Podcast Reflection
The podcast we produced focused on the game play and real life relations of the game League of Legends. The way I worked with my Assistant Producer is to first talk through the general big points we wanted to include in the podcast; later, we worked together in a shared Google Doc to throw in more details from the game under each big idea to enrich our outline.
Our intention was to make our podcast more like a casual conversation instead of just reading our ideas to the audience; however, this didn’t work out at the end because our voice in the podcast just didn’t sound like a normal, interesting conversation even though we tried to maximize expressing instead of reading during the recording. We found out possible reasons for this phenomenon: 1. we both have anxiety when facing the microphone or when aware that we are being recorded, which caused a lot of stuttering, mispronunciation, pausing; 2. We never practiced or constructed our conversation, therefore it was difficult to control the time and degree of expression of each topic; 3. We were unable to produce smooth transition between topics and draw relations to make our podcast more coherent and easy to engage as a whole. My assistant producer and I are actually pretty well-familiar with each other, and we talk and joke about each other on a daily basis, therefore it’s just a huge let down for us that our voice and conversation sounds not exciting and engaging at all in the podcast.
When thinking about the content for our podcast, we attempted to put emphasis on probing, telescoping, and real life relations. Personally, I did not enjoy how it turned out since all the pieces do not connect to one another; content wise I was not mad about it because I think the components we selected from the game work well with the messages we tried to deliver, however, I feel like we could’ve deleted a couple minor topics to leave some room to elaborate more on the more important aspects.
The only piece I was proud of in the entire podcast was the introduction because the vocal announcer, transition music, and background music just magically blended together and was exactly how I wanted it to turn out. If there’s one thing we could’ve done to improve our podcast, I would say is to practice our conversation about League of Legends more regularly to have a better control over the durations of each topic and the structure and order of our expression, as well as minimizing recording-anxiety by being more prepared for the dialogue.
Learning wise, I definitely learned some editing technique since I am completely new to editing dialogues. We also learned, or at least tried, to use precise language to deliver intended message when only limited time was given. I would say my biggest learning experience did not happen until after the podcast was done, since I figured what our process was lacking and what we could have done to make it better. Very much similar to writing, we learn from our weakness by repeatedly listening to our podcast, and positioning ourselves as the audience of our own podcast, and brainstorm about what will be the audience’s opinions toward our work.
Overall, not satisfied with it, but can definitely do better next time.
