Meet the Fantastic Minds Behind MARVELS
Paul Bae, Lauren Shippen, and Mischa Stanton discuss their podcast adaptation of the hit graphic novel
In late 2019, Marvel and Stitcher Premium partnered to release MARVELS, an adaptation of the beloved Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross graphic novel in time for its 25th anniversary. Instead of relying on a regular stable of Hollywood writers and sound designers, they enlisted the talents of veteran indie-podcasters Paul Bae (The Black Tapes, The Big Loop), Lauren Shippen (The Bright Sessions, The AM Archives), and Mischa Stanton (ars PARADOXICA, The Far Meridian) to create a brand new adaptation to celebrate the occasion.
As I was researching for my review of MARVELS, I had a chance to speak with Bae, Shippen, and Stanton by email about each of their individual impacts and experiences in working on the series together.
Bob Raymonda: The performances you were able to pull out of this entire cast are incredible. I was particularly struck by the work in episodes 1.6 (“Warheads”), where Marcia Hardesty’s monologue segues directly back and forth to the action of the Mutants for Peace protest. Did you direct the monologue sections separately from the action and assemble them in postproduction, or were you able to work through both naturally?
Paul Bae: Thank you! Lauren structured that scene beautifully. I love how she already knew how it would sound given her experiences working with Mischa and general familiarity with how I’ll direct the actors. I had AnnaSophia Robb do the monologue separately in Stitcher’s studio. We did the whole thing once or twice through and then took it again block by block to give me lots of choice in takes. The initial once-through was our “recorded rehearsal” that I like to do just in case we capture an incredible first performance.
BR: Your work on shows like The Big Loop and The Black Tapes feels at times more intimate than something like MARVELS, which included several massive set pieces with a lot of moving parts. Was this your first time working with a larger cast all together in the room? How different did it feel from your previous work?
PB: This was the largest cast I’d ever worked with but Mischa set up the recording studio in such a way to not only maximize our acoustics but [also make] me comfortable in that room, given that I like to be in the recording space with the actors instead of in the booth with the board. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I’d like the experience of working with such a large cast, but excluding the loop cast recordings [in which 8–10 actors record in a ring of microphones], we rarely had more than 4 or 5 actors at once, which is similar to The Black Tapes. So I was comfortable. And since I had first choice in casting everyone with the producers, I was thrilled when we started recording the principals and they sounded incredible together. The relief washed over me, and I was able to settle in to direct and enjoy their performances.
BR: The cast of MARVELS was truly tacked with a group of all-star performers. Were there any moments during production where you felt like your experience in audio helped you direct people who are more used to working in film/television?
PB: I think my strengths in casting for audio really prepared me for MARVELS. For The Big Loop, I only directed half the episodes. For the other episodes, the actors recorded themselves or each other. For those situations, my work was really in casting the right talent for the parts. And I believe I nail that in The Big Loop, and that’s what I took to MARVELS in helping me get the performances I needed: casting. And that had a lot to do with Susanne Scheel and her team, who sent me lists of incredible New York actors throughout the process. The rest of it just came naturally since all of us — Mischa, the producers, the actors — we all got along so well. It went exactly how I like dramatic recordings to proceed: absent of drama.
“[Kurt Busiek] understood we weren’t looking to do a straight translation, but instead “yes-and” what he and Alex Ross did in the nineties.”
BR: It’s so clear from every single monologue that all of the characters are given the same level of empathy and humanity that I associate with your writing. What was it like to collaborate with Marvel on a project that had such a deeply ingrained history associated with it? How much freedom were you given to play around with history and perspective in this version of the series?
Lauren Shippen: First off, thank you so much! I’m so glad those are things associated with my writing. It was a total dream and also extremely intimidating to collaborate with Marvel on anything, let alone such an iconic book. MARVELS stands on its own as a wonderful and unique work, but it also is drawing on some of the biggest moments on the fifty years of Marvel before it, so, needless to say, there was a lot to play with. Once we had agreed on the general adaptation approach — the hoax angle — the sandbox was big and open. There were definitely early versions of the story that had cameos from all the big superheroes — including a personal favorite of mine, Namor — because I was just so excited about getting to play all these characters. I ended up not wanting to stuff the story too much, so a lot of those went away, but I was absolutely delighted that I got to write Peter Parker, one of my favorite characters across all mediums. Another thing we talked a lot about was bringing in more of real history, of what the late 60s were like in our world, not just the Marvel Universe. The Vietnam draft (which, in reality, happens a few years after the events of our story) was a big influence on the way that we approached mutants.
