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Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight Launch Announcement

Posted in Blog, Personal, Project Updates

It’s time, the post you’ve all been waiting for! Roy Kaplan is real and it’s here! (Or, it will be in only a couple short months!)

Cover art for Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight

Cover art for Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight. Art by Jesse Peng.

There’s a lot to talk about under the jump, but if you’re just interested in the release information, the short version is: Roy Kaplan: Out of Sight is officially launching on December 28. Check the Out of Sight page for the full release schedule and the Roy Kaplan main project page for the full list of relevant links.

If you want to hear about the project and what I’ve been working over the last two years, keep reading under the cut!

Roy Kaplan? Who’s that?

I think I’ve written some variation of this spiel like ten times before, but I’ll do it again!

Roy Kaplan (or Roy Kaplan, Private Investigator if you prefer) is a paranormal cyberpunk detective audio drama featuring the titular Roy Kaplan–private investigator, ex-burglar, and psychic. Over the course of the series, Kaplan takes on all sorts of cases across the city from blackmail to missing persons to murders and everything in between. With the ability to talk to ghosts and bypass any lock with his telekinesis as well as the advice of his from actual 1940 ghost roommate Wes, there’s no mystery big enough to stop him from uncovering the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be.

Roy Kaplan is heavily inspired by old time radio classics such as Richard Diamond as well as 1930s-1950s hardboiled detective fiction. It’s primarily an episodic format, so that each episode is a self-contained mystery and people can listen to and understand any episode without context from the other ones (besides understanding of the series’ main premise). It is still preferred to listen in release order, but it’s viable to jump in wherever you like. It was important to me when writing Roy Kaplan that it would be, first and foremost, a detective story and not a story that just happens to have a detective in it, that pitfall that so many urban fantasies tend to fall into. If you know me and my writing, you’ll know that mystery is the genre that I’ve accidentally pigeonholed myself into, so I think I can promise some good mysteries :)

This first season, Out of Sight, consists of twelve 30-40 minute episodes, featuring voice talents of myself and over thirty other very talented voice actors across the season. Our custom soundtrack is composed by the very talented Beacon. I’m not the best person to judge (since I really don’t listen to podcasts myself) but I think I can safely say that the time and effort that’s gone into this project has turned out a very solid show. But don’t just take my word for it–check out the trailer!

Credits and transcripts can be found on the main trailer page.

Woah, a trailer!

Not bad for a first audio project, right? This trailer is a bit overdue, honestly! I had a trailer cut together yonks ago but circumstances–partially some major recasts, partially the fact that I ended up rerecording literally all of my lines, but also the fact that I didn’t want to put the trailer out before I knew when I could actually launch–meant that I had to sit on it until pretty recently. If you’ve been following my Tumblr or corresponding with me with any regularity or otherwise following Roy Kaplan’s progress, you probably already know that Out of Sight has had a hell of a lot of delays–it’s certainly much later than our original estimate of autumn of 2022–so I didn’t want to make any more speculations on the release date until I could really be sure of it.

Well, this week I got the last of the required voice lines in and have finally finished the first draft for all twelve episodes, which means that I can now finally confidently say that Roy Kaplan will launch on December 28, 2024. I’ll be releasing episodes on Saturdays every other week, and if you want more information about the official nitty-gritty stuff of where you can listen to it and when episodes will come out, just hop over to the Out of Sight page and you’ll find all that tasty information. Without hyping things up too much, I’ve only gotten positive feedback from test listeners and the amount of sheer talent from the voice actors and our musician is fantastic, and of course I’m the one who wrote it and I am a very good writer :)

So I feel very confident that this is a show that anyone who enjoys detective dramas will enjoy, and after all the work I put into it, it should be nothing less.

Again, if you want more information about what the season is specifically about or other information about Out of Sight itself, just hop over to the homepage I linked in the above paragraph for all those official things. I won’t discuss them further here. This blog post is about my personal experience!

Hey, what the hell happened in the last two years?

Man, so many things happened. Life has been very tumultuous for me in the last two years, but not in a bad way, I think.

With regards to production, we got most of our voice work done in 2022, but then real-life issues, the details of which I’m not privy to and wouldn’t be at liberty to discuss anyways, led to a whole lot of delays across the latter half of 2022 and pretty much all of 2023. I wasn’t doing much in that span besides making episode cover art because other parts of the team were supposed to handle editing and production–I helped with a bit of casting, but that was the main bulk of what I did in that time frame.

Well, at the start of 2024, I decided that I’d waited long enough and I was going to make Out of Sight happen, even if that meant I had to do it myself. Well, April and May came around and that’s basically what ended up happening–I started editing together all the episodes myself. Is my editing the best? Am I the most experienced? No, but I was very much the person who would get it done, so that made me the best option. I was still missing a handful of voice files in part because so much time had passed that some of the voice files disappeared from the Google Drive, which in August and September led to me officially taking over production from Luna, who was previously working on Roy Kaplan and had to drop the project.

