I did my first podcast last week on the Santa Clara Caltrain. Initially I thought, how hard could it be to just talk about the caltrain for at least 10 minutes. Man, was I wrong. You definitely need to have a plan before you start talking unless you want to do a bunch of editing, which is what I ended up doing.
Going to the site, it was a bit awkward at first to just be talking to myself. Thank goodness it wasn’t too crowded or I would have felt even more awkward if people could hear me. However, once I started getting into it, it wasn’t that bad. Topics would just come to mind and I would just start talking about it and describing the scene. I kind of felt like a news reporter.
When I finally got the confidence to interview people was when I got really nervous. However, the man and the girl were really nice and willing to help me with my project. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to, but I gave them a bit of an overview of what I was doing and what I potentially was to ask them once I started recording. I think that this helped them the most because it’s hard to be recorded on the spot with no preparation. I found myself editing the interview parts the most because there were a lot of blank spots when either I or the interviewee was thinking.
Compared to the entire project, I think the podcast portion was the easiest. I thought the essay wouldn’t be to bad, but I didn’t understand the directions well enough to do it right the first time. As for the editing, I tried to add music in appropriate spots and sort of a break since my podcast is around 20 minutes. I also added music to the beginning and the end.
Overall, I think it was a good experience. I’ve never really done work in the field before so that was new. I learned that I really don’t like listening to myself speak. With that in mind, I don’t think I will be doing another podcast anytime soon. Although, I am very proud of the work that I produced because it definitely took a long time and required a lot of effort!