Like so many YA and sci-fi junkies, I've been completely obsessed with The Illuminae Files since authors Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff introduced the series in 2015. Spanning three novels, this is an epic space opera presented as a dossier of digital documents, transcripts, videos, photos, comic book illustrations, and much more. It features a zombie-like virus (Book 1, Illuminae), bloodsucking alien snakes (Book 2, Gemina), and an eerily calm-voiced AI who is somehow both murderous and loveable (all three books), all brought together to create a jaw-dropping, twist-filled, high-body-count, totally engrossing tale. It could so easily have been a total genre-blending mess, if it weren't for the creative genius of the authors. One of them, Jay Kristoff, was a graphic designer in a previous life, and that influence is evident in the way the book is visually rooted. I often describe this as "almost a graphic novel, but not quite."
If you've never physically picked up one of these books, it's difficult to explain how unique and complex they are, and the challenges faced by the team that adapted them to audio. So we created this little "illuminaeted manuscript" to demonstrate how the audio and visuals work together in this audio adaptation. Hit play and watch an aerial battle unfold:
I was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with the authors (calling in all the way from Australia), as well as both the producer and director of book three, Obsidio, about how this monstrous story was originally conceived, and then evolved into a completely new experience in audio.
Illuminae Author Interview
Interview With Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Note: Text has been edited and may not match audio exactly.
Emily Cox: Hi there, this is Emily, an editor with Audible. I'm here with Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, the genius author pair, behind the Illuminae Series. Welcome guys.
Amie Kaufman: Thank you for having us.
Jay Kristoff: Hello there.
EC: Thank you for joining all the way from Australia. I feel like I'm speaking to the future, because it's the second of March for you and the first for us.
Obsidio Production Interview
Interview With Producers With Emily Cox
Emily Cox: Hello. This is Emily, an editor with Audible. I'm here with Nick Martorelli, the producer of the new audiobook from Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman, Obsidio. We're joined on the phone with Erin Spencer, who's not only the director of this series, but also one of my personal favorite YA narrators. Welcome, guys.
Nick Martorelli: Thanks!
Erin Spencer: Hi. Thank you.
NM: Excited to be here.
EC: So we're talking about Obsidio, which is the third book in the Illuminae Files series by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman. It's hard to explain to people who are listening, who haven't seen the physical version of this book, what this thing looks like. So we are going to be pairing some photos along with the story to give people a sense of what the physical copy of this book is, but when I recommend it to people, I tend to describe it as almost a graphic novel. It's not quite, but the visuals really do add to the story. The audio production is so involved and a lot of that is driven by the visuals. How do you even begin to approach a story like this? What was your process?
NM: Well, for me, the process started with going back to books one and books two and listening to them, and figuring it out. And I actually listened to the audiobooks as I read along with those books. Sort of figure out exactly how we treated everything in the past and what the conventions that we'd established for this world were so that we could bring all of those conventions into book three. And then you get the book three and as I started to read through it, I was very aware of, "Okay. We've established how we do sequences that look like this. So we'll just do the sequence like that." And after we have that kind of language in place, what I started looking for were the new moments we had in this book, or the moments of emotional shock as you turn the page, or the certain feeling that the design of this book is giving to us in this moment so it's going to be on us to replicate that feeling in audio for the listener.
EC: So it's saying, "This is the feeling that I'm getting now, how do I make that happen if I were listening and not reading?"
NM: Exactly. And I went through it and I sent it off to Erin so she could go through it, and I think Erin, I'd sent you a list of like, "Here are the moments that I want to talk about when you've read it, but I don't want to tell you what I'm thinking about yet."
ES: Right. Yeah. You wanted to see if we were thinking the same things, I think.
NM: And I didn't want to color your ideas with my own because part of the collaboration process between you and I specifically is we both come at it from a slightly different angle and the best idea is usually somewhere in the middle and it's like taking a little bit of each of our ideas to figure out how it works.
ES: Right. And because I had directed the past two, there were some things like, I just knew ... Like you said, you listened to the past two, but I knew how to address it right away just because we had solved those--I don't want to say problems--we'd solved those issues in the previous audiobooks. Reading this book and listening to this book are two very different experiences, but they can meld together very well. I went to a book signing that Amie and Jay did last year in Huntington Beach. And they told me that they have talked to a lot of readers/listeners. Meaning a lot of their audience is reading and listening simultaneously.
