Podcast Reflection

Our Podcast!

When we decided to do this project, specifically, when we decided to interview people for their most embarrassing moments, I don’t think we realized how much fun it would be to create. We started out with a pretty good idea about how to capture these moments: go out on Unofficial, when people will hopefully have looser tongues, and interview them. Then we would just transfer the interviews onto GarageBand. Of course, we ran into a problem immediately; our tape recorder was not digital. We knew that it was possible to get that on the computer, so we figured we would just handle that problem when we needed to. We took the recorder out on Friday and talked to a bunch of people, or at least tried to. Another problem we encountered was that college kids are shameless. So many of the people that we asked told us that they didn’t have any embarrassing stories, which I guess I can relate to. Yeah, I have stories that should be embarrassing, but they’re pretty common things, so they don’t really embarrass me. To this day, the most embarrassing thing that I can think of that has happened to me was in grade school. Awkward and embarrassing things happen to college kids all the time, especially when alcohol is involved. So Erin and I ended up having to get stories the next day as well from kids who were walking around. We got a lot of good stories, but of course, most of them were incredibly foul and dirty. We were not sure if that would be a problem at first, but then we realized that those are really the only embarrassing moments that people have, so it couldn’t be helped if we wanted to stick with the same topic. When we got to the recording process, we had trouble figuring out how we were going to transfer the recordings onto the computer. We didn’t really like the idea of holding the recorder up to the computer mic since the sound quality was not going to be as good. It was much easier and more effective to just transcribe the stories from the interviews and then just read them ourselves. The project flowed very well with just us recording because we were able to summarize stories and leave out parts that weren’t really relevant. I think that us recording it also made it more of “our” podcast. If we had just used other people’s interviews, it would have been more of a compilation than the “show” we were looking to make. We also had trouble at first figuring out how to work the microphone in the MACs. At first, we were afraid that the sound quality would be really bad because we were just using the computer’s built-in mic and we were in the public computer lab, but I think that it turned out really well and that the sound quality is fine. After we recorded, we saved it to the flash drive and tried to play it, but of course it didn’t work. The song that we used apparently didn’t save, so we had a really hard time figuring out why it didn’t save and how to do that. We finally got it completely saved, but being us, we couldn’t get the link to work from our blog. For some reason, it was saving each individual recording that we made, but not the whole, smooth project. After encountering all of these problems though, both Erin and I were really happy with our final project. We had a lot of fun adding sound effects and editing the piece. I would actually love to make another one, because the whole process was really cool. We both said that we would want to make more, even one a week, which wouldn’t be hard to do since we didn’t use all of the stories that we got and it wouldn’t be hard to get more. We actually had a ton of interest in the final project as well from the people who gave us their stories, so I promised that I would post the link on Facebook for them to listen as well. Who knows, maybe we’ll do a weekly podcast if its “critically acclaimed”, seeing as people never stop doing embarrassing things.