Episode 2: Joan and the Savvy Podcaster: Researching
Series 2 of The Arc of Joan takes a non-fiction detour. I am "playing" a dry witted narrator for an audio tour guide into creating podcast fiction in this 10 part series. This series gives independent producers a step by step guide and a few important hacks to help develop and create their own audio drama series. Episode 1 is an introduction to Audio Drama's and your dry witted Narrator.
Below you will find
the script to this podcast. There will be a test afterward. Jay Kay.
This tour is a basic overview of the steps involved with creating an
Audio Drama Series, whether it be a comedy or drama or horror show.
It is not an opus or the be all and end all of how to create an Audio Drama. But, hopefully it will help give someone a general idea of what they are
getting into before they start creating and producing.
This podcast was created on Audacity software, using the helpful resources from freesound.org and freemusicarchive.org and John Bartmann did the music from JohnBartmann.com
Hey y'all, welcome back to: Joan and the savvy podcaster. Episode 2: Background research and the three P’s. My name is Saylor Billings and I created the Audio Sitcom, The Arc of Joan. But this next 10-part series is dedicated to creating and producing Audio Drama Podcasts without breaking the bank. The blog associated with this podcast is located at: https://thearcofjoan.blogspot.com/ In this episode I’m going to talk about pre-production planning, researching, and budgets.
As I’ve outlined this series I’ve realized I need to come up with a reference example. So let’s say for a simple example you’re doing 12 episodes at 30 minutes each of a completely new fiction series. Comedy, Mystery, Drama, whatever, 12 episodes with around 4-6 actors. It will be recorded remotely (each actor having their own ability to record and send you the sound files). We will call this show “Betty’s Day Out” and it will be published once a week for 12 weeks.
Two things I cannot emphasize enough to you is this: 1. the more preproduction planning and learning that you do the better your experience and show will be. And 2. the more you learn the less you will know. Hear me out. Let’s say you do all your research on a specific editing software and you’ve looked at it, even downloaded the sample and familiarized yourself with it and you’ve read the reviews and you are positive that Audio Awesome is the perfect match for your needs. Only to find out after you’ve spent hours and hours editing that you can’t use it because it requires some specific plug in that you can’t download the whole program because of some weird torrent or it requires 20 gagillion memory bytes. It happens. So my point is: Always, always have a plan B, gather enough background knowledge to cobble together a plan B. If plan A doesn’t work I can use this other thing or plan. Another example, you’ve got 3 people who can play all the parts of your show. Perfect. Someone gets sick, has a death in the family, gets a job on the other side of the country. It happens. What’s your backup plan? Things change very fast in this industry so you cannot over plan.
So there are 3 P’s in my little podcasting world. Preproduction. Production. and Publishing. The 1st thing I do in the preproduction phase is the research which includes planning and listening. I research everything and if I were just starting out I would hop on over to the BBC at bbc.co.uk and have a listen because they are the be all and end all when it comes to audio fiction. They have an app called BBC sounds that you can listen to almost all of their library dating back to the 1950’s. Then I’d listen to some of the “Old Time Radio” shows. George and Gracey, The Shadow, whatever. Just listen carefully to the sound effects and how they used they music interludes and musical underscoring. Notice how you can visualize what’s happening. The older shows had no way of creating atmospheric sound scape’s so they kept things simple sometimes they’d have an introduction basically saying “Picture this it’s Friday night outside Lulu’s Bar in the docks of San Francisco and Bob Schmob is cutting rough with the dock workers…” then you’d hear a barge horn would bell would ring. I loved the simplicity of those shows and as a listener you had everything you needed Who, what, when, and where. And an important lesson for us is that they worked with what they had available to them.
Listen to the dialogue and how exactly they were able to do the shows with the least amount of exposition in their dialogue. “Put that gun away Jacko” or “Tonight, at the party, we’ll have some drinks but we need to leave early so we can blah, blah, blah” and the next thing you hear are ice in drinks clinking sound and background music and you knew where the characters were in the next scene; that night at the party. But don’t stop there, there are some fantastic fiction shows out there right now.
What are some of the current audio fiction trends? I am not a science fiction fan (no judgement just a fact, I have a very low repitoire that pretty much starts and ends with Star Wars) but I can tell you that the Sci Fi bunch are on point when it comes to audio soundscapes and atmospheres. Fan or not, if I were just starting out, I would be sure to listen to a few episodes. Also under this listening pre-production heading really give everything around you a good listen. What does the grocery store you go to sound like, a little league game, the difference between the sound you get in a closet versus a living room with a high ceiling. Those are your atmospherics and ambiance background sounds.
Writing can be listed under pre-production, production, and publishing. Writing for audio and your editing script are different types of writing and the editing script is more technical; casting; all the technical equipment, i.e. microphones – or your rig, editing software; sound effects; theme music; podcast host; website or not to website. Basically, everything is pre-production. Don’t panic, I’ll go into it more in future episodes. Each topic I will take from Pre-production to your publishing. Something that gets overlooked a lot is time management. For your pre-production giving yourself deadlines is necessary.
