You are now at the end of your senior year of high school. Where are you going now? And what do you wish you would have known when you were a freshman? What do you think someone older than you wishes you would know now?
Create a podcast that will run between 5 and 10 minutes.
Interview 6 people. Each interview should be about 10 minutes. You will need at least 60 minutes of interview tape, total.
Free Audio Editors
Soundation - This is an online audio editor that is similar to garageband on macs. There is a free version, though we will be using the basic paid version which is being donated to us by Soundation. We will include a "Brought to you by the power of Soundation" sting at the end of our podcast.
Audacity - A free, open source audio editor. It is very powerful, and a little user-unfriendly. Luckily, there are tons of resources out there for how to use this. For instance, this tutorial on how to change file formats (such as .m4a to .wav).
Free Sounds Resources
Archive.org - This is the king in free sounds and materials. It is a collection of materials that fall under the public domain. This includes books, movies, songs, and radio. You may, for instance, want to use a sound bite from the opening of this old time radio show, called dragnet. Listen to the first few seconds. You can search just about anything here.
http://www.freesound.org/ Just what it says. You have to sign up, but the sounds are free. Good for ambient noise and sound effects.
Buzzsprout on the basics of podcasting - This site goes a little more in depth than we will be going, but it has some useful things to say in "chapter" 2 and "chapter" 4.
Buzzsprout also goes really in depth on post-production for your podcast using audacity. If you are enjoying this type of work and want to make your audio sound as good as possible, this is a great resource.
The basic idea of editing your podcast comes to this:
Decide what style you want. Do you want a heavily produced sound, like Radiolab? Or a more straightforward mix of voices like Serial or This American Life? Keep this style in mind as you begin to edit.
Listen to your tape. Do the interviews say similar things? Do they disagree? Take notes about what is said and how you can organize their thoughts into a "conversation" with one another. Then, cut those parts together.
Add your voice. Your voice is important. You may have parts of your conversation recorded in the interview, but if you forgot to say something, or need to add clarification, add that by recording your own part and adding that into the timeline. I think it is important to script this, to make sure you're saying exactly what you need to say, but not repeating yourself.
Edit out the bad parts. There are tutorials on how to reduce the pops and buzzes that are sure to be in your recording. It's important to make all of your tracks about a similar "loudness" so that your listeners don't go from not being able to hear what is being said to immediately feeling like they have damage to their ear drums. This process is called "normalizing" and is easily done in Audacity using this technique.
Add music and sound effects. Permission matters. We can not use copyrighted music because, well, we don't have the rights. And we don't have the budget to get the rights. That means using either free music, or music that we create. There are some great options out there, all it takes is a little exploring. There is also something called "free use" which can be a way to use copyrighted material, but there are very special laws about how to go about using it. This video does a good job of explaining it. If you have any questions about if your work is using this correctly, come and speak with me, and we'll work it out.
Adding sound effects is a bit less complicated, as there are plenty of free sounds to use from the above listed websites.