Hello everyone and welcome back to another blog post. For the last project in Maker, we have been working on a podcast! This has been a long and tedious process but it’s been super fun. Throughout this post, I will be taking you through the journey of this project. I’ll be sharing the ups and downs and also I will be writing about what I learned. I hope you enjoy!

To start this project off, we did some brain storming about what we wanted out final product (our podcast) to be on. Something interesting that I found out, is how uneducated our class is. Joking. I knew that I wanted my podcast to be on something that had to do with true crime. After doing a little poll of my class, I found out that 90% of the class didn’t know what femicide is. So, I came to the conclusion that this was what my podcast was going to be on.

Next up, I needed a name. For this, I turned to my friends and ChatGPT. In the end, I decided on Silenced Voices. The name went through many stages. However, I feel like my end name is very impactful and powerful. It also gets the point of my podcast across. During this time, I also came up with a tag line/log line which we had practiced in previous projects. Below, you can see what I wrote in the numbers document we were provided 👇 

I would use this tag line for many things so I’m v dry glad that I took the time to write a strong tag line. I would end up using it for the business card that I made for my podcast and I would also use it in the description section on Spotify. 

After coming up with the baseline idea for our podcast, it was time to do our research. Originally, I was going to do each episode on a different femicide case. However, after realizing how much work that was going to be, I decided to just do it on one case. One case that stuck out to me, and then to split it up into 10 minuet episodes. And so that’s what I did. I decided to pick Alicia Kozakiewicz who is believed to be the first victim and survivor of an online abduction. You can go listen to her whole story on my podcast which will be linked at the bottom of this post. I would say that spent upwards of 5 hours on researching her. My first episode was super scripted and you can tell that by listening to it. However, after doing the first episode, i decided that I knew her story well enough to just talk about it and not have to have it fully scripted out. So as you start listening to the later episodes, it’s more like I’m having a conversation with myself. I kind of like how you can see the progression through my episodes of how I became more comfortable with the topic. You can really see my research pay off. Below, you can see the different scripts that I wrote 👇 

Ep 1, Ep 2, Ep 3, Ep 4

When I was first planning out. My original plan was to release an episode every Thursday, however, I think it was last week on Sunday? I had a sudden spurt of productivity and got all of my podcast done. So yeah, that release schedule went out the window. Anyway, the editing of the podcast took me way longer then I thought it would have. For each 10 minuet episode, I had probably just over an hour of editing. This was for cutting out blank pauses and gaps in my talking. Because like I mentioned above, I didn’t script my later episodes so there was a lot of pauses in my talking. 

Something that I forgot to talk about was my podcast art. I would go back up to the top of this post and find where to put this paragraph but I don’t want to. For the podcast art, I probably spent a week on making mine. Mine went through many many mannny drafts and in the end, I still think it could be better. Something that we did in class that I think was super beneficial was having group feedback sessions. We would air drop our cover art to Ms. Kadi and she would air play it to the class. We would all then give our feedback and suggestions. I’m proud to say that I gave feedback to everyone who presented. I think everyone in class was annoyed by my voice at the end of all of the feedback that I had given. Here’s some feedback that I got for my trailer and my cover art👇 

After figuring out how to use Podcast for Spotifiers, I posted all of my episodes. They’re out now so you can either click the link here, or scan the QR code below to open my podcast. If you want.

Anyway, thank’s for making it this far through my blog post! This project was super fun. I learned a lot about editing and being patient. I also got used to the sound of my voice which was something that I didn’t really enjoy. But then again, I don’t think that anyone likes the sound of their voice very much. 

Best wishes,

Dana