Podcast Evaluation
Pre Production
Our initial brief was to research what made a good and bad podcast and to then come up with an idea for our own podcast. The idea for our podcast was to take the best aspects from several podcasts that we had listened to and put them into an episode where we talk about the latest music news. The most important thing that I learnt for this project was to carry out extensive research in order to discover any patterns that were shared amongst good podcasts and to be able to develop our own style. Due to our decent research, planning our podcast was made a lot easier and we were able to go into far more detail than we originally thought. For example we were able to determine which microphones would provide the greatest quality and in which layout they needed to be in. This then made production and also post production much easier and allowed the audio quality of our podcast to be at a reasonably high standard. We were also able to find some interesting news topics that provided great conversion starters as we wanted the podcast to feel free flowing and natural rather than scripted. However, despite the extensive research being incredibly useful, it took far too much time and next time I take on a project of this nature I would like to spend a lot less time on the research and pre production side of things so that I can spend more time editing and perfecting it in post production.
Health & Safety
In order to have a successful production the safety of the all members of the team must be a priority. The only real health & safety risk we had on this project was the trip hazard created by the microphone cables. To prevent any accidents or injuries occurring due this hazard we made sure to tuck the cables away as best we could and we made sure that anyone who entered the recording studio was made aware of their location.
Production
When it came to production I learnt the importance of planning for more time than you think you need. When we recorded the podcast we planned to be able to complete it in just an hour and a half and that is how long we booked the studio for. This turned out to be a little problematic as we encountered a number of issues in setup. We first had an issue with one of the microphones not working which meant that we had to switch it before discovering an issue with one of the cables and having to change that twice. Once we had finally got the hardware working we found a problem with the volume levels for the microphones on the computer software. Once we had solved all of the problems we were left with just half an hour to record the podcast. This meant that we were slightly rushed and the quality of the podcast was not what we wanted it to be in the first few minutes. Other than those issues and the first few minutes of the podcast being unsettled the rest of the episode was to a fairly good standard. From our analysis we know that everyone enjoyed listening to the episode and that most people enjoyed the topics that we discussed. However a number of people felt that we could do a bit more work on the audio levels and that we needed to use pop filters on all of the microphones as there was only one available. A lot of people felt that the length of the podcast was spot on and that the topics were engaging and interesting. Next time I would hope to book more time in the studio so that we can spend longer on setup to ensure the best sound quality we could possibly get. I would also spend a bit more time preparing what I am going to say in order to eradicate the use of 'ummm' as a filler.
Post Production
In post production I feel that I would have benefited from getting to know the editing software better before we edited the final version of the podcast. I would have also spent more time finding intro/outro music and sound effects as they make a huge difference to the overall quality of a podcast. From our feedback a lot of people said that the transition sound effect that we used needed to be varied rather than using the same one over and over again. A number of people also commented on the audio levels and ideally we would have solved that in the production phase but as we ran out of time there, we could have spent a bit more time working on them in post production. That again links to our lack of experience with the editing software that I touched on previously. Another thing that we could have improved on was cutting out the 'ummms' because, even though we cut a number out, there were a lot in the final version. I feel, however, that the way we broke up the topics and some of the sound effects that we used allowed us to make a fast paced, free flowing podcast which, to the most part, the audience found engaging and were pleased with the overall quality of it.
