(77b) Production Notes

I somehow missed in my first read-through that Snape had removed the memory of his presence from everyone who witnessed the Harry-summoning. Which – first of all – holy crap! How did I miss that level of malfeasance? But secondly, makes you consider just what a really powerful and dedicated group of wizards could do with rituals if they really put their minds to it. Might they even be able to nearly-perfectly erase an entire city of out of the world’s memory?

I used a time-rewind-ish sound effect for the Obliviation. I know the repeated Obliviations aren’t actually a time-rewind, but it felt very appropriate given the trail-and-error nature of the attack. Perhaps I’ve played too many video games, but I was reminded of the fail-rewind-try again mechanics of Prince of Persia and Braid immediately, so I jumped right to that.

The Mr Hat-and-Cloak whisper was frustrating. The first time he appeared I didn’t quite know what I wanted to do with his voice, but I wanted something interesting. So I did several different takes of his lines, figuring I’d pick whichever sounded best, and apply some sort of filter. As I was listening to them I thought “Hm… this might sound kinda cool if I just layered one over the other…” I tried it and liked the effect and went with it. Unfortunately I didn’t really have a procedure for what I did, which made replicating it this week darned difficult. I don’t feel that this is quite as good as before, but I don’t have the time to redo it entirely. Hopefully it’s very close, and it certainly won’t have been the first voice to have changed over time.