I went to go see the new Star Trek movie – twice.  Once on a regular screen and once on an IMAX screen – and I loved it both times.  As a Trekkie, I was definitely satisfied – but as a hobbiest Star Trek writer, I was a little disturbed.

My #1 hobby is writing Star Trek audio drama, so I was left with questions about the consequences of the new Star Trek movie on the older canon.  One of the golden rules of writing for Star Trek has always been to put your toys away when you’re done playing.  That is, you need to write a “close-loop” episode (or season, series, etc.) that effectively puts the Star Trek universe back where it was before you started writing.  Anything you break needs to be fixed (First Contact), anything you create kinda disappears (Insurrection), and anyone major you kill needs to somehow find a way back (Search for Spock).

It looks like J.J. Abrams has -temporarily- suspended this rule.

*** Spoilers Begin Here ***

Consequence #1 – Things Will Break, People Will Die, and We’re Okay With That

Every somewhat versed Trekkie had a moment of acknowledgment when the major characters started discussing the Alternate Reality hypothesis.  Spock’s “Whatever course our lives might have taken before…” line.  That was J.J. Abrams telling us that this was *his* universe. The candy buttons, single, centered view screen, and cold brushed steel of the other timeline don’t exist here.

You might have noticed there’s also a black hole where Vulcan used to be.  Not only is that a major tourism killer, but the fact that J.J.’s writers either didn’t care to – or haven’t yet decided to – set things right and repair Vulcan or the timeline means that the old rules just don’t apply anymore.  Major players can be taken out.  If they were able to destroy Vulcan without a second thought, imagine what perils this could mean for our favorite characters.

Consequence #2 – Back Home, Spock is Gone!

I’m of the opinion that the warm and fuzzy canon we’ve come to know and love still exists as a parallel universe to the one J.J. Abrams created.  There are plenty of supporting examples for this (TNG: Parallels) and I don’t think J.J. Abrams’s intent was to “kill off” existing canon.  As a functional way to bring back The Original Series cast as well as tell new and compelling stories without having the ending already known, the Alternate Universe thing was a great way to do it.

In fact, the major pieces supporting my theory that things can live hunky-dory side-by-side is that Spock made absolutely no attempt to correct the timeline.  Generally when someone breaks the timeline, Starfleet Officers take it upon themselves to set it right at any cost. He never mentioned fixing the timeline to Kirk, he didn’t travel back with him to help (young) Spock re-capture the future Vulcan ship with the Red Matter, or any other lengths we’ve seen Starfleet Officers go to to set things right.  Picard with the Borg in First Contact, Kirk and Spock with McCoy in the TOS episode Guardian of Forever, and so on.  That Spock failed to do anything to set it right in this case seems a little mysterious – unless there’s some secret dynamics of Red Matter that we’re not aware of – or perhaps more character driven – that Spock could not bear the thought of a universe – even a parallel universe – without Vulcan.

But for the folks back home, in the old universe, Spock is friggin’ gone.  Which also means…

Consequence #3 – Back Home, Romulus is Destroyed!

The reason Nero went on his killing spree – Spock failed to save Romulus from the supernova.  So now we’re short a Spock and the Romulan Empire is without a homeworld.  Do you need a moment for that to sink in?  I know I did.  Romulus, in our nice, fuzzy and familiar timeline, is destroyed.

As a writer, I have to live with that – unless I want to create my own Alternate Universe.  I kinda did with Dimensions – I put the story in the Mirror Universe, set in a period that we’ve know nothing about.  Even so, if my characters ever make it back home, they’re living in a universe where Romulus is doomed.

Star Trek: Remixed

This is all an assumption.  We could posit that Spock (the old one) wasn’t actually from our warm and fuzzy familiar canon universe, but yet another alternate universe – and the same for Nero.  For all we know, in the warm and fuzzy familiar canon universe, Spock could have saved Romulus and Nero went on happily as a married miner.

As a long-time Trekkie and Trek writer, though – I feel like maybe warm and fuzzy isn’t where Trek should be anymore.  My fiction is definitely darker for a reason – I don’t think Warm and Fuzzy is where the world is at anymore.  People can’t identify with that.  Let’s take some risks.  Let’s blow up some planets and do some things that aren’t so safe with our favorites.  If we miss ‘em, we’ve got the warm and fuzzy universe on our DVDs and VHS tapes, but now we also have this new playground to play on… and a few more fans who’ll want to play too!

Before I was laid off, I had purchased a Flip Ultra with the plan of making a “Superhero” series of videos in the style of Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.  My superhero name – Nick The Four-Eyed.  My “costume”? The WiFi shirt from ThinkGeek.  The only thing standing in my way at the moment: scripting.  I don’t like making one-offs, so “Nick The Four-Eyed” is going to be a two-part series, at least.

I haven’t decided whether or not I’ll be singing.  If I do, it’ll probably sound something like William Shatner’s version of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (see the YouTube video at the end).

I created a topic for Ignite Fort Collins – and my topic, “Digital Frontiers – Psychotic Resumes and WTF Marketing” was voted on pretty heavily.

