Ashes of Wisdom, Episode I. ARRIVAL

Played 132 times

Uploaded by: bytebender

Upload date: 3/7/2025

Description:

Baghdad, 1258. The Mongol army is days away from burning the greatest library on Earth. Enter four time-traveling nerds with strict orders: Watch. Don’t interfere. Too bad history isn’t that simple.
Dr. Leila Nassar (a historian with family ties to the chaos) leads a crew of rebels, rule-followers, and idealists. Their mission seems simple: document the House of Wisdom’s destruction. But there is one problem: The scholars they’re supposed to coldly observe won’t stop being human!

This is the first episode in a series of 5. It starts in medias res, which might cause you some confusion. However, everything should become clearer the more episodes you watch. Constructive criticism welcome!

When they are speaking to natives, they're supposed to be using tech that transparently translates what they say to perfect Arabic. However, it is too time consuming to add translation effects.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this series. The last thing you made was amazing and I'm quite sure this will be the same.

I like this. The intonations and inflections make this feel like a radio production from the 80s with modern sound design. I like it.

THis is pretty solid. Nice sound design and environment effects. The AI voices aren't even that bad.

Absolutely brilliant my man, brilliant. The reverb in the beginning was a little off, but that's just me giving what you asked, constructive Criticism. I Love the hell out of this project though and can't wait to see more my friend.

There are a few points where the lines are overlapped in a way that feels a little rushed. I think that this sort of spacial sound design has the easy tendency to be overused, as well, such as spacing actors too far out. But overall, solid.

Thank you all!

@ GigaSound: the reverb at the beginning is meant to represent the scale of the city. Baghdad at the time was known for multi-story buildings and narrow streets, which I could imagine would cause reverb. Though I agree, in hindsight I might have overdone it. In fairness though dear VR is not very flexible with its reverb.

@The Machine: If you mean the characters overlapping each others speech sometimes, that's intentional. It was meant to represent characters interrupting each other, covering up for each other (See When Thomas covers up for Zainab when she accidentally revealed she knows about the scholars works)
About spacing actors too far out: I'm sorry about that. In some instances, lowering the volume of a voice line is meant to convey whispering and muttering. But this accidentally makes it sound like they are distant. Unfortunately Eleven labs doesn't have a way to make the voice whisper something so this is the only way to go about it.

Thanks for the feedback!

Oh yeah, I know. It's really difficult to sound design people interrupting each other naturally, without them actually being people on a camera together.

The other commenters are right, not only am I impressed with the immersiveness of the audio style, I'm also quite impressed with the AI voices, they don't detract nearly as much as they could've if you'd picked worse voices or not engineered their expressiveness as well.