Podcast piece

Introduction

For this piece, me and a few of my classmates decided to record a podcast/radio drama piece that delves into the world of supernatural beings and ghosts. We decided to do a podcast as it allowed us to explore our ideas in a greater depth and incorporate a wide range of sound effects and audio.

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The process

After finalising our initial ideas, and having a concept of what we wanted to explore within our recording, we began to write a script for our podcast. This wasn't the easiest process, as we found that we struggled to perfect the structure/layout of what we wanted to say. We eventually resolved this problem by coming up with the idea of a ghost hunt in a haunted house, which we scripted and came up with sound effects for. It also allowed us to incorporate aspects of a radio drama within a podcast, as we acted out our lines.

After our script was written, we began to record our lines. This was a fun and exciting part of the process as we got to use professional recording equipment and use the recording studio. This was also the most lengthy part of creating our podcast, as we recorded each of our lines separately and edited everything together at the end.

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The next step after recording the spoken audio and uploading it to a computer, was the editing. We listened through the unedited version and decided what sound effects we should include, and where. This allowed us to figure out how we would make this recording interesting and how we could bring it to life.

We sourced a large amount of our sound effects from a software called PixaBay, as well as using our own.

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Once we added all of the effects and sounds that we desired, we began to edit them. Using Adobe Audition we adjusted the track volume and muted various parts to include sound effects. This is important to know when trying to edit specific audios.

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We used a voice changing effect over one of Ella's lines in the audio, as it was relevant to what was happening in the story. We did this by using an online voice editor and uploaded it to our audition.

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This was the last step of the editing process, which gave us all a chance to listen back to our work and see how our podcast came to life. This was the most rewarding part of the process as we got to see all of our work put together as a final piece.

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Final completed piece

Below I have attached the completed recording of our podcast/radio drama, with all the finalised edits.

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Evaluation

The process of recording this piece was something that I found the most enjoyable throughout this whole project, especially watching the final piece become complete.

At first, me and my peers had a range of different ideas, but found it hard to pinpoint exactly what we wanted to do and how we would execute it, however we resolved this issue by combining different aspects of radio dramas and podcasts through what we learned in class. This is how we came up with the idea of staging a ghost hunt and recording it with different lines for everyone. Writing our script also allowed me to become more familiar with the idea of script writing and learning how to use scripting to make the dialogue flow smoothly and sound clear and natural.

A method that we used in order to accomplish this was thinking about what we would naturally say in the situation that we are in the recording, rather than thinking about what a potential character would say.

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This project also helped me to understand and appreciate the importance of sound effects, and how I could incorporate sound to portray suspense, themes and emotion.

 One thing that I noticed that it is important to pay close attention to detail when adding sound effects and editing, as it can easily come across as choppy or seem overcrowded with irrelevant noises. This is why when creating our script, we included specific sounds we wanted to include at specific points, so the noises and dialogue paired well together and helped to amplify the mood of our recording.

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After overcoming these obstacles and resolving them, we found it much easier to create an immersing and effective recording that included a range of skills we learned throughout these audio sessions.

This is why overall, I found this process highly enjoyable, as well as educational as it payed off to see the final result of our collective crafting and editing, as well as implementing skills that will definitely be helpful when creating anything else audio or script based in the future.

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