It seems like just yesterday that we were first discussing making the Clockwork Bird podcast, and that’s because it was yesterday. Well, pretty recently, anyway. Might as well be yesterday, given how elastic time has become over the last couple of months. Point is, it’s been a remarkably snappy turn around from having absolutely no plans to sit down and record a narrative podcast, to having three and a half episodes actually down on paper and an almost full cast list.
We’ve got a contact email for the podcast, a contact email for the studios, and our very own studio twitter. We’ve also set up a patreon so you can drop us a quid or two if you think we’re doing a half-decent job. Donating will mean we’ll be able to make more episodes, more quickly, and will furnish our lovely cast with some livelihood, which is always nice, but especially so during the time of the ‘ronas.
It’s a bit of a funny story, how all of this happened. Some time in September 2019, we started making half-hearted jokes about making a film out of the then-hypothetical Hanging Sloth Studios. At the time, I was using the name perfunctorily as the studios under which my band, Maybe Wednesday, were performing. In reality, the ‘studio’ is a simple audio set up I run out of my bedroom, and the staff are, well, me. And the cats I suppose, but they’re really terrible colleagues to be honest and I don’t know why I put up with them. Not once have they offered to make me a coffee, and they keep attacking my feet whenever I walk past whichever piece of furniture they’ve decided to lurk under.
Every December I produce a ridiculous plan for the year ahead. It works pretty well for me, actually, and it’s ridiculous only in the level of detail I go into with said plans. I know it’s not very rock-and-roll but I have no idea how anyone else gets these things done. Anyway, I – almost arbitrarily – added ‘make a podcast’ to my ‘ideas’ section of my very thorough plan for 2020.
Myself (Pippin), and my housemates, Alex and Jessie, have been talking about making a podcast on and off for a while but with very little seriousness. I workshopped a couple of ideas for non-narrative podcasts but none of them ever really stuck. In the end, the endeavour was more or less abandonned, until late April when it suddenly struck me that I could write a narrative podcast, and maybe that idea would hold a little more water. It turns out that it did. A lot of water, quite quickly, like a super sponge. A very small super sponge, mind.
Anyway. I’m very glad we’ve managed to get even to this stage and I’m really excited about the next couple of weeks, during which I’ll be finishing off the scripts for Episodes 1-5 of Clockwork Bird, or the Modern Icarus, a sci-fi horror podcast about humans, humanity, and hubris, featuring cyborgs, lawsuits, and a very personable Alexa-like assistant called E-Liza.
In the meantime, I’ll keep you posted. As everything with Hanging Sloth Studios, this website is a work in progress, so please bear with us whilst we get our bearings. Or Slothings? No. That’s bad, isn’t it? Oh well, worth a go I suppose.
See you on the flipside,
Pippin Eira Major
Sloth-in-Chief
Hanging Sloth Studios 