Jacobs Fanfic Readings: "A Rarity of a Date" by CaptainSnark (feat. 5 VA guests) · 7:19pm Oct 12th, 2018
This readings history is an interesting one IMO. This is a reading that I started to work on not too long after the release of my "A Therapeutic Sleepover" reading (which was in early 2017), and it was originally going to be quite different. At first I recorded my narration on my old Blue Snowball, and I was originally going to voice all of the male characters and just have a voice actress guest as Rarity. At the time I missed the small details pointing out that the casino dealer in this story is a mare and I originally thought this was a male character until I caught those details. Originally I thought of voicing Hard Boiled in my impression of the late Orson Welles in his younger years (like when he narrated the 1938 radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds," or in his role of Charles Foster Kane in his 1941 film "Citizen Kane"), and just came up with some original voices for the rest of the male OC cast (including the dealer whom I thought was a stallion like I just said).
For Rarity, I actually went through a few VAs before I completed the reading and released it. First I thought of approaching Fan 714, but didn't get a response. I set up a casting call on my Casting Call Club account for a Rarity VA, and although I cast another VA in the role, at one point I was less motivated to continue working on this reading, and thought of scrapping it. For awhile, it did end up scrapped, until several months later.
When I was adding new fanfics to my collab chart, I thought something along the lines of "You know what? Let's revive my 'A Rarity of a Date' reading, but this time I'll start over and make it a full cast reading and just narrate the story for this version (and of course I rerecorded it a couple of times on my Blue Yeti)." For the voice of Hard Boiled, I had a couple of VAs in mind: Wuten, and ShadowOfCygnus. I approached Cygnus for the role, but he was unavailable, then I approached Wuten and he was actually available. Not only that, but Wuten was the quickest VA to send me his lines after being approached for and accepting an offer from me. He actually recorded and slightly edited his file and sent it to me somewhere around 40 minutes after I offered him the role, which I was surprised by and impressed with! I know that MuseScript sent me some lines quickly, but I'm not even sure that she was that quick to send me her lines when she did. Then I approached Neighrator Pony for the minor role of Wealthy Palace, and he accepted and sent me his lines approximately a couple of weeks later. As I added this fic to my collab chart, my close friend ThunderSpeak offered to voice the stickpony, and recorded a few samples of ideas he thought I'd like for him, and the sample I picked is the one heard in the reading of course. After months of this readings production being on hold since December of last year, I had to recast the role of Rarity. I heard a sample of Pretty Pegasus Wings as Rarity and thought she would do well in the role for this fic reading, so I approached her for the role soon after, and she accepted. She sent her lines around a week or two after my offer, and then I spent half a day (6-7 hours) going through her lines, editing them, and applying them to the fic reading file in their proper spots.
My search for music and sound effects to use actually dates back to my first original version of the reading that'll never see the light of day. At first I was having a bit of trouble finding music befitting of a casino as well as carnival music, especially in the case of the former being that I noticed someone would want an email confirmation or something like that for the use of their casino music that I thought of using at first. Then when I thought again of music to use, a memory came to mind: Back in the late 2000s and the early 2010s, I would sometimes play a video game version of Monopoly for the Wii (not exactly one of my favorites especially among other games, but it's a still good game), and I had thought I could use the music that plays on the games menu whenever selecting a game to play as well as one of the boards to play on and the playing pieces. Listening to it again, I thought it'd be a little too intense for the casino portion (it isn't an intense theme overall, just seeming a little too much for what I actually imagined, and thus I deemed it unfitting). Then I decided to listen to the theme of the "classic board" within the same game, and I thought "Yes! This would work quite excellently for casino music!," and I used it. I also searched for relaxed music pieces on Kevin MacLeods site "Incompetech" for the restaurant scene and the ending, and decided to extend the latter to play during the entirety of the carnival scene as I realized the carnival ambiance was a bit lacking without any music. ThunderSpeak was kind enough to offer me assistance in searching for sound effects and music to use in the reading, and the ambiance for both the casino and carnival scene in were actually found by Thunder, he also found sound effects for the poker game, and I ended up using each of them since they worked quite well! I also decided to search for a dice rolling sound effect on FreeSound.org, as well as a couple of MLP unicorn magic sound fx commonly used in fan projects like fic readings, audio dramas, animations, and more.
This was also the first of my readings in which I decided to try experimenting with different fonts for the fanfic title and the subtext credits (but not the first to be released with that feature). I wanted to use some type of block letter font for the title and ended up using "bahnschrift," and a fancy-looking thin text font for the subtext and ended up using "ink free," and I decided to use these for "Trixie Lulamoon vs. Maud Pie" and "Following the CMC" too, and although I didn't expect those to be released before this one, I'm still glad to have applied this new feature to them as I thought it made the text credits look more fresh compared to using the usual calibri font especially since I use it all the time for all my other types of videos.
