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STELLAR JOCKEYS JULY NEWSLETTER
Welcome to the Stellar Jockeys newsletter for July. This month's edition isa trip down memory lane, along with your usual collection of community
submissions.
Benjamin, Stellar Jockeys

How The Audiobook Was Made
To celebrate the addition of the Brigador ebook to our merch store, wethought we'd look back at how it all came about. Sitting in my computer’s
D:\Brigador\Books folder are about 140 les. I’m only going to talk about
three of them. This is what part of the rst one looks like, zoomed out.

What you’re looking at are some of the corrections and annotations tothe ~75,000-word Brigador novelization from spring 2016. The majority ofthese are simple orthographic xes. Frankly, very little had to be changed
when it came to editing the written novel.
The other two les, however, are another matter. Before that, we need tonote that the Brigador novel and its audiobook adaptation was a
con uence of multiple people, in multiple places, namely:
Brad Buckmaster for writing it from the south of England
The Monahan brothers for their feedback, foreword and cover art
from the USRyan Cooper for their VA from the north of England
Benjamin (the one typing this out) for editing Brad’s words anddirecting Ryan while in Moscow, Russia

Makeup And Vanity Set for their music from their Nashville-based
studioDavid for their skills with Final Cut, also in Moscow
So how do you get from all those people to an audiobook? Well to start,
you need to audition people for the role. So, here’s a test read from early2016 from Ryan.

Secondly, some stats on the audiobook itself:
In its nal state it is 18 chapters plus an epilogue, with a runtime ofalmost eight hours.
In its initial state those eight hours were made up of 193 short audio
clips.
Now, once you’ve found your VAs, and done your recordings, the othertwo les are needed. In more o cial circles you would probably call theseproduction notes; I called them chapter notes. To what end? Let’s take aglimpse.

The two les of chapter notes were used by three people – myself, Ryan

and David. I would write the document after downloading and listening tothe reads (numbered numerically) from Ryan via cloud upload. Ryanwould follow the direction from my comments. Once satisfactory, Davidcame in to do post production, and take all 193

les and stitch them

together into the chapters. Lastly, I would listen through to the assembled
chapters after David exported them.
In an ideal scenario, this should all be done in a studio environment with
an audio engineer present. Instead, this was done remotely, so in orderfor things to not go completely o the rails, you need a document that at aglance whoever is looking at it can understand what they need to do andwhere they need to do it.
Finally, for those that haven’t read or listened to it, the book is in twoparts. This was because we wanted the audiobook to coincide with the 1.0
release, but we only had enough audio up to chapter eleven, so Part II
wasn’t immediately available when it was released back in 2016.
In 2019, the original AIF les from 2016 were cleaned up further and a few
changes made to make it available on Audible. One of those changes
altered the epilogue slightly, though I still prefer how the 2016 version
closed out. Spoilers ahead, if you have not read or listened to the book.
At the novel’s conclusion, newly-promoted Col. Blake, Sgt. Maj. Miranteand Cpl. Collins are recovering in hospital. At the six-minute mark in theepilogue chapter, part of the MAVS track that is now known as “The Rules
Have Changed” (but originally titled “March”) swells in as Blake gives herspeech. Here is how that nal section used to sound.

Hope you have enjoyed this brief trip down the memory hole.

Community Spotlight
We've only got space for a couple of entries this month, so here's twofrom Discord newcomer Ri eInfantry. First, their take on the infantry ofSolo Nobre...

And their vision of Precursor James in a Varlet being chased byBombuchas...

These images and other contributions by our community can be seen in
the #becks_best channel on our Discord.
Join Our Discord Server

Next Month
In August's newsletter we'll discuss our current plans, as well as check inon what our exemplary community members have created.

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112 N Neil St Apt D, Champaign, IL
United States
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