Soylent Theater

Sometimes a little technology can be a dangerous thing. Especially in the hands of astute, science-fiction loving comedians.

From Magic Marmot Studios in Minneapolis comes Soylent Theater, a sketch comedy troupe that has been performing live stage shows of "twisted science fiction geek comedy." If you know the difference between a Dalek and dilithium, their act is for you.

Their first CD, "Made Out of People," will be dropping soon. If you're heading to the CONvergence science fiction convention (www.convergence-con.org), you'll see it featured there. The disk is also being submitted for the Mark Time Science Fiction Award.

"Made Out of People" was produced using almost entirely Sony Creative Software products, from Sound Forge to Vegas Video to Acid Pro to Noise Reduction to CD Architect.

The disk is a hearkening back to the days when Radio Theater was king, but updated for today's audience sensibilities. Soylent Theater used sound effects, music, and various production techniques to provide a very visually-oriented sound; it's like "Theater of the Imagination."

Soylent Theater is made up of five writer-performers: Kelvin Hatle, Tim Uren, Zvie Razieli, and Joshua and Joseph Scrimshaw. Adrienne English, Natalie Wass, Pat Harrigan, Barbra Pemberton, and Rob Withoff provided additional voices. Recording and post-production were handled at Magic Marmot Studios, with Rob Withoff pulling duty as recording engineer, editor, and producer, with invaluable assistance provided by Zvie Razieli. Additional writing duties were also provided by Pat Harrigan.

Rob writes: "we did the original dialogue recording in the studio, tracking to DA-88; this allowed us to capture some of the nuances of the performance that would otherwise be lost in a single-track style of recording, but allowed for each performer to be miked separately. The dialogue sessions lasted just over three weeks, beginning in May of 2001.

"All dialogue was captured and cleaned up with Sound Forge 5.0. Basic EQ, limiting, and normalization was the primary cleanup duty, but the Noise Reduction plug-in was extremely useful in getting rid of things like background hum and fan noise that crept into some of the recordings. In addition, I was able to crank the settings on NR to get some really great alien voice effects!

"Acid Pro was used to create some music beds and enhance some of the production music that was used.

"All of the dialogue takes were divided into phrases using the Marker tool in Sound Forge, with the labels being set to the dialogue cues. While this was originally done to make locating the dialogue points easier and wave files shorter (large sections of quiet were removed), it had an unexpected benefit as well. The tight integration between Vegas and Sound Forge made me very happy, because when Vegas loaded the wave files, they retained the marker information, and it was easy to select the perfect dialogue by double-clicking the desired region. This was terrific, because the majority of the assembly work was finding the right bit of dialogue from different takes, sometimes down to replacing individual consonants in words. Vegas made this a breeze.

"Each track was compiled as a separate project; completed projects were realized to .wav files and post-processed with the Waves L1 Ultramaximizer.

"The individual .wav files were transferred to a different machine running CD Architect; this allowed me the precise control over the boundaries between tracks, fades, and timing that I was looking for. (Rob is now using VV3 for CD mastering – editors). The final layout of the CD is much more interesting than just your simple song-break-song that normal audio CD's have, and is an integral part of the presentation of the CD.

"I used to work at Digital Audio Labs, and I've had my hands on just about every piece of multitrack software out there — Cubase, Samplitude, Cool Edit Pro, MxTrax, Pro Tools, Saw Plus — and Vegas absolutely has the most intuitive, smoothest, and most powerful interface of all of them."

Sci-fi comedy…Minneapolis…seems Soylent Theater is stepping up to fill the vacuum left by Best Brains' departure. And with their continued use of Sony Creative Software products, we're sure they'll take comedy where no man has laughed before.