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Before the break (I know that was a long time ago) we had our annual winter exhibition. Now since we are older and have already done a Star Wars exhibition our teachers came up with another idea for us.

We were tasked with creating three podcasts. One of a family member, one of our grade 12 partner and the other of a random person at the exhibition.

 

Yes, we were paired up with grade 12’s. I was with Spencer.

 

Now these weren’t just everyday podcasts we had we had to make all three an interview about a unique story that our interviewee had.

For inspiration we listened to a bunch of interviews done by Storycorps.

Storycorps is a organization whose goal is “to preserve and share humanity’s stories in order to build connections between people and create a more just and compassionate world.” The whole idea for our podcasts was similar. We wanted to find really strong and interesting stories from everyday people to prove that everyone has something to share that we might not know about them.

To start of the project we interviewed our grade 12 partners. Spencer and I used the first half of a class figuring out the story and the other half we spent recording.

Spencer’s story was about an unknown part of his family heritage. He was raised Scottish and Irish when, in fact, one of his grandmothers was Russian. I won’t spoil too much but I was really happy with the story and I found it quite interesting because almost everyone can relate to it. Everyone has a family heritage, some unknown and some known.

For all three podcasts we had to use an app called Ferrite. Apparently pro-podcasters use it but I have no idea if that’s true. Also we could add an intro  and/or and outro depending on the format. We could also add music to all of it or parts of it.

It really was pretty flexible podcast criteria except for the fact that their had to be a story.

 

Now for our second podcast we had to interview a family member. I interviewed my uncle, who was in town for the weekend. My uncle worked for the Port of Vancouver and is currently involved with Transport Canada, working on the Echo Program.

I interviewed him about growing up. It was really interesting to learn about his childhood, I never really knew how he grew up and what some of his influences were.

Now after doing those two podcasts we had to do one more. At the exhibition we interviewed three people and had to pick one of them to do our podcast on.

Thankfully there was a lot less stress going into the exhibition. It was either the fact that we only really had to decorate and come up with some interview or the fact that we had been doing exhibitions for two years.

For the whole set up of the exhibition we paired up, or in my case got into a group of three. Each group drew a name out of a hat to see which room they would be in. I was with Ryan and Adam and we were in Mr. Yip’s Room.

Since it it was Christmas we decided to go with a Halloween theme. (Only kidding, we did Christmas)

We turned the room into a recording studio that was decorated with an assortment of Christmas decor. We covered some of the lights with festive coloured paper, hung up a ton of lights, had hot chocolate and a non-alcoholic margarita machine.

The setup was actually a lot of fun, I enjoyed digging a giant net of lights to a wall. (Since I’m a scout I tie a lot knots and I really enjoy doing elaborate setups with rope like this)

Now since recording with all three of the interviewers wouldn’t work we each took turns getting an interview and by the end of the night each person had three interviews. My topic was Influences I asked my interviewees about what their influences were growing up and in their adult life. I was able to get some really interesting stories. I had one person who was in software engineering and talked about his influences currently. I also had a dad who talked about his son’s heart defect and his father dying when he was a preteen. It was a really strong story and it made me really think how lucky I am with having so many family members.

 

Now it came to editing. I put together a first draft in the following days and sent it off to Spencer for critique.

 

I heard back and made a checklist of some things to change. When I got back from the break I then got to work making those changes. (it didn’t take long) then I sent it off to Ms.Willemse who took a look and I only had to raise the volume a little bit and then it was good to go.

This was probably one of my most favourite exhibition projects. I really liked learning about people and also learning how to properly do an interview.