It has been an absolutely crazy month, it feels like I have done much more than in the first one. I have been researching and contacting people in order to make a podcast that follows my topic of sports but also tells a story during the time of WWII. This was much tougher than my other podcast but I think it came along nicely in the end. For this project our driving question was to use stories from people who witnessed part of the war first hand to convey the causes and consequences of WWII. I think in the end I was able to fully communicate the importance in the stories that Elizabeth told. There is a lot to talk about, so here are my experiences throughout this podcast episode.

There is a lot to talk about, so here are my experiences throughout this podcast episode.

The first part major part which helped me understand what I needed to do was our first milestone where we listened to podcasts and stories told in the same format we would be telling ours in. I found this really helpful because I had no idea what format I was supposed to use. In my last podcast episode I just used clips of my interviewee and placed them amongst recordings of my voice, however this would not be the case in the WWII episode. As we soon learned, we are supposed to mostly use only the interviewee’s voice as they are the ones telling the story, we were just supposed to give context to their voice. Without this help I probably would have done my podcast episode the wrong way. Here is the link to the podcast calL The Hopeful.

The next big step for us was to contact our interviewee’s and ask them about their stories. We spent a good amount of time preparing for this interview as it was our main part of the episode, which meant we had to have interview questions that were able to direct them into sharing the stories that would fit each of our individual podcast types. I knew I had to get a story about sports so I added smaller questions for every main question I asked. This way I could keep them on track and get a more intricate answer. This part took a bit of time since I had to think about how I could phrase different parts of my questions and also think about how I was going to transition to new topics.

I did my interview a few days after we were told about what was expected for our podcast. I got a hold of my great cousin twice removed ( my grandmothers cousin ) named Elizabeth Guilbride who was a child around my age during the war.

She told me about many parts of her life during the war, and how she was able to stay active during the time as well. I found that my technique of using many questions work well, and allowed me to direct the conversation in a way that allowed me to get the answers I needed in order to fulfill the driving question.

Something else I found interesting was something to do with recording her voice through the phone.

 Before this interview my teachers had given me and my class advice on how to record sound and one of the tricks was to throw a blanked over yourself and the mic to block out any background noise. This trick worked really well, and I continued to use it when I was recording myself giving context to her stories.

Next up for me was research, or really just listening to what she had said in the interview and then finding out more details about those things. A main competency in our project was to be able to to find good sources for our podcasts. I looked into sports that were happening at the time, dangers of war, and even some facts about other things like the olympics that took place after the war. Elizabeth was able to go to them and I got to hear all about it, so I thought it wold be a good idea to learn a bit more about them and share what I found. I was also able to go through many videos and short documentaries in order to gain a better understanding of what Elizabeth was talking about. In class we also watched and read from many sources that had detailed information on specific parts of the war.

Since I had all the audio I need and I also had my own audio, it was time for putting the podcast together and mixing it. I found this part the most difficult because sometimes she would talk about things that weren’t really related to the topic of my question. This meant I had to do many hours of clipping audio and then only keeping parts I was going to use. I had to go through many drafts ( eight I think) and many peer critiques as well, and with every bit of feedback I was able to narrow down the exact parts I needed.

The most helpful feedback I got was from my teacher who advised me to cut a whole bunch of the information on the growing up of Elizabeth as it was interesting, but it did not contribute to my overall topic of my podcast. Before I thought I had not enough material as the podcasts we listen to were much longer than what I intended to make, but of course those were professionally made podcasts, so the expectations for ours was much lower. After I had cut all the information that was not helpful, I used the tools in Garage Band to fully mix and create my final version of my podcast.

This was part of another huge step in our podcast called the global collaborator. I had to use the technology I have to successfully communicate my ideas.

After that final piece of advice I was able to finally create a final draft and handed in what I thought was my best work.

Of course we spent time learning about WWII through multiple sources, but in this post I have mainly talked about the parts I enjoyed, and the parts I found difficult.

That wraps up this reflective post, I did have a good time making parts of it, and some other parts were more frustrating, but in the end I think it turned out good. I was also able to understand why we learn about these actions of the past and why they can not be repeated again in this era. The stories didn’t really give me a sense of how the war started, but hey did give me a good understanding of what the major consequences were because of the war, like the lack of nutrition that Elizabeth mentioned.

When this podcast was completed I fully understood how much more I understood because of what I heard from Elizabeth. With her information about the war I was able to learn about personal experience rather than just reading the information from some textbook.

This project did leave me wondering about in the future will other come to me for information on events in my life like COVID-19, I think that would be something to look forward to in the future.

That’s all for now.