It’ll be a great topic if it’s chosen – how to turn yourself into a digital gunslinger and brave the “digital frontier” of social media and the internet.  Sounds like a goofy topic but I hope to make it really funny.  I’d really like to get a millennial presence at the event and anyway, public speaking has always been something I enjoy.

Dan Schawbel also graciously accepted my invitation for an interview for the Psychotic Resumes podcast.  We talked for about 15 minutes on his new book, Me 2.0, what personal branding is, and what graduating college students should focus on.  It ended up being a really good discussion, which I will put together in podcast form and publish for Wednesday.

I had the opportunity to meet with Amanda from DolphinFeet this week.  We had a great time talking about life, jobs, social media and general nerdery.  I’m looking forward to teaming up with her for some branding-based shenanigans!

Last night I went through all two hours of audio auditions for new Star Trek: Dimensions parts.  We’ve selected the players for the new parts and I’m very excited to have *real* voices to complement the ones I had in my head.  At least now the dialog sounds much less creepy. Ha!

Lots of fun projects to work on in my “spare time”… including my Twitter eBook, which I hope to finish by the 20th.

I haven’t had this much of a challenge since I did the audio crunching at KCSU.  Overall, the project was A LOT of fun and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.  Hopefully next time I’d make it a bit longer, too.  I also found out about the capabilities of my machine.  Having 50+ wav files open simultaneously in Audacity is just a little beyond its reach.  In fact, in addition to the 2GB of ram I have standard in it, it grabbed up another 4 GB virtual to try to mesh the file… alas, it wouldn’t.

“Ship’s counselor Georgia Harolds is making her rounds with the senior crew.  The invasion of Betazed has left everyone a little shaken – and even the Captain has become something of a recluse.  Georgia begins her journey with the Captain.”

Star Trek: Dimensions created by Waleed Ovase and Nick  Armstrong
Written and Audio Engineered By Nick Armstrong
Based on Star Trek By Gene Roddenberry; No rights infringement  intended
Executive Producer for Giant Gnome Productions is Waleed Ovase

DOWNLOAD or LISTEN NOW

But because we’re supposed to release part one of the Before The Mirror mini-series today, I was left with some pretty low-quality audio and not a whole lot to stinkin’ do about it.

It’s time for some 4 AM audio heroism.  Some of you may know that I do the Psychotic Resumes podcast.  I’m the only one who records, so I can control the audio quality as much as I care to.  But it’s not always bunny rabits and roses.  You may not know that I was the 90.5 FM KCSU Production director for a year, and an understudy for a year before that.  If I hadn’t been in radio for so long, I wouldn’t know about the silly stupid things that can save you from ripping your hair out over poor audio quality.  If you’ve never dealt with this problem before, consider yourself lucky.

Here’s a copy of the original:

Most of the files that I received sounded like that.  The audible portion of her voice was burried somewhere around -18 dB or lower.  The audible noise (ambient room noise, computer fan or just a bad connection to the computer) was hovering around -25 dB.  What’s worse is that it’s your run-of-the-mill high-to-mid-frequency hiss, that is, it intersects with the good audio all over the place.  There’s not a whole lot of room to rescue the good audio (her voice) from the crappy noise.

If you look at the audio file, the wav actually resembles crab grass popping up from time to time whenever she is speaking. That there’s a field between those sprouts is not a good sign!

Here, I’ve amplified the whole file – peaking at 0 dB max:

If you turn up your computer volume, you can hear a nice section of the hiss before she starts speaking.

This file is not that heavily affected, but it’s still not what I would consider broadcast quality.  If you line up a higher-quality audio dialog track against this one, the difference is easily noticeable.

You can use a noise filter all you want on that, but it’ll only come out sounding like a big artif-cked mess (play below). Turn down your speakers for this one unless you want to sap your will to live.  Note: this is what most people resort to, and they live with the artifacts. I don’t like hearing random ghost whistles while I’m trying to enjoy something, though, so…

This is audio that has been damaged.  Sure, you won’t get the hiss, but people will wonder why her voice sounds so hollow.  This is not an acceptable broadcast quality.

Instead, here’s what you need to do.

First: amplify your audio so that the peaks are at least maxed at -15 dB.  You can use Audacity for this.  Export from Audacity as a WAV file.

Second: use Levelator to automagically adjust the audio levels in the file.  What levelator automagically does is apply normalizers, limiters and compression filters to smooth out the audio track.  The best part is – it seems to know generally what is good audio and what is bad audio.  That is, it was able to minimize the noise amplification while simultaneously bringing out Georgia’s lovely voice.

Third: NOW is the time to use those noise filters, but do it right! Gather a large sample of the noise without breaths, pops, clicks, or other oddities.  Then apply your noise filter on either the lowest or second to lowest settings.  Trust me – the Levelator does good work, you will not need much noise reduction and the automagic that it did will prevent most artifacts from being audible to anyone but dogs.

Check out the new waveform and audio:

You can hear the difference – this file is now suitable for broadcast.  Now, it’s time for bed and a LOT of coffee in the morning… then later tonight, the premier of Star Trek: Dimensions – Before The Mirror – Part One!