EC: Oh, really?
ES: Yeah. Just because I think some people read this and then they think, "How in the world did this get put into audio? What does this sound like?" And so, they may reread with the audio and looking at the visuals because there is so much, but the audio brings so much to this book as well.
EC: We were talking earlier about this is an epistolary novel, which is sort of a collection of items, or ephemera, or documents, or diary entries. But unlike Dracula, for instance, which is an epistolary novel, which is letters and news clippings, this has such a digital profile as well. And because a lot of the original sources are potentially in audio and then they're transcribed for the print book it was then up to you guys to turn it back into audio.
ES: ... the process of dissecting it is done page by page, section by section ... , you can't just blanket this book in one process.
NM: And we talked about that. We talked about the moments where it is a transcription of a radio conversation, that we are in a sense, performing the original conversation. So whereas the transcript may say, "Sound of static" is this an opportunity for us to actually employ the use of a sound effect of static? But there are other times where it is a transcript of video footage where the idea of saying, "Sound of static" actually feels more correct because we are now reading the transcript as opposed to watching the original video footage.
So there was this sort of balance. Even in a book where there are so many different options, we're still very zeroing in and very specifically on, "What is this page?" It's not just a blanket approach to the whole book, "Oh, it's all dialogue so we'll just read the dialogue." It's like, "No, this is dialogue of this kind. This dialogue of that kind." And how do we approach that.
ES: Yeah. And really ... I mean the process of dissecting it is done page by page, section by section because like Nick said, you can't just blanket this book in one process. Each page has to be broken down and analyzed in a different way.
EC: How long did it take you guys to crack this nut? It feels like maybe longer to break it apart than to put it back together.
ES: Yeah. The prep on this was the most important thing. Because once we get in the studio, it's live and it's going. So we worked together I'd say, two months. Wouldn't you say Nick? Two months on prep?
NM: Overall from the beginning to the end, I agree. Yeah. And we had about a two and a half hour phone call once we both read the book to sit down and--as Erin said--go literally page by page. "Okay on page 34, there's this. Now on 35, there's this. On 36. Who's talking?" And that was really helpful. That was a great conversation because we were able to identify some of the same questions we had for the authors. And identify some of the same opportunities of, "Let's do something cool here." And there were a number of moments too, where we're like, "Let's do something cool." But we could never quite figure out how to do it so we went with a simpler solution and put our efforts elsewhere, in like, how do you balance out the prep? How do you balance out the work?
EC: Right. And so Erin, how many characters did you end up needing? I think you were telling us, you had it all tabulated.
ES: Yes. There were 20 characters that were recurring from the past two books. The characters that we'd all met and heard before. There were 14 new voices that came in and then there were 9 small roles that were maybe just under 10 lines, that we were able to cast with people in the Penguin Random House offices and friends and the like. Overall, 43 voices.
EC: That's a lot to keep track of. It's very intense.
ES: It's a lot to keep track of. And some of the actors voiced a few different characters because this book is set in the universe, there can be any accents. There're people from all over the universe. So we were able to use some actors that were adept at multiple accents and dialects.
NM: Which is one of the things I really enjoyed listening to the first two books. That there is this global feel to the cast. Like there's this wide variety of people in it, which I thought was really great.
EC: And how did you guys land on which accents to place with which characters? Do you think the creative discretion was left up to you guys or were there clues?
NM: One of the first things we did was talk to the authors about ... Erin actually identified all of the new characters we had. And the authors gave us brief notes on all of those people with some specific suggestions for narrators or certain qualities of the voice. And some of them were just you know, "Men, 30s." So at the point, we found the specifics that the authors had been looking for and at that point, I threw everything back over to Erin as Erin was the one in the booth with the actors as they were recording.
ES: Yeah. So I made my character list of the new people. I had maybe eight descriptions about that character. Like, the description could be, "Great hair, perky, analytical." So I would have these descriptions about one person and I just would think, "Who is this? Who is right for this?"
EC: Right. Yeah.
ES: And there you go.
