Forest 404, written by Timothy X Atack, is released by BBC Audio this week giving audiences a chance to experience its three strands – the thriller starring Pearl Mackie; the talks about the subjects raised; and the immersive soundscapes – as well as an extra chapter, created exclusively for this download. Paul Simpson caught up with producer Becky Ripley at the start of the year…

 

Thank you for the fascinating Forest 404. One of my colleagues went to the launch at The Barbican back in 2019 – was it quite challenging to whet people’s appetites without spoiling it at that event?

It was tricky because the major plot twist happens about halfway through episode 5 when you get the backstory from Theia and what happened in the Slow Days i.e. our days. So, yes, we had to hold our tongues on all of that as it totally reframes and shifts the whole narrative. But I think you just have to have faith that the first episode is good enough to keep people listening to the second, and so on.

I know Timothy Atack’s work from some of the scripts he’s written for Big Finish Productions, and he’s very good at creating a cliff-hanger.

He’s great, isn’t he? He’s just got one of those minds that thinks in a totally different way to a lot of writers I’ve worked with before. He’s particularly good at world building. Something that we spent a lot of time over in the early days was creating Pan’s world and making sure the rules added up, and then we had to work out which rules  to overtly expose through exposition, and which to hold back, with the knowledge that the rules are there  to underpin the story without having to be spoon fed to the audience.

How did you first get involved with Forest 404?

I work in-house for a production department that feeds into a lot of Radio 4 work, so I’m a BBC producer and my workload is assigned to me ahead of making various programmes. Most of what I make is for Radio 4, for the linear network, to go out on air, but increasingly we’re starting to do more podcasts as well, to try and bring in a new audience.

I think this commission came about because the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the AHRC, originally approached the Natural History Unit with the intention of wanting to commission the BBC to make a piece of TV – that made the audience engage with the sounds of nature. The Natural History Unit was slammed with every other commission that they were doing at the time and so my editor, who has got a nose for these things and sometimes sits in on NHU meetings, thought maybe we could take it on. We had to stick to their brief of the sounds of nature being at the heart of the commission.

So we got it co-commissioned. That resulted in an interesting brief: playing to what the digital Radio 4 team wanted, which was a thriller and a gripping narrative, alongside what the AHRC wanted, which was more public engagement around the sounds of nature. That’s why this thing is quite hard to put in a box in terms of genre.

It really is on three levels, isn’t it?

Exactly. Every episode of the main thriller narrative is accompanied with this Ted X style talk and also an immersive soundscape. The idea was that listeners can choose their own path: people who are more interested in just sitting back and absorbing these  experiential sounds can just tune into the soundscapes, people who want more of the fact behind the fiction can tune into the talks, and some people just binge the drama. In this way, it plays to a podcast medium because you can’t do that in linear radio.

Do you know how people went through it? Was there more emphasis on the drama or on the immersive soundscapes or on the “Ted Talk” things or was it a complete mix?

It’s a real mix, and what’s interesting is that different genres appeal to different times of day. So, while people are on commutes – or rather, back in the day when people did commute, before this virus took over our lives…

Back in the Slow Times!

(Laughs) Yes, back in the Slow Times, exactly!

People would often tune into the talks because they were small enough to listen to on their walk to the tube. It was the time of day where you’re in that more factual, curious state of mind – you’ve maybe just heard the news – whereas later on at night people were listening to the drama, and very late at night people were listening to the soundscapes, which is when you’re winding down and not necessarily wanting to engage with academic ideas.

It’s appealing to a different part of the brain.

Yes, definitely. More meditative and visceral. I co-produced the soundscapes with Graham Wild, who’s brilliant. We were very conscious of tapping into the whole sonic spectrum within the mix of every soundscape, so you really get the guttural bass-y sounds alongside the high-end stuff. I think that  has an emotional effect because different pitches can really trigger different reactions.

In the same way that different levels of music do. Back in the Slow Times, I was a church organist and when you play something on a low pedal note it has a completely different emotional effect to playing something on a very high flute or whatever.

Completely, and you can feel it resonate in a different part of your body. I’m sure you get that with the organ.

Yes. When you put the really big pipes on, yes, you feel it. It’s like one of those Martian war machines coming towards you!

Yes, that’s binaural. (Laughs)

Without question. What for you was the biggest challenge in bringing this together?

It was the edit. The edit was absolutely overwhelming.

The recording was done in quite a quick turnaround because podcast budgets aren’t huge! All the drama episodes were recorded within a week and also all the links that Pearl does, bookending the talks. The talks, co-produced by the amazing Eliza Lomas, were recorded in the cracks over a couple of weeks, so the whole recording period was super tight.

I was left with a wealth of audio. I called it my three-headed beast! I really felt like I needed to tame it somehow, to mould it into these three cohesive strands. Somehow.