It’s been a really, really busy six months. I conducted a casting call for my remaining roles in September, reviewed over 800 auditions, prepared scripts, and cast new actors. I actually ended up rerecording all of my lines–something like ten hours of raw audio across all twelve episodes (two takes, after all). And of course, the editing itself is no walk in the park. Even though I’d say my editing style is pretty minimal–I pretty much cut together raw audio and I generally use the minimum amount of sound effects to convey the stage direction and am very light on ambiance–it still takes so many hours to pick out all the right takes and cut them together and time them to sound natural and volume balance everything and…you get the point. It’s a lot of work. Well, this week, after months of pretty much non-stop work on this project, all the episodes have reached the finished first draft, which is why I finally feel confident enough to make a release announcement. I’d gotten burned so many times on the release date before this, so I wanted to make an announcement and really mean it when I could guarantee it was true, and that time is now.

It’s been a long road and honestly I am very relieved to be at a point where I can (very soon) stop working on Roy Kaplan to focus on other things for a while. I don’t really expect to listen to the series much myself after it’s uploaded and ready to go, since I don’t do much of listening to podcasts (and I think I’ve listened to these twelve episodes enough times already).

There’s definitely the sense, sometimes, that I’m doing a really monumental amount of work for very little payoff–three years and a thousand hours of work for something like seven hours of finished audio drama that someone will binge in one afternoon, what’s even the point? Especially when the audio drama space is incredibly saturated to begin with. But at the same time it’s worth remembering that 66k is a novel’s worth of story, and Roy Kaplan is the story that I want to tell and I’m the only one who can and will.

It’s been a learning experience for sure, taking Roy Kaplan the rest of the way across the finish line. Listening to how voice actors read my script has given me some insight into how much direction is needed in certain places. Editing twelve episodes has made me acutely aware of certain phrases that I use a little too frequently. Production has required me to do a lot of coordinating and keeping track of schedules and making sure nobody’s falling off–I’m pretty sure a non-zero number of the voice actors I’ve worked with think I’m neurotic (which is probably not incorrect). Even the relatively simple act of getting Roy Kaplan posted and distributed and writing promotional posts has been exhausting–I’ve basically spent the last two days doing nothing else, and I don’t even have most common social media.

I don’t know how good Roy Kaplan is. I think it’s probably better than a lot of indie audio drama that’s out there–the editing might be straightforward to a fault and a little rough around the edges, but all the raw material going into this show is solid as hell. I know the writing is good, I know the acting is good, I know the music is good. I’m vaguely aware that the length of the episodes and the size of the cast makes Roy Kaplan a bit of an outlier from a lot of audio dramas out there, and going for a full scripted show of this nature for my first audio project might have been a little too ambitious…but this was the show I wanted to make, so any other easier project simply wouldn’t have happened because it wouldn’t have been what I want. Maybe I only have myself to blame, for creating a show in the model of an actual NBC production instead of something a little more reasonable, but here we are.

What happens after this?

Well, first is getting Out of Sight properly finished, uploaded, and ready for people to enjoy. After that, I’ve got some other things I need to work on, like the script book and art book that I’m going to put up for sale at the end of the season so people can help me recoup the money that I spent to make season 1. If things go well enough re: funds, then season 2 can happen. I do have plans outlined for four total seasons, though only season 2 has an actual episode listing figured out. I’ll be spending January to May while Out of Sight releases writing eleven new scripts (I already have one finished) for season 2, Greetings from the Other Side, and around June or July I’ll see how I am with funds and if I can actually go forward with getting voice actors on board and producing another season (an overwhelming majority of the funds that go into production are to pay voice actors, as I do not pay myself for my voice work or editing). Assuming I do have the funds and my life is stable enough, I would be able to release season 2 around new year of 2027.

“That’s a long time!” Yeah, well, I’m only one person, and I’m handling writing, production, and editing (I know I use “us” and “we” when talking about the production team but to be clear I, singular, am the production team), not to mention that I have other things I’m working on. Yeah, it’s probably possible to produce a full season of Roy Kaplan in one year, from the start of writing to the end of editing and release, but not when I’m doing all three main jobs. I think season 2 would be a little easier on me because the production cycle would be spread out across two years instead of me frantically trying to edit together an entire season’s worth of episodes in four months.

I won’t be doing a crowdfunding campaign for season 2–or any season. Production funding will solely come from things like Patreon support and the digital purchases, because I don’t really feel comfortable doing crowdfunding campaigns. I don’t have any incentives to offer and I can’t guarantee production schedules. I think it’s more reasonable that, instead of telling people to pay me for a product they haven’t seen, I’ll make the show and they can pay me afterwards if they want more of it. At the end of the day, I’m not very good at monetization because I just don’t like to put things behind a paywall, and I can’t really come up with things to sell besides the things I’m personally interested in. I’m putting this season out with the hope that people will appreciate my effort and the show, and if they want season 2, then they can put down the money to make it so.

I am still fantasizing about a future where I can make Out of Sight into a physical 6-CD box set with a physical script book. I would like it very much to have my work in a physical format so that even if all my computers and the internet exploded tomorrow, I would still have a record of my work, and also it could hypothetically be put in a library. But those things, if they ever happen, are a long ways off.

In the meantime, I still have a bit more work to do on Out of Sight–getting my transcripts together, putting together and scheduling my posts, cleaning up the last of the episodes that need to be cleaned, finishing up the end-season goodies. While the hardest of the work is now behind me, I’ll still be busy for a while yet.

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