EC: I loved in the second book, Steve West, who is English, that was so sneaky because then his character turns out his American. Surprise. And his accent changes to American. It was really ... And he's one of our favorite narrators anyway especially in the romance side, his pseudonym.
ES: Yes. Steve is exceptional.
EC: Yup. So Katie from Random House who helped set up this interview for me. She told me about getting pulled in as one of those extra last minute additions to help record the battle scene and I wanted us to kind of dig in to that a little bit because this was one of the more complex moments in the book and it's really fascinating that you were able to translate it. How do you even tackle this thing?
NM: So the first step is that the pages are laid out with words all over them, going up and down, sideways, and all in different fonts and colors. And we had the authors write out all of the dialogue that's on this page as a linear piece of paper, just what order do all of these words happen in. And we also asked, "Are any of these characters we know already?" And they said, "There are all just ... These are all fighters, these are all pilots. These are not people that we know from any other part in the story." So at that point, I sent it over to Erin.
ES: Right. And it's interesting because on the first book, in a similarly formatted scene, I didn't know that this had actually originally had been written out in a linear way. And if you listen to the first battle sequence, I was visually trying to piece together these pages and piece together the order and it was really difficult and complicated. On the second book, I thought, "I should ask." You know, if this was ever written out just linearly. And it was. I thought. "Oh my gosh. I wish I would have known this before." So the second book, boom! I got it. And then this one, I already knew to ask, got it out and you start to actually see that there is a story and there are conversations happening within this battle sequence, when you see it written that way. And so, it was just a matter of having different people that were willing and excited about it to come in the booth and do some lines for me. And I think everybody had a lot of fun, Nick, did some lines.
NM: Yup. I'm a pilot in the sequence too.
EC: Did you make it?
NM: Spoilers. I don't think very many of them do.
ES: Yeah. No. But yeah, it was fun and everybody had a lot of fun with it. People that are not normally actors came in to the booth and gave it their all.
NM: And then we took all of that recording and turned it over to our editors and our sound designers, Ted and Heather Scott. And they took the story that Erin had found in the pages and did the same thing with the sound design for it, by putting in the effects of radio calls, by putting in sound effects, by putting in the laser fiber, by putting in the ships zooming past each other, by putting in like radar beeps and targeting scanners and things like that. And I think they did an incredible job with the sequence. It really, to me, feels like you can feel the camera zooming from one cockpit, out into space into the other panning around. I think they just crushed it with this sequence.
NM: "This spread, when you flip to it, gives such a visceral, emotional reaction to the reader. We have to figure out a way to do this in audio."
ES: Yeah. And I would like to add that Ted and Heather Scott, every day I thought about them because their job ... I'm not an editor, but I think, "Gosh! This is so complicated." Every day they're getting bits and pieces and they have got this huge 620-page puzzle to put together. And because of the nature of this book, we didn't record it in linear fashion. We didn't start on page one and end on page 620, we skipped all around based on scheduling and the day and who's talking to who. And so, it's really complicated and I just deliver Ted and Heather files as well labeled and organized as I possibly could, and they just do magic with it. They are amazing.
NM: And in that preparation time, I had been having the same conversations with them that I'd been having with Erin, in that sort of sense of, "Here's a moment where we can do something cool. Here's a moment where I feel this happening." The pages that immediately follow the battle as they are good example of this, where the visual layout of these pages to me suggested a very specific kind of feel and a very specific sound. So I talked to Ted about, "Let's shift the action. Let's include explosions. Let's bring the sound out a little bit and then bring it back in." Again, as I was saying earlier, we wanted to replicate the feeling of what looking at and reading these pages felt like by listening to the sounds and the performance and the pacing of it in audio.
EC: Right. I've listened to the battle scene, but I haven't listened to the pages following, but there's a lot of shattered glasses there you know, is that kind of tinkling in there?
NM: Well, it's shattered glass in the sense that it's the shattered spacecraft. And the words on these pages are mini-profiles of three of pilots who've just been killed and it's talking about their hopes and their dreams and what they want to do when they get back from war. And then, it shifts to broken text font, where it basically says, "They're not coming back from this war." So there's this sort of like bravado and melancholy in it all at the same time. And I was talking to Ted, I was like, "We need to figure out how this works. We need to get this feeling in our ears."
