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Melissa Bendixen: This is Audible Editor Melissa Bendixen, and here with me today is Travis Beacham, the writer of the Audible Original Impact Winter, an epic—and slightly terrifying if I do say so myself—postapocalyptic vampire tale. Hi Travis, and welcome.
Travis Beacham: Hi, thanks for having me.
MB: Of course. Travis, listeners might recognize you from some of your other writing credits, which include the film Pacific Rim, the TV series Carnival Row, and the film remake of Clash of the Titans, but here with Impact Winter, you're writing an audio-first story.
What's the origin story of Impact Winter, and what do you think is the special sauce that makes it work so well in audio?
TB: It was an idea I had for a long time, this idea of a sunless world from a comet impact and vampires being able to thrive in such a world. And I knew from the beginning that I wanted it to be about these two sisters. But that was even before I knew it was a podcast or I had any idea what sort of story it was at all.
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I think it was one of my managers who asked if I had any sort of podcast or audio ideas and this was the one that jumped to mind. It's hard to say why, but I probably was thinking along the lines of old Gothic, epistolary novels like Dracula, where you have a story told in letters and that sort of thing. I don't know, something about vampires and audio just meshed in my brain and it all sort of came together very quickly after that.
"That's what feels special about it to me: when you put on headphones and you listen to it, it feels like you're there and it feels like you're in the world."
The special sauce? It's hard to say. I really wanted it to be more of a kind of a fly-on-the-wall audio drama, sort of like in the English tradition. Figuring that out was the fun of it, and how to tell a story without necessarily having someone narrate it for you. I really wanted to focus here on sound design and immersion and painting the world for your ears so that you could feel like you were really in it. I think that's what feels special about it to me: when you put on headphones and you listen to it, it feels like you're there and it feels like you're in the world.
MB: Definitely. There's something about the audio that just crawls inside your head. I was wondering, the setting of the Moors was really evocative—what was that decision for you, what made you choose to set it in the UK and on the Moors?
TB: I've always been fascinated with that as a setting: these naked, barren landscapes that are just bleak and seem to go on forever and are imbued with this ancient ghostliness, all these ghost stories on the Moors, and all these old folk tales. The minute I knew that it was going to be a postapocalyptic story and that it was going to feature vampires, I was thinking of ways to distance it from the postapocalyptic stories that we're used to seeing, which really deal more in zombies and scientific and science fiction threats. I wanted it to really feel magical, that kind of like dark magic, like I said, of Dracula and old Gothic horror, and so it really drew me to a more European setting.
I wanted these vampires to be less like zombies—although, you know, we do have more savage ones than we have more civilized ones—but more like Bram Stoker's Dracula, where its powers are sort of ambiguous, like he could turn into a fog bank or he could turn into like a swarm of rats or whatever. Really dealing with a threat that seems to be arcane and supernatural, more so than science fiction.
MB: Yeah, definitely. In your career, you've worn many hats, from being a screenwriter to an executive producer. How does working on this project contrast with, say, being an executive producer or being a head writer for a show or a movie?
TB: It's definitely more like writing for a TV show than it is for a movie. For a movie, most of the time, you come in, you break the story, you write the script, and then you sort of hand it off and people go do with it whatever they will. On a TV show, you're involved in production. You're not only writing and breaking the story, but you're involved in casting and really everything. This was a lot more like that, but I think even in this, what I found to be very fun about it was not only the writing and the producing it, but the directing as well, and working with the actors.
Having been on sets, you know, you'll do a scene for camera and then everything shuts down for an hour, maybe more, as they move the camera and the lights, they check everyone's makeup, and they check everyone's costumes. Everyone's sort of sitting around for things to get going again, just so that you can see the other side of the room. But in audio, you have all the actors there and you do the scene, and you figure the scene out and you discover things, and then when you're done with it, you just move right on to the next scene. So it moved very quickly. What I really loved about that was it left a lot of room to play with the actors and to sort of play-pretend and really discover the characters and discover the moments in the scenes. It felt to me, in a weird way, to be almost more creative of an endeavor than writing for a film or even television.
There was a lot of thinking on our feet and discovering the characters and the beats in the scene. It was very important early on to me that we not record it piecemeal, that we not record each actor individually on their own, but that we, as much as possible, try to get ensemble recording, try to get them all in the same temporal space, reacting to one another. It was COVID of course, so they all had their separate booths, but they were all like reacting in real time and reading off each other in real time. You get a lot of those moments where good actors that are listening and paying attention to one another are bouncing off one another and changing the scene as it goes. And there were times where I would just call for a retake and not really have any notes but just say, "I like where this is going, let's just do it again." Yeah, it was really fun to figure it all out.
MB: Wow, that's really cool. So they all did get to be together and work off each other and everything? Awesome.
