For those who may not know, book one of the DEAD series, DEAD: The Ugly Beginning, is now available on audible.com for your listening pleasure. One of the common "complaints" that some people have had about my DEAD series is the vast number of characters. So as it went into production, I was anxious to see how the man chosen for the job would handle it. He went beyond my expectations, creating "voices" for everybody. I am surprised he did not end up babbling like a loon in a dark corner when it was all done.
So, take a few minutes and get to know Andy McFerrin (who is already hard at work on book 2, DEAD: Revelations), the VOICE of my epic zombie series.
So, what led you to doing voice work for
audio books?
The usual one-two punch of
necessity and opportunity. I got into this by playing guitar and singing in a
band that recorded an album with John Bricker at Falcon Sound (who’s producing
and engineering these) last year, and we kind of got chummy. He kept mentioning
to me that he’d been getting into voice production, audiobooks, that kind of
thing. Very much “You should totally
be doing this, nudge-nudge-wink-wink.” For like months. One little financial catastrophe
later, voice work went from being this cool thing that sounded like it might be
fun to try sometime to “YES I SHOULD TOTALLY BE DOING THIS PLEASE CAN WE START
NOW.” And then I got my feet wet and discovered that I almost like VA more than
singing. I’ve only had a few months to change the header on my mental business
card from ‘struggling musician’ to ‘voice actor’, but I have a feeling this is
where it’s at for me. It’s a completely different animal performance-wise, and
lets me be as introverted as I care to.
The social media is…
...still kind of a mystery to me.
I’m aware that a lot of people use social media for marketing and networking
and all that but every time I’ve tried to use, say, Facebook for self-promotion
I find myself being so apologetic about barging into people’s newsfeeds that I
never manage to deliver any kind of message and just default to goofing off.
Also, pictures of cats and food. #YOLO #deuces #fakehashtag
Share some information about your individual
work on projects besides the ones you are doing for me:
Right
as we started the first DEAD book we
were just finishing work on the audiobook production of an old-school SF novel
called Spindown by George Wright
Padgett, which is one of the cooler things I’ve worked on. It’s a throwback to
the utopia/dystopia SF of the sixties and seventies, where you’ve got this
gleaming artifice on the surface covering the guts of a system that’s succumbed
to its own obsolescence and falling apart at the seams. And against that you
have characters who’ve grown up in that system trying to deprogram themselves
and figure out who they are. While trying not to get ripped to strips by killer
robots, as of course you do in these kind of situations. Kind of Logan
Aside
from that, I’m still writing and playing music in my spare time. I have an
album’s worth of material sitting on the back burner that doesn’t seem to want
to leave me alone, so sooner or later I expect I’ll end up recording all these
ideas just to get everything said.
What
is one question you are sick of being asked—not in interviews, but by individuals
who know you are in the entertainment industry?
I’ve not been at this
end of things long enough to really get sick of anything, I’m still very much
in the starry-eyed, coin-op-heart-shaped-vibrating-bed phase. But the first
thing anybody says when I tell them I narrate audiobooks is, without fail, “Do
you have to do, like, all those different voices?” Yes, they actually add the
pause and ‘like’ every time. It’s eerie. So give it a few months and that’ll
probably be it.
So,
let’s talk a little about the DEAD
series. What are your thoughts on the project, and do you have an interest in
the zombie genre apart from this work, or is it simply part of the job? What
(if anything) do you think sets it apart from other stories in the genre
DEAD
turned
out, pretty unexpectedly, to be right in my wheelhouse. By far the most fun
part of the job is when I get to climb the walls, gnaw the scenery, and
otherwise let the demons out to play. And there’s no genre better suited to
that than horror, so I knew I was looking for something in that vein. I wasn’t
specifically looking for zeds, but definitely horror. It was when I got the
Garrett story arc as an audition script that my attitude changed from “Oh, it’s
got zombies, that’ll be fun” to “Holy shit, I have to read this.”
Full disclosure: I’d gotten kind of jaded on the zombie thing. I think
it’s become so ubiquitous within our popular culture that it’s in danger of
losing the big idea that made it work in the first place. With the kind of
supersaturation we have—I mean, you’ve got zombies in commercials selling
insurance for crying out loud—it’s all become very safe, and safe is boring. So
to come across a story that’s willing to be so ruthlessly unrestrained—nobody’s
safe, nothing’s off the table, no trigger warnings, you will get wet on this ride—it took me back to what I liked so much
about Romero’s Night in the first
place, that dangerous sense of chaos where you don’t know how it’s going to
end, Joe Lantern-jaw isn’t going to swoop in and save the day, and you have to
face that uncertainty. That’s horror. DEAD’s
approach definitely re-kindled my interest and got me back to thinking of
zombies as horror, as opposed to a pop culture ingredient that’s only there as
part of a mashup.
