- Bringing books to life in this special sort of way that requires only pajama pants and a dream. It's really, really fun, and it's really rewarding. - [Narrator] The Sandman, an audible original, produced in association with DC, from the DC publications written by Neil Gaiman, dramatized and directed for audio by Dirk Maggs. - We're opening the door to a universe with Sandman. That was the excitement and the trepidation. Neil wrote a masterpiece; you don't start rewriting masterpieces. - I don't think we knew if this thing we were trying was going to work. And we certainly didn't know that it was gonna work as well as it did. - To even think about The Sandman all by itself. That was the only thing he had ever created. That's enough; that's on par, I think, with to keen is this entire world.

- I really believe we are living in the golden era of comic book adaptations, now in the golden era of audio drama. (suspenseful music) - [Neil] The garden of destiny of the endless, you would know it if you saw it. After all, you will wonder it until you die or beyond, for the paths along and even in death. There is no ending to them. The first thing I did was work with Dirk on the scripts. There was lots of scribbling, there were lots of notes. There was lots of stuff just to make it sound right. After that, really everything was up to Dirk. - The first job that we do, the first part of the equation, is recording the cast. And so I try and work them all together in one room, gather them so that they get eye contact with each other and they can play off of each other. That's really important. - [James] You threw the bread at me.

- [Kat] I don't believe this. Dream, you're as bad as Desire or worse. Didn't occur to you that I'd be worried silly about you? 
- [James] I didn't. 
- [Kat] Think that's exactly it. You didn't think. 
- I love voice acting. I would do it for the rest of my life. I would retire my face in two seconds. 
- For me, Kat is Death. She has just, she has got that presence. She's got that wonderful perky. What we'd say in the UK, cheeky, kind of irreverent feel to her. 
- Oh man, the story of meeting Neil Gaiman is so magical. And I think I just tweeted out to him about listening to him, talk and memorizing lines and eating sushi, something like that. And he answered and I was like, what? And that became what is now a very long, amazing friendship. 
- We appeared to have become friends.

if I was in Los Angeles, I would always have dinner with, there'd be three or four people I would always have dinner with, and Kat was always one of my friends at that table. And I think we'd always been looking for a way to work together ever since. And this is it. And for Death, I just figured she'd be great. I mean, it was one of those things where I sent her an email saying, Do you wanna do this? - Like what, okay? - [Neil] Got back lots of exclamation marks and happy faces and hearts. - Did not ask for any more details. 'cause the answer is yes, obviously - It wasn't complicated. A lot of the really good casting that we've done, we've cheated. And the way that we cheated was we just went, well, who's a fan? Who would love to do this? And I happened to know that James Macavoy boy was a fan.

- [Michael] Now, do you still wanna know what's going on? - [James] Yes. - [Michael] Isn't it obvious, dream king? - [James] No. - [Michael] I've quit. - [James] You've... I'm sorry, there is some trick here, some stratagem, some rules. - [Michael] No, I've stopped, I've resigned, I'm leaving. - Going into act one. I think my immediate concern was, are we all on the same page in terms of the characters? And James Macavoy and I had two or three talks, just going through our understanding of where the character was coming from, because Dream evolves through all the books of Sandman, but James had to nail it from the beginning in such a way that people who knew the character would feel safe with him. And act two, we have Regé-Jean Page as obvious. And it turns out that Regé-Jean Page

is not only an excellent actor and an outrageously good-looking chap, he also sings like an angel. (Regé sings in a foreign language) And I've got to say it still sends shivers up my spine. (Regé sings in a foreign language) And then having recorded the voices and edited those tapes together, we then begin to add the world that takes place around them. And what I try and do is have a feeling that the world is going on both with the minute, but also separately. So if you listen to, for example, a sound of her wings, you will hear that while Kat and James as Death and Dream are talking in the foreground, there's a soccer match going on in the background. - [Kat] Have you finished? - [James] Yes - [Kat] You could have called me. - We were much more interested in getting a result that sounded like a film soundtrack, so that when you listen to it,

you feel you are hearing something that could be a movie. It just didn't happen to have a camera in the room. The one thing we can do that movies can't do is we tend to move characters to the left and right more than they do. If you ever watch a movie at home on your TV, and you've got one of those home theater setups, you'll know that a lot of the time the voices just come out of the middle under the screen, because that's where the actors are, but we actually spread it out to left and right - [Man] Wake up sir - [Anton] Oh, I must have dozed off. - And that gives you this immersive sense because my theory for what it's worth about audio is that it is a truly visual medium, but it doesn't come in through the front door. It sneaks through the side entrances. Your imagination creates this world.