TB: Yeah, there's a real chemistry that developed too, which I was very pleased about. I was worried going in, with COVID recording, like you wouldn't get that sort of camaraderie, that bond that you get on other sorts of productions, but they really developed a chemistry very quickly so it was nice.
MB: Yeah, I feel like you can tell that in the recording. There's definitely that connection with the characters.
TB: Yeah.
MB: And speaking of, I just want to name this stellar cast of voice actors for our listeners. Immediately recognizable we have Liam Cunningham as head of castle security and Darcy and Hope’s adoptive father. Listeners will recognize him from his role as Davos in Game of Thrones. We also have names like Holliday Grainger [as Darcy], Himesh Patel [as Felix], David Gyasi [as Rook], Esmé Creed-Miles [as Hope], Bella Ramsey [as Whisper], Caroline Ford [as Penelope], Chloe Pirrie [as Mayor Gussie], Indira Varma [as Kallistrata], and Freddy Carter [as Jory] on board.
So you told me a little bit about what it was like working with the group and their chemistry together, but do you have any anecdotes that you could share with us about the day-to-day life of working with these actors?
TB: So we do this thing with the vampires where the ones that can communicate can sometimes do sort of a hypnotic suggestion to compel you to do things. The way that we decided to do that in audio is you would hear their voice speaking as normal but then under their voice, you would hear like whispers of the same sentence overlaid, and so in recording that, anytime we would get to a line where that's happening, you would have them deliver the line as normal and then you would have them do it a few more times to give you the audio material to cut in.
"It's so liberating to be able to paint a vivid, diverse palette of characters like that because they come to the story with so few preconceptions."
But towards the end of the series, there's one where Penelope is trying to get someone out of the room and says, "Go take a long shit—"
MB: Oh, I remember that.
TB: And so we had to have Caroline Ford—I explained it to her, "You're going to do the line and then you're going to do it like three more times," and it was hilarious trying to get that out of her because she just rattled it off and immediately started laughing, and I had to be like, "Okay, sorry, we're going to need that a little slower," and so she just had to repeat it over and over again into the mic.
Another anecdote: as the things get actiony towards the end—and I don't want to spoil anything so I'm not going to mention the characters that are involved—but as things start to get actiony, because I had camera links to the actors—I could see them all in their booths like Zoom-style—and I did notice as we were doing some of the action scenes that a lot of them were posing for it. So when you had a character with a bow and arrow, she would have the bow and arrow, like, gesturing with her hands as if she had a bow and arrow towards the microphone.
MB: Wow.
TB: And so they were really getting into it, literally in the booths. You could see them acting the scenes out. That was a lot of fun.
And, oh, there is one, during an interrogation scene early on, Darcy is there and she gets angry with the vampire that she's interrogating. You'll hear a glass falling onto the floor, like when she gets very angry and she goes into sort of rough this vampire up. That is actually a water glass that she had on her stand when she was recording it that we just kept in the recording. She got so into it that she started knocking things over.
MB: That's crazy.
TB: Yeah. I guess the long and the short of it is they just got really into it, which was a lot of fun.
MB: Yeah, wow, that's awesome.
So, there are so many distinct and colorful characters in Impact Winter. And, in fact, this is a strong through-line in all of your work. What's your process for building new and distinct characters?
TB: I love character, and character is something that I was so pleased to be able to dive in on here. My reputation for writing for the screen is mostly to do with world-building, which I love; I love maps in the front of books and glossaries at the end and all this mythology and stuff like that. I love fleshing that out. But I think what's most fun for me—and it's surprising when I tell people this—is dialogue. If you just stick two people in a room and have them disagree about something, that scene is much, much, much more fun for me to write than a scene where I'm explaining something about the world. And so it was really fun to work in this medium that's driven by dialogue. It's driven by words and in that same sense driven by character, so it was very fun to create these characters.
I knew very early on that I wanted it to be mostly about the sisters. When you're writing genre stuff, a lot of times in the industry there's always like a main guy and it's always kind of the same guy. He's like brooding and haunted and a bit rough around the edges. I just got sick of writing that guy, so in developing the characters for this, I just thought to myself, like, "I'm just not going to have that guy in it at all," because the minute that you put him in it, all the attention gravitates towards him.
Then I just thought, "It's not going to be that. It's going to be Darcy, it's going to be her sister, it's going to be her friend, Felix, and it's going to be some of the vampires that we meet." It's so liberating to be able to paint a vivid, diverse palette of characters like that because they come to the story with so few preconceptions. When you start painting outside the box like that, you find that you have a lot of freedom to discover them as human beings and not as archetypes, which was very, very fun.