DEAD also has going for it
this vibe of dread inevitability which I’ve been missing for a while now, where
getting to shelter doesn’t necessarily mean you’re safe. You can hit the safe
room, barricade the doors, and then you have this dilemma where you realize
that you’re not keeping the horde out—they’re keeping you in, and they have all the time in the world whereas you...well,
don’t. Onrushing entropy, the knowledge that one way or another the bill is
coming due and you’re going to pay it, is just about the most sickening feeling
I know of. I’ve been facing that in my personal life for some time, so there’s
definitely some serendipity there. It was something to draw on.
I have had the pleasure of hearing your
sound files for all of the characters that populate the DEAD world. Care to share the process you are using to A) Come up
with so many voices; and B) Keep them separated in your head?
Voice devlopment
starts during the first working read, which is usually my second time actually
reading the book. I sit at the PC as I go through the manuscript and make
character notes in a separate file, and when I run across something in the text
that describes a character or they have a moment or interaction that I feel
gives me a handle on their personality, into the file it goes. It lets me build
a picture of who each person is beyond what’s in the book, and sometimes
that’ll trigger a recognition—maybe it’s someone from real life, maybe it’s
someone from TV or a movie, but it’s a person I can draw from. So now all this
other data becomes available to me that I didn’t have before and instead of
just being a question of dialect and embouchre and dialogue, now that person’s
a character in my mind. And sometimes in a pinch I’ll just go from scratch and
just mix and match accents with attitudes until I have something that feels
right.
Then in preproduction
we “audition” the voices in the studio, and John keeps samples of each voice on
hand which he can feed back to me whenever I lose track of who’s who. So yeah,
basically we cheat. And even with that sometimes the voices drift a bit. Some
of the “auditions” we laid down for you ended up being way different from what
we ended up going with by the time we started production. Because I’m kind of
an overthinking spaz like that.
How would you describe the DEAD series to friends?
Straight 101 bourbon,
neat, make it a double, with a bloody brain for a chaser.
Any
favorites among the characters yet?
It’s early yet, but
Juan Hoya’s the one I’m watching most. Juan’s got this real interesting range
throughout the first book—he starts with this aggro alpha-male swagger that
gets followed to its most extreme, cold-blooded terminus, whereupon he makes a
conscious moral decision to retreat back to a more human position, change his
standing, and carry on. I like that about him, that he’s not letting his past
dictate his future. I also think he’s probably got the strategy which’d be
closest to my ideal—procure boat, keep to myself, relax with my thoughts. Might
have to incorporate the beer from the San Diego crew’s scenario, but it sounds
workable.
My favorite in terms
of voice, though, was Sgt. Wimmer. Once his voice took on that Applachian
accent I realized he sounded kind of like my grandfather, so I got really
attached to him. I want to walk around for a day or two and just have that be
my voice for a while, creeping everyone out.
What
is one thing about you that would surprise individuals who do not know you
personally?
Well, I’m gay, I guess
that’s a thing. Not that this is any great revelation in 2013, but I’m a big,
tall, hairy dude who makes loud rock music so people generally don’t figure it
out without being told. And they have the most entertaining reactions when they
do finally catch on. My partner’s similar in both stature and mode, so even
when people see us as a couple they still don’t put two and two together.
There’s this Asian restaurant we go to regularly whose staff still thinks after
several years of steady custom that we’re brothers, and I don’t have the heart
to tell them otherwise. I should be annoyed by that, but I think it’s
hilarious.
So,
with book one under your belt, any scenes that stood out for you? Any of the
characters that you can’t wait to get back to and see what happens
The scene that
actually kicked my ass the hardest was the one on top of the prison with Joshua Martel. I had to take
a break after reading that bit the first time through. The idea of being
completely vulnerable to a mob like that, completely othered and decreed
less-than-human...that resonates very strongly with me. Definitely brought back
some formative experiences which I’d stuffed down the memory hole for years
until I finally found a constructive way to bring them to the foreground and
confront them, so I empathized with him probably more than I was intended to,
given his rap sheet and M.O.
