10/03/2009
On Content and Editing
Hey everyone, luckyshirt here.
The feedback from you guys has been great, and I want to sincerely thank everyone. More importantly: some of you have been brutally honest, and if we’re going to break things down into value, then these are the comments that are most needed as we flop out of the nest and plummet to our social media deaths (but keep the high fives coming, too).
I went into this planning on being as transparent as possible about the podcasting process, and in that spirit: let me say something about our content…
As I mentioned in the first post, this recording was entirely unscripted. The three of us started recording right after “meeting” on Skype. I was interested in finding out just how little preparation could go into makeing this thing, and wondered what would happen if the three of us just talked about whatever came to mind.
Episode 00 contains some of the discussion we had before, during, and after recording the material in Episode 01. It is not very well organized, and separated by music bumps that drive me nuts (even though I’m the one that put them there). I wanted to keep that Episode, because I wanted to get feedback on it when compared to a single-topic post like Episode 01.
While Episode 01 really only focuses on vampire food, there is still some serious wandering in the conversation. When this happens, you’re forced to make a decision about whether to cut the little isolated topics up and add the music bumps, or let the conversation play out in the recording. I’ve heard podcasts that do both, but in this case I left almost all of it in there. I did this because I was also interested in finding the balance between editing time and listener attention span. In all honesty: I should have editied it more. There are a few slow spots, and the recording would have had a better pace to it if I had shortened in and added the bumps.
Some of you have suggested using talking points or better organizing the discussion. Future posts will be like Episode 01, and will center around one or two problems that need solving. We didn’t prepare at all for the vampire question that Sween dropped on us, so the conversation was all over the place. I happen to like that in certain situations, since this whole thing is nonsense, BUT I’m sure that knowing our topic in advance and agreeing on a lightly sketched path of conversation would help. I’m still undecided on this.
Finally: Sween warned me not to post 00, because it’s not a good representation of what the future will hold for us and now I’m convinced he was right. Good looking out, Sween. We had already recorded HOURS of material (some of which was VERY funny by the way, but wrecked by sound problems), and I was in a salvage mode trying to use whatever we could. This is why none of you should hire me as an editor.
So thanks for all the comments, and PLEASE keep them coming to us on Twitter or to audiohandpuppet@gmail.com
Cheers, suckas!
Text posted at 11:26
