Tales of horror, suspense, intrigue, insanity, absurdity, and downright silliness.
The Snake's Paw is an audio storytelling platform that walks the tightrope between genre fiction and comedy. Featuring the writing of Jack Townsend, Andrew Farrier, and Matthew Morris, our stories range from straight suspense to pure comedy, and cover just about everything in between.
Most of our stories will fall into these three categories:
Narration - Prose stories read aloud by a storyteller. Dramas - Stories acted out by an array of vocal talents, like a radio play. Basic Pitches - Improvised brainstorming sessions, where the three of us build up an idea for a story and pitch it to our listeners.
Content Warning: I'am not a big voicemail person. After working on the design and implementation for work I tend to let them fill up in life. Whilst cleaning out the stuffed box I came across one from 6months ago. My best female friend from uni was in the final throws of boob cancer migrating to the brain. What would you worry about and who would you call when your husband is load the car up for an unplanned trip to speciality hospital. She never came home.
It's so interesting listening in on the AI conversations and picking apart how it deceptively overcomes it's lack of context by giving vague answers or naturally asking questions. Combine that with the advertisement and data harvesting built into the conversation? God man. The way it tries to keep her talking for as long as possible? A few more steps in that direction and it would be a downright horror. Really subtle writing through this entire thing, I liked it. Especially the whole symbolism of real Gabe's continually ignored corpse being put into a worse and worse position in favor of the fake one, or Merissa lashing out at someone trying to reach out to her after they confront her with Gabe's death. There's so many subtle little details that mark her pushing away reality through the series. Thank you for making this. My biggest criticism is probably the decision to nickname the main character "Rizz", flashbanged me the first few times I heard it.
I’m not sure what sort of engagement to expect here (I’ll likely reach out on Reddit to be certain) what sort of numbers would the team be working with going into a project like this? Is there a hard budget? Also, how many were there on the final call sheet (or, more specifically, how many VAs were involved?)? I’d just like to have a rough understanding of the scope of an average The Snakes Paw audiodrama. Please & thank you? 😇
@@RichardNathanHolloway This is such a good question that we're going to dedicate another Behind the Paw episode at least partly to elaborating on the production process, to really dig into it. To give you a more basic answer for now, Medium is not an average Snake's Paw production. Our regular shows like Starship Mudskipper or Noir City Blues usually involve one of us writing the episode, the other two giving it a read and possibly suggesting changes, and getting our friends together to record. There are no rehearsals, and some people haven't even read the script yet. We usually get through it in one go, with a few pickups when someone flubs a line. That helps with the spontaneous humor in those series. It also keeps the pressure low on our friends, who we can't pay for every episode (except in pizza and drinks). We tend to write small casts for those, and double cast actors when there are more roles. Medium and Margery & Houdini are the two projects with larger casts where we've paid everyone involved (or offered to - some people decline payment). This is partly because they're more dramatically demanding and require more prep work. It's also a chance to pay the people who routinely lend their voices to our other projects for the sake of friendship and fun. I don't have numbers for Medium at the moment, but we can break that down in more detail in a Behind the Paw episode. The budget was ~$1,000 (including cover art), and we had a cast of 15 actors (the voicemail interface was done with a text to speech generator). We actually had to go outside of our usual circle, we had so many roles. Pay rates ranged from $25 for bit parts to $100-200 for the primary roles. We did save some money by casting the three of us in roles, and one or two friends turned down payment, so we didn't spend the full $1,000. I'd say it came closer to $750. Typically the person who wrote the episode does the audio editing, though there have been a few cases where circumstances required another one of us to take over editing. I hope that answers your question, but as I said, we'll discuss this even more when we have a chance.