I think in addition to it being about sisters, it's also a story about growing up, but on two fronts. You have the story of Hope growing up in, I would say, a high school coming-of-age sort of way. Darcy is a different coming of age. It's like graduating college and not being sure what you're going to do with your life after that. Obviously that's not the story, but intellectually, that's the threshold where she's at.
MB: Yeah, I felt that. I love the way, in the beginning, we have that scene with Darcy and Felix. Darcy's the one that is the fighter, and when the blighter vampire shows up, Darcy's like, "Step aside. I will take care of this."
TB: And he just waits. Yeah.
MB: And that's the moment, yeah, when it's signaled to us as the listener, this is not going to be your usual vampire story.
TB: Yeah, and I don't want to slag on "chosen one" stories, because I think to some extent this does have sort of yarns of that, but really early on, I thought the important thing about her is that she doesn't have any superpowers when we meet her. She's just somebody who's been doing this and is very good at it and Felix isn't. I wanted to treat that very matter of factly, that she has an acquired skill level, just out of determination and out of this drive to fight.
MB: Yeah, she's worked for it.
TB: She didn't wake up one night and like have a sword in her hand or whatever. She went and got the sword.
MB: Right. Yeah, because she has a true chip on her shoulder, for sure.
TB: Yeah.
MB: I want to dive into the sound design element a little bit more because, like we're saying, the sound design is truly fantastic and immersive. I had a hard time listening to Episode 4 in particular because that one was a horror moment, with the crawling sounds of the vampires and the gore of like, blood, and like reaching inside someone's chest cavity to grab their heart.
There's so, so many elements here where I was in the story and then afterwards I was like, "How did they do that? How did they create that sound and what was the Foley work like on this?" Can you tell me about the sound design process and what your vision was for it?
TB: Yeah. When you hear a lot of audio dramas, the mainstream tendency is for the sound to be very clean and isolated and for you to know every sound that you hear. A door sounds like a door, footsteps sound like footsteps, and if you don't know what something is or you don't know what something sounds like, then you don't hear it. It's very streamlined that way.
I knew for this I wanted it to sound as full as a movie that you just weren't looking at, right? For it to have like a grit and a texture and to have sounds that maybe weren't identifiable but seemed logical in the location and the context. So having like the metallic of a canteen lid being unscrewed, little sounds like that, and just sort of filling the space with this sound meat, you know. It translated to dialogue and performance too. If there were false starts or an actor stuttered or stumbled, I really liked to keep that stuff in because, like I said, I just liked it sounding not very clean and sort of more natural and organic.
And so in thinking about this, very early on we hired these people at this company's sound department. They don't really do audio dramas, they haven't really done podcasts. What they do is mostly cinematic work, and so it was fun having basically cinematic sound designers working on this podcast. It was very different for them because, instead of trying to match the picture, they were now building this world from the ground up based on just the script and the gaps between the dialogue.
So it was fully Foleyed. For a lot of the gore, there used to be quite a bit more in that one scene that you're talking about, like snapping celery and like melon rinds. They went all out in the first round and I was like, "I don't know that it's that brutal." For that scene in particular I wanted the violence of it to be more clinical. So you hear the tink of metal instruments on a tray and every once in a while some precise cut or something like that.
"The supposed weakness of audio, not being able to see what's happening, is actually a strength in a horror story. Sometimes you can mine the fact that you can't see what's happening for tension and for suspense."
But yeah, it was a fully realized sort of world. There were times even when I was listening and reviewing the sound design and reviewing the cuts, where I would have headphones on and I would literally think somebody had entered the room behind me, because also what we did, they have this program where they can physically place sounds in a hypothetical three-dimensional space around the listener. That definitely entered into the sound design: the blocking of it, having characters that are farther away, characters that are behind you. Who's close? What direction are they moving? Are they leaving the room? Are they coming in? A lot of that figured into the sound design, and I think because of that, probably the best way to listen to it is with headphones or earbuds, so that you get your head into that space and can really tell where the blocking is and where all the action is happening, because there are story points that are dependent on understanding the space.
MB: Yeah, like where someone is in the space. I'm thinking of the moment in particular that made me jump out of my skin was when Hope is in this van and you hear all the vampires around her crawling on top of the van and stuff like that, and it's like, "Wow," like, "Eeee."
TB: I love that. And then the music, she shoves the earbuds in and plays the song. I love that scene and it was a lot of fun to record too because in our first record, the actress, Esmé, wasn't really reacting to it, so we had to have her come back once we had filled in the space with all the sound. We realized, "There're vampires crawling all around her. We've got to hear her in the foreground, even if it's just her breathing, we've got to hear her in some way reacting to the thing that's happening."
You run into things like that, where it's like, "Oh, now that it sounds really full, we need to bring the actor back and have them be there somehow in this space." With all the vampires crawling around, you'll hear her breathing very heavily and nervously and swearing under her breath, and that's all stuff that we added to justify this very lush sound design that we'd done.