Taking each element/topic and giving yourself a strict deadline in your research, getting it in, testing it, etc. In the first episode I mentioned rabbit holes you can go down when researching. And if you are new to this then everything is a potential pitfall and rabbit hole you can get stuck in. Giving yourself deadlines is one way to counter this affect. So as far as the listening, the first step, it’s a bit of a habit you can pick up, or you can make a play list, just try to get in the habit of taking things in and a lot of podcasts will put, what to the naked eye looks odd in their show notes. Not everyone uses show notes but sometimes you’ll see words like Shure-57 or soundbible, or T-rex 52 catbutt. (I use Shure 57 as an example a lot, I know, I’m not promoting it but it’s just because it’s one of the most common mic’s used.) But once you familiarize yourself with the names of mic’s and sound effect catalogues and editing equipment, you’ll start to recognize that the podcaster is sharing what equipment they use and they are giving credit to anything they received for free to help make the podcast.
Understanding time management and budgets
While you’re still in pre-production you need to get out a calendar and set out a publishing start date let’s say October 1st is on a Monday and so then and for the next 11 Monday’s will be your episode publish day. (Some people will wait till they have all their episodes finished before publishing, which is totally fine, I just do it a different way, and either way you’ll still need to keep an eye on your time management.) Using that October 1st date you need to start working backwards. Are you going to do 2 months of production? (i.e. recording and editing 12, 30 minute episodes in August and September) then you’d have to have the scripts finished a couple of weeks ahead because you don’t want to drop the scripts on the actors the night before and expect to get a good performance. Some actors need a table read, there are a lot of factors happening at once in the recording/production phase. Again, here it doesn’t matter too terribly much how you do your schedule just that you keep to it, but for me, I like to work a month ahead of the publishing dates. So if I publish “Betty’s Day Out” 4 times a month. That means the first four scripts, recording, editing, the whole finished episode is done no later than Sept. 1. I get 4 in the bag before I start publishing, many podcasting hosts will let you pre-publish with exact dates the episodes go live. By working a month ahead it gives you breathing room while you’re in production. Also, it is inevitable that something along the way will go wrong, no matter what your master plan is, so now you’ll have time to figure it out without panicking and it gives you flexibility during the production phase. Some people will plan out and make really great flow charts for this but basically you’ve got 4 loaded onto the host to start, then you have the next two episodes written and sent out to your cast. So in the pre-production phase give yourself hard deadlines for your research/learning as much as possible and acquiring your “tools” (mics, audio editing equipment) then in your production phase work ahead of the hard publishing deadlines (Every Monday for 12 weeks) thereby giving yourself flexibility while still sticking to the production deadline schedule.
Real quick here I want to say something about budget’s and professional editing services. When I first started out I literally couldn’t find an editor to hire and when I did, it ended badly. I went through 4 editors before I just taught myself how to audio edit on Garage Band and then latre Adobe. And now 14 years later I look on the internet and there is a whole new industry for it. You can hire podcast editors and there are price lists with various services and service menu’s and honestly some of them are really reasonable considering the amount of work they put in. So, if you’ve got that kind of money you want to invest in this, then go for it. Stitching together a podcast can be a nightmare. It is long and tedious and fun and your hands get crampy but it can be so very rewarding. Also, beware the price per hour an editor charges because it can really add up quick. Plus, you’ve got 12 episodes to pay for and if you’re paying for the technical why would you not pay your actors? Without actors you have no show. And if you’ve got the money invested to make a technically impeccable and professional show you really, really should get “Betty” out into the world then you need to put money into the marketing budget. “Betty” could very easily start costing you at a minimum 1000 dollars an episode times twelve episodes is 12000 dollars. Plus your podcast host costs. The smart move here to help offset the cost would be to have advertising put into the episodes and the current rate of return is at the very best 50 dollars per 1000 listens (it’s more like 35 dollars unless you have a famous and recognizable name attached). So you have to get at least around 300,000 downloads to get just that 12,000 dollars back. And just FYI if you get 50 downloads/subscribers per episode in the fictional story podcast world you’re doing really well. This is just an estimate and a back of an envelope calculations but my point is you’re going to have a lot of costs to cover and I’m all for supporting this new editor industry. However, remember the really tedious and hard part of editing is stitching -which is lining up the voice actors tracks with the sound effects and the ambiance or atmosphere, making sure every voice actors tracks microphones have the same outputs. You can teach yourself how to remove lip smacks and noise reduction and basically clean up the audio in like 15 minutes. At any rate, you’re going to have to put together a budget. It’s really going to be less of a traditional budget, that is money coming in and going out, as it is going to be a wallet hemorrhage. If you’re on a serious low cost “budget” I would recommend the beg, borrow, steal format. Less of the stealing however, no one likes a low budget thief. Let’s call it the beg, borrow, trade format. Except for the hard tools like microphones, computer, etc. Everything you see for sale that is Waaaay out of your budget you can find either for free or at least used and low cost. You can make spit screens or more conventionally now called pop screens by taking a pair of panty hose and wrapping it around a coat hanger, and blankets for sound dampeners. You can trade with your actors by offering to put together a voice over for their auditions in a tight well-produced format, in return for their much-appreciated labors.
My point here on budget’s is outline in your preproduction all the elements costs. Make a wish list and a need list with 3 rows: Big budget, low budget, your budget then start hunting and gathering.
That’s it for now. Next weeks episode will go through the Preproduction Writing. And if you haven’t been told yet, I hope you have a great rest of your day!