EC: Amazing. Really cool. So there's some other challenges in this book that we were talking about earlier. There's a bulletin board that is a code, that the people on the planet--they are now captives on this planet--are using a notice board to communicate in code to each other. And this is super visual. How did you guys do this in audio?
NM: And this was one instance of that adaptation process, where less is more. And the question for these pages became about, "What do we really need? And what is visual color?" Because it's gorgeously laid out. There's visuals all over the place. There's lots of red herrings and then when you turn the page and you get the key for the secret message, it's amazingly clear and it's the same visuals just with certain words underlined. So as we were doing it, Erin and I were talking about the idea that these things that don't change from one page to the other, we probably don't need to include at all because that's not where the focus falls. So what we need to do is we need to strip way the things that are distracting to focus and really concentrate on the stuff that tells the story.
EC: Right.
ES: Exactly. And we did that in some way, almost in every page in the book. You know, on the book, on the transcriptions, it may say, "So and so is talking." And it says it every single time. We have to just take those away and let the actors talk to each other. So every page was adapted in some way.
EC: Right. And so, what were some of your favorite scenes, personally, to work on?
ES: I've really loved Lincoln Hoppe as AIDAN. His voice as AIDAN was in all three titles. And he is, to me, funny-
EC: I love him. By the way, I listen to everything he reads.
ES: I love him too. I love him as a person, I love him as an actor and I loved him as AIDAN. I just would laugh and smile and be afraid of him all at once. He really to me, was the perfect AIDAN. And so, working on his sections bought me a lot of joy.
NM: I was lucky enough to be in the room while they were recording his first day and there are long strings of code that AIDAN recites and-
EC: Because AIDAN is an AI, I just wanted to add that in so that people listening know that.
NM: AIDAN's a computer.
EC: Maybe evil, maybe a genius, maybe great.
NM: All of the above.
EC: It's all of them.
NM: All of them. And as he is either malfunctioning or catching up with what's happening in the world, he occasionally spits out lines of code. And in the previous two books, Lincoln had read the code and then would stop a little bit early as opposed to hearing the whole string of numbers, he would stop a little bit early. And as he was performing in the booth, I talked to Erin, I was like, "I've got this weird idea that let's get him to read the whole thing, but we'll get Ted to speed it up a little bit in post-production." So Lincoln is performing it as an actor reading the numbers but then Ted gets a hold of it and does something with it to make Lincoln's voice do something that a human voice could not do and it gives another level of computerization to him that I think is really really cool. And that was directly inspired by being in the room with Lincoln and hearing him work.
ES: Right. Yeah. That was a brilliant idea on Nick's part. Just because we'd already done it a different way in two other books, I was still sort on that track and I really think that was really an effective way of addressing that.
ES: But to be in a booth with other actors and act and respond and see each other and develop those relationships was really fun and really important for this process. And it makes, I think, the performances so much more authentic to have everybody working together.
NM: I'm looking for my favorite scene. My favorite scene, do you remember where the ... Erin, do you remember where the baby montage is? The baby mosaic?
ES: Yeah. Let me look.
NM: There it is.
ES: We found it.
NM: 266.
EC: That's when my heart clenched. I was like, "I don't know. I might have to put the book down. I don't know if I can continue."
NM: When you were reading it?
EC: Yeah, when I was reading it. Yup.
NM: So for the listeners, there is an AIDAN scene where he makes a certain decision and what follows is a two-page spread of an infant done as a photo mosaic of lots of different individual pictures of people and then it comes back to AIDAN. And AIDAN continues explaining what he's done with the decision. And this was one of the sequences where I was reading the book, I was like, "This spread when you flip to it gives such a visceral, emotional reaction to the reader. We have to figure out a way to do this in audio." Because you get plot and like we can just have AIDAN read his thing. Skip these pages and go on and you understand what has happened, but the print design has done such a great job of giving you this sort of like catch breath in the middle of the scene, so we needed to figure out how we do this.
NM: And Erin and I talked about it. We had a couple different ideas. And we settled on the idea that someone was going to sing a lullaby over this section.
EC: Oh wow.
NM: It was Emily right?
ES: Emily Woo Zeller. Yup.
