of months composing a soundtrack to upcoming TTRPG Upriver Downriver. I've also been streaming the process of putting the music together and it's been great to experience creating in public.
I'm working on properly archiving all the streams to Youtube, but if you want to catch the streams live, we make music on Twitch every Monday and Wednesday from 8pm UK/3pm Eastern.
Coming Soon: The Tower Part III (& Some Other Cool Stuff)
I'm delighted to announce that we have received funding from the Creative Scotland Open Fund to make The Tower Part III. We're currently in the process of writing the series and working out how we're going to make it, but one of the conditions of the funding is that it has to be released by the end of the year. We're all very excited to continue the story of The Tower and, thanks to the funding, make it as polished and as exciting as it possibly can be.
In other Tower-related news: listener and kick-ass artist Arazmis sent us an incredible little animation loop which we've turned into our own 'Chill Anime Beats To Study To' style video called Chill Beats To Climb Impossible Towers To:
You can find the music used in the video here, this project started as a joke and then turned out to actually be kind of a good idea. I'd love to make more of this kind of music and this kind of video, so stay tuned for that.
Thank you for reading to the end! Here is a picture of my cat as a reward:
If you like what we do and you want to help us make more, you can buy us hot beverages on ko-fi. You can also support us by buying something from our bandcamp, where we have the soundtracks to our show as well as extra music.
All that being said, the best support you can give is listening to our shows and telling other people about them. Word-of-mouth is everything to small indie podcasters, and hearing from people who have enjoyed our work is what keeps us going.