BR: One of the things that I love about the podcast in comparison to the original graphic novel is that it zeroes in on a few specific moments in Marvel history to tell one tight, compelling narrative rather than an entire history of superheroes in New York City. How did you decide which of those moments would best work in audio specifically?
LS: I’m always of the mind that anything can work in audio — a belief that I think Paul and Mischa share, too — so I don’t know that I was thinking about which moments were perfectly suited for the medium. It was more about which moments excited me from a character standpoint and how those would work in a podcast. The biggest is Alex Ross’s gorgeous painting of the Silver Surfer coming through a sky of flames — that’s something that’s extremely hard to translate into audio (and Mischa did an incredible job) — so, for me, it was all about translating the awe that Phil Sheldon was feeling as an ordinary human on the ground. The sequence of Phil walking through a nearly empty New York City as everyone believes the world is going to end was another moment I wanted to hear; I then created a similar process with Ben Urich and Esther, a new character, to show that chaos was still active in the center of the city, whereas Phil encounters stark silence on the outskirts.
BR: Speaking of the original graphic novel, the credits mention that Kurt Busiek was a consulting producer on the show. What you all put together is so clearly respectful of the source material, while also creating something that feels vital and brand new. Would you mind telling me a little more about how involved he was with the project?
LS: Kurt was, of course, an invaluable voice in this process. He was involved with all the development and script review, making sure that we were capturing the original feeling. He was such a wonderful collaborator because he understood we weren’t looking to do a straight translation, but instead “yes-and” what he and Alex Ross did in the nineties. He was wonderful to bounce ideas off of and, for me as the writer, the greatest gift of having him there was getting Phil’s voice right. Phil Sheldon is the creation of Kurt Busiek, and very few people have had the honor of writing him, so having Kurt there to guide me on what Phil’s dialogue should sound like was a real asset.
BR: Galactus is such a massive, imposing presence, which obviously can pose a challenge when working in an audio-only medium. Could you tell me a little bit more about how you achieved the effect of his voice and performance? They truly do feel of an appropriately massive/terrifying proportion.
Mischa Stanton: The first thing we did was hire an AMAZING actor, Ryan Andes. He has such a naturally deep voice that it practically did half the job for me! And here’s a story to give Ryan even more credit: In the script, it was noted that Galactus should speak in all languages at once. Now, of course we couldn’t get every language, so Paul and I chose to focus on languages that would have been extant in immigrant populations in NYC in 1966: Spanish, Italian, German, Yiddish, Russian, Polish, Japanese. But somehow we had neglected to tell Ryan that that was the plan before he came in! So when Ryan came in to record, we handed him a bunch of pages of translated text… And he simply nailed it. He just flowed from one language to the next, hardly any hesitation. It was incredible to watch
So once I had all those lines in all those languages, that’s when my work really began. First I stretched and tweaked the timing of each line in each language, such that the emotional beats lined up with each other even if the words themselves came at varying paces. That way it felt like Galactus was saying one thing with one motivation even in 9 languages.
Then I sent that through a variety of effects: pitch shift, a Lo-Fi distorter that gave it a “blown-out” sound, and [I] applied a reverb profile of a walled-in outdoor courtyard (like you might hear in the middle of Times Square, if you could ever empty it).
After that, I applied a sound design trick called “reverse-reverb” to the whole track, which is when you reverse the sound, apply reverb, and then reverse it again, so that the echo leads up to the sound, instead of trailing it. This is an oft-used trick to give a voice an otherworldly quality.
And then after that combination, I applied another extra-long reverb layer to the lowest frequencies, to give it some extra rumble as it rang out across the city.
BR: This feels like the largest project you’ve ever worked on to date. Were there any particular challenges for you as a designer, in order to figure something of this size out? The amount of convincing crowd terror and atmosphere that exists alone is incredible. Was a lot of that sourced from sound libraries? Or did you create much of it on your own?