NM: Emily Woo Zeller sang this lullaby and then it all went to Ted and Ted and I, really sort of worked the details of the sound of this moment, "How do we convey the melancholy, the danger, the sadness, the longing but also the menace, and how do you put that all into 30 seconds worth of audio?" And I think Ted just did an incredible job again. But it was.
EC: I need to find that part of the file and listen.
NM: But again, it's one of those instances of "the print book gives a feeling, how do we give the same feeling with the audiobook?"
EC: That's awesome.
ES: And I'd also like to add, something else that was fun for me because I read the role of Asha Grant in this book.
EC: Right.
ES: I've actually read little bits on every book, but this was a bigger role.
EC: Did the authors cast you for that or did you?
NM: The authors did.
ES: I believe so.
NM: Yes. In that original casting email, the authors suggested that Erin read Asha Grant, particularly because of her involvement in the first two books, reading another role. And they thought that learning that the role on the previous books was also Asha could be a cool Easter egg.
ES: Yeah, but it's fun too, for me, that all the actors are so excited to be in the booth with other actors. Because normally, this is a solo job, you know, they're sitting in their booth and they're reading a book and they may or may not have a director. But to be in a booth with other actors and act and respond and see each other and develop those relationships was really fun and really important for this process. And it makes, I think, the performances so much more authentic to have everybody working together.
EC: That's really interesting that you bring this up because I wish I brought it up earlier. I don't think I realized that ... So for the radio transcriptions, I mean the moments of dialogue, you had two actors together reading?
ES: Yes. There were two to three actors in the booth at once. The only person that was ever solo was Lincoln as AIDAN just because he has a lot more solo narration, but most of the time, it was two to three actors talking to each other, responding and listening and reading this book with each other.
EC: That's so cool. Amazing.
NM: We were also lucky enough to get all of the actors from the first two books back. I know we talked about the 20 returning narrators, but everybody came back to finish out the trilogy, which is really cool.
EC: That's very cool. I personally fell in love with so many of the voices. With every book, I've been like, "I hope they stay, that they keep them on."
NM: That's the thing, you can't recast actors who have done such iconic work in these kinds of roles because it's not the usual kind of audiobook work either. It's not reading as a narrator and playing everybody, it is MacCleod, that's his voice now.
ES: Well, and I do want to say, my biggest disappointment in Obsidio was that the pop star, Lexi Blue did not come back. She was in the second book and she sang this Bubblegum pop song that was the earworm. I was seeing all kinds of posts about it on Twitter. Everybody was loving it and hating it because it was that annoying, cheesy pop and I was dying for her to come back because that was actually me. I got to sing the song.
EC: You did? And so, who wrote the music?
ES: Jay and Amie wrote the song and then the editor, we found the sound bed and we recorded it. So I kind of came up with my own way that I wanted to sing it and we worked with the ... The producers on the last two books was Janet Stark. So we worked with Janet and the editor and came up with that song. And I was dying for Lexi Blue to come back in Obsidio.
EC: I was dying to find that song on Spotify because it really got stuck in my head. I was like, "What? Is that a real thing?" We need it to be a real thing.
ES: I know. And Aimie told me she said that they actually have the entire song written and so many people asked them to do it.
EC: Yeah.
ES: To have the full song. I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I have new career."
NM: I pushed for Lexi to be in this book Erin, but they wouldn't go for it. They wouldn't bite. Closing credits music something like that. They wouldn't bite.
ES: Oh my god! That would have been so funny. Well, I'm excited too. I'm narrating Jay's next book.
EC: Oh great. I have that on my coffee table at home.
ES: It's called Lifelike.
EC: Are you enjoying it? Is it highly recommended? I need to ...
ES: I just started, I'm on page 40, but I'm loving it. It's right up my alley. And it's interesting to see some of the words, some of the similarities. Just because I got so involved with this Illuminae series, I feel like I know him. So he'll use a certain word in a sentence, and I'll think, "Ah, that's so Jay."
EC: Well, I think that's probably does it for us. Thank you guys so much for joining me and for talking me through your process and how you guys collaborated. It's an immense project and I'm intent on getting as many people to dive into this series as possible.
ES: Thanks for having us.
NM: It was a pleasure to be here.
