What about your internship has been an eye-opening (new or unexpected) experience?
Creating a podcast episode is a labor of love! It’s not just turning on your microphone, talking for 45 minutes to an hour, and then hoping you’ll magically have this hit podcast that everyone’s listening to/talking about. (That’s not to say that there aren’t folks out there who take this basic approach, but odds are it doesn’t yield the best results.)
There have been weeks where we’ve talked for an hour about just sound effects or massaged just a few sentences of an episode’s introduction, but paying attention to this level of detail helps shape the episode and gives you a fighting chance of sustaining a listener’s attention.
Here are a few other interesting, eye-opening notes that I’ve jotted down over the past month:
- Keep an open mind: You never know where you’re going to end up during your research, which can be said for nearly any form of research, but it holds true in mapping out a podcast episode, too.
- Think about sound while you think about the story. There are three general schools of thought when it comes to sound and podcasts: don’t use it, use it for transitions, or incorporate it as another voice in the story (think of a movie soundtrack).
- Think, too, about undertone music – i.e., music that isn’t neatly tied up in a bow with a clear beginning, middle, end but rather that feels a bit incomplete.
- Write your questions first. Then think of who to interview. I like this concept because it forces you to think through what you’re hoping to learn/discover during the interview/research process. Start with your open-ended questions and then think about who you want to interview.
What were your initial expectations? Have these expectations changed now that you are half-way through? How? Why?
Because I’m always a little late to the party, podcasts are a fairly new form of entertainment for me, so my only expectation was that I was going to get a crash course in what it takes to actually create a podcast. Abby and Mills set the stage for The Green Tunnel’s tone pretty early on, so I had a feeling that I could get into the storytelling aspect quickly and easily.
When we first talked about creating our own episode this semester, I naively thought that we’d, quite literally, research, interview, write, and produce a living, breathing episode. In reality, I’ll likely only have time to map out the episode – craft the questions, research the people to interview, brainstorm the episode’s goal, possibly even hike parts of the AT and talk with hikers along the way (and perhaps get some sound bytes, too).
What’s remained the same is that I get to research history and tell stories in a creative yet casual way, which is my favorite way to learn and share history. For example, the following is the introduction that I’ve drafted for the Ruins and Ghosts on the Trail episode:
Hiking is traditionally a pretty solitary affair. You’re one with nature. No cell phones. No technology. No modern distractions. Just you and the trail. However, when you’re hiking the Appalachian Trail, you’re never really alone with nature. You’re walking through stories of days gone by – of life that existed on and around the trail before the trail was The Trail.
As of right now, the episode is going to tell three stories: one of Uncle Nick, a social recluse living in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee during the late 1800s; one of Ottie Cline Powell, a little boy who disappeared and froze to death by himself in the woods in Virginia in 1891; and one of the Shelton Laurel Massacre, a small community in North Carolina accused of being Union sympathizers who were then brutally killed by Confederates troops in 1863.