MS: This is definitely one huge project! So much so that my computer full-on crashed multiple times during production. So one big challenge of making MARVELS was just reconfiguring my workflow to compensate for the sheer amount of things going on, trying to ease the burden on my poor computer. For example, most of Galactus’ lines of dialogue were built in a separate Pro Tools session, and exported to the main episode once the effects were applied. That way I didn’t need 10 dialogue tracks and 3 effect tracks in the main episode session just to have Galactus there. I could condense that down into 1 track. Same sort of thing with stuff like Galactus’ laser beams, Spider-Man’s web “thwips,” and Ben Grimm’s footstep cycle.
After that, color-coding my track groupings in Pro Tools was the biggest way I kept it all straight for myself: light red for dialogue, dark red for footsteps, light blue for ambient sounds, dark blue for foley objects, green for reverb sends, yellow for music, etc. Without that I would have been completely lost in the sauce, trying to keep 130+ tracks straight the whole time.
Crowd work was one of the biggest challenges in the whole show. MARVELS is a story about viewing extraordinary events from an ordinary point of view, and so I knew immersing the listener in the chaos and fear the populace of New York would be feeling during an event of this magnitude would take a lot of nuanced crowd dynamics. And not just screaming and running — moments of disappointment, shock, elation, despair. The crowd really feels a lot in this show!
To achieve that, we recorded an entire afternoon with what we in production called the “loop cast,” which was a group of 8 extras that were told to improv around and within a ring of microphones based on prompts from me and Paul. That gave us a good handful of custom crowd cues to use, which I then supplemented with library crowd sounds. Which even then almost didn’t feel like enough! One of these days I’d like to put together a nuanced and detailed crowd sound library. Just hire 50 actors for a couple days, and tell them to react to a bunch of different stimuli. I feel like I could never have enough.
Something that I thought you did so well was to create an individual, specific sound palette for each of the heroes involved with the story. When Johnny Storm and the Silver Surfer are first fighting, early in the series, I was easily able to track what’s happening in the fight even without Ben/Phil’s narration of the moment. Could you tell me about some of the techniques you used to ensure that came through in the finished product? What kinds of sounds did you use to differentiate them?
MS: That was something I conceptualized very early in the process. I knew that in the chaos of a large battle, with four diversely-powered heroes, two booming giants, and give or take a Silver Surfer or a Spider-Man, it was gonna be really important that I give each one a signature sound, so that the action could stay straight in the audience’s heads.
I started with the easiest ones, Johnny and Ben Grimm. Johnny Storm is a living gout of flame streaking through the sky, so I gathered a ton of torch, fire and flamethrower sounds for his flight. Ben Grimm is a living pile of rocks, and so I imagined that whenever he took a step it would be as though someone had dropped a 400-pound bag of gravel on the sidewalk. That gave Ben a heaviness and Johnny a crispy-ness, which are both fairly atonal sounds, so I knew Sue’s force fields would have a ringing tonal element to fill in the gap. And perhaps fortunately for me, Reed never actually uses his stretching power in the show — I think we were more focused on portraying him as the team leader and the smartest man in the Marvel universe, and so letting himself be his own superpower was a choice I really liked.
For the Silver Surfer, I knew there were three elements I really wanted to highlight: 1) his smooth-metallic body; 2) his Power Cosmic, given to him by Galactus; 3) his incredible flying speed. The metal sheen is based on the sound of using a bow from a stringed instrument on a cymbal, stretched and manipulated. The low warble of his Power Cosmic was imported from Galactus’ soundscape, where big G’s low booming and deep rumbling lasers were translated to a smaller form. And then to achieve the speed, I created a Doppler shift in his flight sounds, which in layman’s terms is that thing that happens when the pitch of a sound lowers as a fast-moving object goes past you (like a train horn’s tone dipping as it passes through the station). And then I wove in the sound of a Lear jet passing by. Because, y’know… Lear jets are fast.
And then for Spider-Man, while some recent modern takes of Spider-Man have tried to shrink and computerize his web-shooters, I knew I wanted them to have a little heft, a little clunkiness. I spoke really early on to the Marvel creatives about wanting to ground the web-slinging sound effects in the period aesthetic of the 1960s. So I used the sounds of things like gas canisters, ropes creaking, and even reels of analog film unspooling. In my opinion that really helped to give it a retro feel and grounded [it] in the time. We went for a very classic Spider-Man feel, and I think we nailed it!
The entire series is available to stream now on Stitcher Premium (and you can sign up for a free month with the code: FANTASTIC). It will be premiere in an ad-supported format on all other platforms on Thursday, March 19th.
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