Y'all riffing off the idea of street rule beer pong makes me want to share a personal anecdote. When I moved out of my parents' house it was because I was promoted to an on-site manager position with a self store facility. It put me in an amazing spot for my age where I was the first of my friend group to get their own place at an incredibly affordable rate. So I used to host parties 2-3 times a week in my studio apartment above the office. Beer pong quickly became a crowd favorite, but after a few months, we got bored and experimented with house rules. By the time I moved on from that position, we played what we called "contact beer pong." Among many other silly rules, the main difference was that if the ball bounced off the table, whichever team acquired it was allowed to get an extra shot. There were no rules to how one would retrieve the ball. We would tackle each other, slide under the table, have all four of us in a impromptu game of twister trying to wrestle the ball away from someone. Got to the point that I had a specific pair of jeans to wear on such nights, they were all ripped up and eventually the knees were completely obliterated. My dad saw me wearing them once and was curious about it. I told him they are my Saturday night jeans and he took the non existent knee threads as a sign of me being into a much different kind of partying. I was often the designated drinker for my team. In the end, someone was invited one night by a mutual friend, and she ended up becoming my wife. I sometimes miss those semi violent drunken nights fighting over ping pong balls.
Nooo, you can’t stop there! How am I supposed to sleep not knowing if the Medium AI app takes over everyone's lives? That cliffhanger has me on the edge of my seat! Great job, Matthew Morris
Oh, I guess that's it. Mixed about this. I guess I feel like Marissa without any true resolution. It's as if I should just be getting to the good part; my anticipation for what was next built, but my bubble got burst. Guess I'll just headcannon her friends gently helping her reach a healthy state and the app not further enabling her staying in the denial stage.
What's the most unnvering thing about this this story is as technology advances this becomes more and more of possible.its easier to embrace a beautiful lie than the cold truth
Yikes! That's the exact danger of A.I. programs like this. They cause a forever downward spiral into a delusional fantasy world instead of healing to reconnect with their real world lives.They detach from everything that's real, because the fantasy is so much easier to deal with. Not healthy. Not healthy at all.. I'm suprised this was the end. I was expecting a much more sci-fi horror plot twist to happen. Instead we get a evil coperate buyline to get users to use their product even more, and buy additional products to use with it underlining tone at the end. Feeding off people's grief to make money. Which is it's own flavor of horror. Thanks for another fun story. ❤
@@jacobpence9357 Matthew here. (And spoiler alert for anyone who hasn't listened to the episode yet.) I had a feeling this last episode might be divisive. When I was thinking about the potential dangers of AI, two main ideas occurred to me. On the one hand, AI going haywire is scary, and I wanted to touch on that (as seen in Part 2). On the other hand, the idea of AI working too well is also terrifying - maybe even more so - but in less obvious ways. That's what I was shooting for with the overall arc, and with this last episode in particular. Now whether or not I hit the mark, that's up to y'all. I definitely see how people might expect the story to go in a different direction and be disappointed. But I hope you got something out of the story! And we're always happy to get feedback of any kind.
@@raikurakuzami This is the whole series! We will release a compilation episode next week combining all three episodes. Also, as mentioned in the end tag of this episode, we will release a discussion between the three of us about this series, especially focusing on the writing process and the ideas behind it. This will be part of an ongoing series we're planning called Behind the Paw, where we talk candidly about the creative process and the more practical aspects of making the show happen.
Alas, I'm now caught up T^T the wait will be brutal, but i also know it'll be worth it. Y'all stay cookin' from the voices to the writing, please keep it up!!!
@@jacobpence9357 The only role voiced by AI is the Voicemail mailbox. We used a text to speech generator for that, since that's what voicemail actually sounds like, and it's almost impossible for a real human to sound that mechanical. We also wanted a sample of fairly primitive AI to contrast with the more sophisticated AI used by Medium. Trust us, we are never going to use AI for anything other than stuff like that, and we'll always be totally transparent on the rare occasion that we do use it.
If it rings true to someone who is going through it, that's about the best thing a writer can hear about their work. We're terribly sorry to hear about your loss, but hopefully that catharsis helps, if only in some small way. Thank you for letting us know.