MB: Yeah, and it also brings home the element of being in the center of it all that the audio really gives you.
TB: Well, I really liked not being where the action was, in a weird way. You mentioned in the first episode, when Darcy goes off to fight the vampire outside. We're not with Darcy, we hear her through the walls. We're with Felix, waiting inside. That’s mimicking the idea of, as listeners, we have no visual cues as to what's happening. Similarly, Felix has no visual cues to what's happening, so we have to wait, essentially, for her to come back inside to know who won the fight, both us as listeners and Felix as someone waiting inside.
With Hope in the van when the vampires are attacking, I liked obscuring the vampire sound and really, like you said, being with her in this tight space rather than outside and hearing what's happening outside very cleanly.
MB: So it's like we get the story from the listeners' perspective?
TB: Yeah. I realized early on, that the supposed weakness of audio, not being able to see what's happening, is actually a strength in a horror story. Sometimes you can mine the fact that you can't see what's happening for tension and for suspense, which just seemed like a lot of fun.
MB: Definitely. What you can't see is way scarier than what you can.
TB: Yeah.
MB: Yeah. I love the way that the music can bookend episodes, or sometimes it comes in as transition. How did you choose the songs?
TB: Oh wow, so the songs have always been part of it. Anytime I write something, I have this very long playlist that I'll loop and play on repeat as I'm writing. From the very beginning "The Sun Ain't Going to Shine Anymore" was always top of that playlist just because there was something so eerie about it, especially the version I was listening to, which was the Frankie Valli version. It felt very of the piece for me.
There were a few rules that I had for myself in picking songs for it. Because it's mostly about Darcy and Hope, I wanted most of the songs, as much as possible, to have female voices, because it's the internal character voices almost. I associate music with storytelling so intimately. I'm always, always listening to music when I'm writing, so it felt appropriate to use it in the audio storytelling.
We also had score by a great composer, Benjamin Balcom. A lot of times the direction I would give to him would be, "It should sound eerie, it should sound bleak and sort of grating.” I wanted the score to sound almost grating at times. You'll notice there's a lot of like screechy metallic sounds in the score because it just sounds cold and icy. And with the songs a lot of times we’re contrasting that, where we’ll pick sort of smooth and melodic songs that contrast with the abrasiveness of the score.
MB: Yeah, I noticed that. It felt like it was punctuation to what you had just experienced.
TB: Oh yeah. You see it in prestige cable and like HBO all the time, where you're watching an episode of something and they'll go out to black on some like kick-ass needle drop. I love that convention. I've been thinking of this less and less as a podcast and more as prestige television for audio. Thinking about that and using needle drops in the same way made sense.
MB: Ah, I see where you're coming from.
TB: Yeah.
MB: So Impact Winter doesn't end with a cliffhanger, but it does leave us with the feeling that there's much more to be explored in this world.
TB: Yes. There's a graphic novel that's coming out, I think this summer, that I've written and is being illustrated right now. That's going to pick up the other end of the story and fill in more of the backstory leading up to this first season.
Definitely, there's more story to tell and there's more places to go with it, and the end of these 12 episodes is definitely not the end of the story as far as I see it. I know where it's going and I know how I want it to end, and so it's just a matter of figuring out the best way to do that from now on.
MB: I can definitely tell that Darcy and Hope have got a lot more ahead of them.
TB: Yes. Yes.
MB: Okay. So final question: who do you think Impact Winter is for, and what do you hope listeners will get out of this experience?
TB: That's so funny. I mean, what I've learned to do is you’ll write something and you'll tell the story that's on your heart to tell, and if you're very lucky, you'll find that you're not totally unique and that a lot of people are wanting to hear this story as much as you're wanting to tell it.
I think it's for really anyone who likes vampire stuff, anyone who's fascinated with that sort of like mythology or gets embroiled into it. I would love it if young women took to it because it's a kind of character that you don't often see in genre, and I know there's a ton of female genre fans out there that really love that stuff and feel connected to that stuff, and so I would love it if they felt they could claim some ownership of it.
And I think just anyone who wants to be sort of immersed into a world. It’s a full cast, immersive audio drama. If you're a fan of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, or my stuff like Pacific Rim or Carnival Row, you want to be taken somewhere and transported somewhere and meet the people there and hear a story about them that has a lot of humanity in addition to the traditional genre thrills, then I think this is for you.
MB: Totally. Totally. Well, Travis, thank you so much for talking to me today and truly geeking out on Impact Winter and sound design and the cast and the amazingness of it all.
TB: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure. I could talk about it all day.
MB: Yeah, and I think you could probably tell that I could too.
TB: Thank you. Thank you so much.
MB: And listeners, you can go listen to Impact Winter on Audible now.
