Today is the day, I have hinted at the podcast, I have given little details about the podcast, but today the podcast will finally be available to all. This was the first major project of the year and it was definitely one of the tougher ones that I have done in PLP, however I believe the final product was worth it all. I will be going over what really helped shape this podcast over the last month and a half.

Our first and most important step was understanding what makes someone significant to Canada, as you know in this podcast each of us chose a person that we believe has impacted Canada, then we had to prove it using evidence from their lives and also an interview. So for the first bit of this project we spent our time discussing what makes a person significant to history, I found this helpful because at first I had a whole list of people I wanted to choose, but as I learned more and more I found one person in particular that I thought would work the best, Steve Nash.

When we had our person figured out, we then had to put their life into a story spine, which really meant we had to plot out their life. Things like “where was the climax of their life, or is it still happening?”  “ what lead to this climax?” In addition all of the information we had in the story spine had to support our argument for why they are the greatest Canadian.

We soon moved onto to researching our person which was good for me as I did not know everything about Steve Nash, but that wasn’t the part of the project that I found tough, however coming up would be probably the most challenging part of the project.

Scripting, I had never really done scripting on a level like this before so this was a completely new experience. We were given the option to either script our podcast word for word, or have some bullet points where we could improvise parts, and I definitely think that without the bullet point option that I would still be scripting my podcast right now. What was tough was not only getting the right information in the right spots, but also there was a second part to the script where we had to record ourselves reading through everything.

This is what really got me, I learned very quickly that reading information and then speaking it was difficult for me. It didn’t matter if it was in bullet point or word for word, I found it very hard to read off the information I had written down unless I had memorized what I found say. This lead me to many many small recordings with constant changes as some of the recordings didn’t sound the same. This part took me a very long time but eventually I got it all done. I think in the future I should break my script up even further so it is easier for me to see what is coming up and then talk about it.

Of course after we were done scripting it was time to do final recordings and start mixing our podcasts together. Although I had all the audio I needed because of my scripting, my podcast was still missing an interview that really supported by argument, luckily I had the perfect person in mind. I know him through some of my friends and my parents are good friend with him, he is no other than Martin Nash, younger brother to Steve Nash. I knew he was the perfect interview because not only did he have an inside look on Steve Nash’s life, but he was also a professional soccer player and since my podcast is all about sports I though his view on things would be priceless.

I was able to get a hold of him and also get the opportunity to talk to him over the phone. We discussed Steve Nash’s career, what set him apart, and how he has impacted Canadians alike. It was a short interview but I think he was able to give me all the answers I needed to finish up my podcast.

Now that the major events in the podcast had been taken care of, it was time for me to mix everything together. I actually learned quite I lot about mixing and if you want to know more as well here is the link to the other post I did about mixing.

The main thing I thought my podcast was missing was background music for when I was talking. I remember a long time before this podcast I had listen to other podcasts without background music when the host was talking and personally I though it was too serious and kinda boring, so I had to create some music that would appeal to my audience. Another thing I was missing was ambient noise, or sounds that match with the podcast. For example since mine is talking all about basketball it would make sense that the ambient noise be something like shoes squeaking on a court or a basketball ringing of the board. I did get recordings of these things and tried them in the podcast, however I did not think it was the best fit. All the sounds were just competing against on another and even when I adjusted the volumes it didn’t really help. So I only kept one or two ambient sounds that I thought would be useful in the podcast and didn’t really clash with other sounds.

After all of these small additions I finally had what looked like a podcast. In class we did two or three peer feedback sessions where we listened to others podcasts and then gave advice on what we thought was good or what needed work. These sessions helped me determine what was working an what wasn’t, along with some things I did notice, for example my interview volume was way higher than my regular talking volume so it really messed up the audio. I had assumed people would listen to the podcast with a higher volume, but when people actually listen to it, I found they didn’t do as I thought which also messed up the volume. This was easy enough to to fix, I just changed some of the volumes to fade when they ended.

During this project I have learned so much about the skills needed to produce a high quality podcast, the effort that goes into them is really incredible, I can say now that I have a much higher respect for people who do this professionally. 

If you want to listen to my podcast, then click the link HERE to listen to it.

 

That’s all for now.