There’s this mob
mentality thing among people where all you have to do is slap a certain
label—earned or otherwise—on someone and then they’re fair game for whatever
inhuman things the mob wants to do to them. It used to be racial or ethnic
labels, then it was ‘faggot’ or ‘nerd’, now it’s ‘freak’ or ‘pedo’ as in the
book, tomorrow it’ll just be something else. I see it on the Internet, I see it
in the news coming out of places like Russia and Uganda, and it’s equal parts
frustrating and terrifying. A lot of the reviews brought up Garrett, but as a
reader I find a single monstrous character to be a far more explicable, easy
thing to confront than the insidious knack the anonymity of the crowd has for
making people make monsters of themselves—for what seem like the most perfectly
justified reasons—and delight in the transformation. There’s a point, in short,
where righteous indignation stops being righteous.
As for who I want to
get back to...Thad, Keith, and JoJo, the San Diego trio. I really liked the
chemistry those guys have, and their part of the book ended just as they were
finally getting out on their own and into the biomass with their competence and
warm beers. So I’m very curious to see how they go.
One
of the biggest criticisms regarding DEAD
is that it paints humanity in a negative light? Did you get that vibe? How did
you see it?
That’s a criticism? I think that says more about the
people criticizing DEAD than the
books themselves. I mean, I get that maybe some people are made uncomfortable
by certain scenes but that’s the whole point of horror, is it not? I submit
that if a story doesn’t push you out of your comfort zone and play with if not
transgress upon your taboos, then what you’re actually reading is not horror
but fantasy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I don’t understand the
idea that the utter collapse of civilization should be depicted in a polite,
tasteful, nonchallenging way. It’s a wildly unrealistic expectation. It’s okay
to show people being eaten alive by zombies—which aren’t real—but if you show
monstrous acts which are carried out daily by real people that’s somehow beyond
the pale? Nonsense.
Really, humanity doesn’t need DEAD to paint it in a negative light—humanity’s been doing a
bang-up job of that all on its own, we just try not to notice if we can help
it. Darfur, Rwanda, the Yugoslav Wars...you don’t need zombies to bring out the
worst in people, just take away the socioeconomic infrastructure that keeps
people cohabitating and watch ‘em team right up and sharpen the knives. We like
to dress it up in euphemisms like “ethnic cleansing” or “civil war” or “unrest”
so we don’t have to look at the brutality of what is actually happening, but
the reality is still there waiting for us. I think it’s healthier and more
productive to face up to that than to wallpaper it over.
But aside from that slightly belligerent digression,
I didn’t actually find DEAD to be particularly negative on humanity anyway.
While parts of DEAD show humanity
reduced to its absolute nadir, there’re other parts where someone seizes the
opportunity to be better than what they’d expected of themselves. For each
Garrett or Travis Reynolds, there’s a Steve.or a Dillon Clay. There’s
brutality, there’s tenderness. Sadism, kindness. Selfish ambition,
self-sacrifice. Dogmatic idiocy, clever resourcefulness. Cowardice, courage.
Sometimes within a single character. People are like that. It’s a very realistic
way of looking at the scenario.
How
do you see humanity dealing with a scenario such as this? (Removing the idea of
how unlikely it is, of course.)
I dunno. When you get right down to it the zombie
apocalypse is essentially a great big Kobayashi Maru (calm yourselves, I’m not
a Trekkie, I googled it)—it’s not about solving the scenario, it’s about how
long you survive it and how many of your ethics you’re able to hold onto along
the way. That strikes me as something for individuals to determine, not humanity
as a whole.
Did
anything stand out for you?
Juan’s catchphrase, “Tight like a tigah.” For the longest
time I just could not figure out how to deliver that line without lapsing into
parody. Never in my 37 years have I found myself wandering around the house
repeating the same sentence over and over like Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King, sounding more
ridiculous each time and giggling like a maniac—“Tight! ...like a TIGAAAAAAAHHHHH!”
I’m sure the neighbors thought I was mental. Fortunately, if the second book’s
any indication Juan’s catchphrase seems to be going viral within the DEADiverse, so it was time well spent.
Getting to say it in Travis Reynolds’ voice was hysterical. And with each
additional voice I say it in, it gets more and more fun.
Links:
(I’m between bands at
the moment, don’t have a personal website, and for now my social media presence
is more personal than professional, so...ummm...
Falcon
Sound Company: http://www.falconsoundcompany.com/
Spindown on Audible, if that’s not too shameless in the
self-promotion department: http://bit.ly/1e3YMtW
Great interview with Andy. I really liked reading his take on the series. I purchased it this morning and I'm having a blast listening to it!
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