The edit was the biggest challenge because we wanted to make something that was sound rich, it wasn’t a simple 3-track edit. The drama episodes probably had about 15 tracks or more and we were making sure that nothing competed in the moments when all of those channels were in use – those really rich textural moments where you’ve got layers upon layers of sounds beds and music and speech.

Making sure nothing contended added more work to the mix, automating everything, EQ-ing everything, getting the levels right.

So it was a big job!

It’s a terrible pun but you’re almost not seeing the wood for the trees…

(Laughs) Yes, especially in the early days when all you have is raw audio and you have to start by just painstakingly labelling everything. Scene 1 Take 1… At that point you think, “How am I going to get through this?”

What I do is work to a speech edit first, selecting the takes and getting the rhythm of the voices. The three characters co-narrate the story and you want to time the rhythm of their speech so that there’s an energy that works to build tension for the thriller or to play to the comedy at other points in the script. Then once I’ve got that, I put in my sound beds and illustrate it with sounds effects to  bring it to life. Then you punctuate the speech with little resets,  music or sonic motifs to give the ear and brain a break from listening to speech. You want to make sure you’re not always listening to speech.

Did you have a clear idea in your mind as to how it was going to sound when it ended up? Or was it “This is what I’ve got to work with” rather than trying to reach some kind of utopian ideal with it?

I think probably smack-bang between the two. I had a clear idea in terms of the musicality of it. In part that’s because I had the theme tune finalised before I approached the speech edit. I had the tune from Bonobo that we’d been back and forth with. That was set and that was great because it meant that it provided a pivot point for all the rest of the sound.

We detuned all the atmosphere beds. The beeps and whooshes of the city, the roar of the traffic, the cavernous hum of ‘the inner’, the lights bouncing down the mirrors to Fumetown… we detuned all those sounds to the same key that Bonobo’s theme tune was in, which was F Major or its relative minor, D Minor.

Because that was all set in stone before I even attempted any of the speech edit, I knew that it would all inhabit that sound world, that key. But otherwise it was just a case of getting all the ingredients and working out how to cook them up.

Listening back, I think at times I maybe could have stripped it back more. I think I threw everything at it and actually I wonder whether sometimes I perhaps didn’t need all that sound design, all the time. But that’s something you can only work out with hindsight, after you’ve put it to bed for a while.

How much has it been changed for the BBC Audio release?

Yes, the main change for the BBC Audio launch is the bonus ‘behind the scenes’  episode, which was really interesting to make. This features an interview with Tim all about the writing of it, some reflections from me on the making of it, and some insights from Alex, on the results of the science survey that we made alongside the original launch, which sheds some light on the mental health effects of different natural sounds.

The actual podcast itself isn’t wildly different. I did tighten some bits and you can always infinitely tweak your sound design, which I did a bit. The extra bonus episode is entirely new though, and will hopefully be really interesting to all those out there who want to make their own podcast, be it factual or fictive. It’s always fun to share insights and geek out on how these things are made!

Nearly two years on from having worked on it full time, what’s the element of it you are proudest of?

For me, I think it’s bringing the idea of climate change to a different audience. I know since Forest 404 there’s been an absolute glut of climate-led stories, be it fiction or nonfiction, as there should be. I really think that’s a brilliant thing that commissioners are waking up to. But Tim and I have both been very passionate about climate change for a while now, and we really wanted to bring it to an audience through narrative so that they can engage with it emotionally. Reworking the question to make them think about what that loss would feel like… if they were four or five hundred years from now, if they had lost this massive biodiversity that we have now, what would that feel like? I can’t answer for Tim but I think for me, yes, I’m proudest of bringing that story to light.

I remember last January [2020] when the forest fires were burning in Australia and they were the worst they’ve had in recent history. For some reason the podcast started doing the rounds in Australia then. That was so interesting because it’s not like we were plugging it there but obviously it was available on all the podcast mediums like Spotify and iTunes and somehow it got picked up.

We were seeing tweets from people saying they were listening to it whilst watching it play out in real life around them. There was one tweet from a girl who had just rescued a koala. She had it in the back of her car and she was driving it to the local vets whilst listening to one of the more biodiverse natural soundscapes. That really stuck with me.

Will there be a sequel?

Who knows? I genuinely don’t even know myself. It was kept vaguely open in the final scene so that there is a possibility of there being a sequel… or maybe a prequel. But there’s nothing on the table so far. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

I think what I definitely say is that me and Tim are very keen to work together again, be it on a sequel or, perhaps more likely, on a different thing altogether. I just think he’s an absolute gem.

Forest 404: A BBC sci-fi thriller written by Timothy X. Atack is published by BBC Digital Audio (£9.00).