This movie that's unspooling in your head. In act one, when Rodrick Burgess receives Hathaway from the Royal museum, who's carrying the big book, the book of magic, and you can sort of hear it, the book handed over and open (pages turning) and so on, but how the book looks is up to you, what suit Burgess is wearing is up to you, how the room looks. Is it oak paneling or is it whatever? You can be your own designer, set designer. You can have the actors look just like the characters in the comic, if you want, or you can make them have any other characteristics you want. This is the beauty of the medium. It doesn't tell you what to look at, it doesn't tell you what things look like. It's up to you - [Neil] Tenderly, she takes the head out of the sack and rests it neck down on the chest.

- [Woman] Aaah - There's been a big difference between working on act one of Sam and act two. On act one, I sound-designed the whole series, all 20 episodes myself, because I wanted to be absolutely certain it sounded exactly the way I heard it in my head. And sometimes you just have to do that job yourself. You have to sort of work out the template to carry on. The second series of salmon is so insanely ambitious in terms of the reach. We go from hell to New York City, to the land in the world of dream. We go to revolutionary France. We go to Imperial Rome. We go to San Francisco in the 1860s. It's such a wide variety of things. And because we've been recording acts two and three pretty close together, I had to pass on the sound design work to a sort of trusted team. And I've got to say, it's been fantastic.

- [James] I shall see you soon, my sister, see you for one final time. - [Kat] Huh, idiot. - [Dirk] So we've recorded the actors. We've added the sound effects and the backgrounds and all the bits of Foley. Then the very last bunch in legos that have built this building of sound is the music. We spend weeks, hours, days trying to make the sound effects just right and really get everything just so, and then Jim Hannigan sends me a piece of music, and the whole thing just goes up like there's helium in the balloon. He kind of, it just underpins all the emotion and all the and the epic sweep and the hope of the characters and the despair and all of that. And Jim just does this. (suspenseful music) - So the role of music is a very interesting one in audio drama, in a sense that it not only has to support the narrative,

but it also, at times, has to tell us a little bit about the environment we're in, create a sense of scale space. And this is, it's quite distinct from scoring to picture in a film or TV or even a video game. Audio drama is much, much more reliant on sound to sound and music, to paint pictures in the mind of the listener. - I think James is an astonishing composer - Music that just carries you with it. That's Jim Hannigan, I'm just so glad we've kept him. I thought we'd lose him to a movie any minute, oh I've said it now. I delivered the final mixes on the 6th of June last year. And it was released on the 15th of July. That period of waiting were pretty filled with suspense to be honest, of course, on publication day, you do keep an eye on social media. And after the release time I was looking online.

and of course, nobody's posted anything 'cause it takes 11 hours to listen to everyone. And then finally, people started reacting, and it was just the biggest load off to know that we had brought it to life in a way that was totally respectful, totally accurate to the comics. And people felt, sounded like the characters in their mind's ear. - [Neil] We've got a lovely review here from Charlie, but he wrote, This reminds me of the old radio plays, but done to absolute perfection. Dirk and I are both children of radio drama. We both appreciate it. We both love the history of it. We both know that comics have been audio dramas as long as there have been comics, pretty much. It is the most fluid, easy, remarkably delightful method of creating drama that there is. It's occurring in real time, you're feeling actors, you're feeling emotion, but you are doing all the work in your head.

- I think this is our time. I think we're proving this is a brilliant medium, and in no way is it on its last legs. We're just beginning to move forwards now. - And the knowledge that we are gonna be able to do all 75 episodes, that we're gonna be able to do the stuff that I did after, that for me is the enormous innovation. There hasn't been anything like this, and we're getting it out there. - Thanks so much for watching. Do please go to Audible and listen to The Sandman. It's made just for you, handcrafted by craftspeople of the finest magnitude. And also, it was a labor of love, and it's really, really good. So please do go to Audible, do listen to The Sandman, and do tune into this channel for more information. - Thank you for watching.

The Making Of The Sandman: Act II | Only on Audible

The Making Of The Sandman: Act II | Only on Audible