Episode 10 Joan and the Savvy Podcaster: 2008 and the big mistake

 Episode 10
 

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 9 is a general overview of launching and publishing the podcast.

Below you will find the transcript 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

 Hello and welcome to the final episode of Joan and the Savvy Podcaster.  This audio series was designed to, primarily, give the aspiring independent podcaster and overview of how to create and produce an audio drama podcast.
I don’t want this to come off as “We had to walk uphill both ways to school with no shoes” instead, I hope it will give some insight to just how far the technology has come in such a short time. The excitement of possibilities I felt in the beginning of podcasting, I still feel today.  
So let me set the scene for some perspective. 2007 was the year the first iPhone was introduced, Craigslist was just getting started, and there was no gay marriage or streaming media. Personally, my partner and I had moved to San Francisco the year before and I was finishing a documentary with Phyllis Diller and nursing the wounds of a failed television show. Failed, as in mercilessly stomped on before it even had a chance. For Christmas my partner had gotten me the new iMac desktop. My first Apple, and 2 things caught my eye, Garage Band and iWeb. After years of banging my head against glass ceilings, brick walls, and unidentified flying objects a creative light blub went on. I was very myopic in that all I saw was a way to make and distribute performance art. How was I going to distribute it exactly and pay for it? Who cares? Let’s go make art! Podcasting was just starting to crawl, stumbling along and back then the big thing to do was to either do an interview show or read a book, that was out of it’s copyright protections, out loud and try to get advertising money. (Not much has evolved from that idea.)
My big idea was to remount the world of radio drama’s. I thought, with these tools available now you could even have a website like a television station, but with podcasts, just like in the days when they had Lone Ranger and George and Gracie and My favorite wife radio hours. And to be honest there was just no one around me to tell me this may not be the very best idea. And I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway, if nothing else this would be a great experiment. This is also the reason I did this how-to series, it wasn’t meant to be in depth but just to verbally walk people through the process.

Writing, Casting, and Recording
Step 1 was to write a series that could sustain several seasons. I named the show after the O bus line at the end of our street that my partner used to take back and forth into the city. The O Line Mysteries. Originally it was going to be a fictional account of the people that road that bus with her. So I set it in the island town we were living on in the San Francisco Bay, I called ithe island Ohlone, which is the historical American Indian name for the island. And like a cat with a hairball I reworked the plot and choked out a couple of episodes and outlined the rest of a 25 episode series. 

Then I sat on them as I cajoled, convinced, and coerced some unsuspecting people to talk the lines into a microphone. Neighbors, partners, work people, random strangers, didn’t matter to me. The first two episodes were recorded in the living room of our old Victorian house on 2 borrowed Shure 57 mic’s using panty hose stretched across a coat hanger as spit guards, transferred to a borrowed Mbox to make them digital and recorded through garage band and into an external memory. I knew the sound would echo horribly but I figured I could at least clean some of it up in the post. In lieu of pay we put out a food spread to shame a craft service truck. Which at the time seemed like a brilliant idea to at least show some gratitude, but y’know, having people eat and do voice over work, not the best idea. The next week we did the same thing to record episode 3 and 4 and at that point it was obvious this set up was not going to work. I was going to need a more sustainable recording situation. But first I needed to figure out how to edit these first four episodes, garage band just wasn’t cutting it for me. It was great to feed the vocal’s through and record into a sound file but I needed something more to actually stitch together the show and add the sound effects and music. I didn’t want to set me sights too high for the outcome and knew this was going to be very rudimentary.

Editing
First, I hired a woman owned recording studio in Oakland to edit the first four episodes, ya’know I was all proud I was supporting a woman owned business. As I pulled up to the studio which was at the back of the house I kept an eye on this guy sleeping in this beat up red hatchback, I remember this so vividly, I took a deep breath and cradling the external memory which held my most precious sound recordings, hoped she would show patience with me and what I was trying to accomplish. By the way, back then, I didn’t have this saved in 3 different places. Buying memory was very expensive, I think that eternal memory was like 256 megabytes and that was a top end deal. This editing session was going to go one of two ways, either I would be welcomed with open arms or it would be a disaster. As I go around back, I hear a car door shut and I go in and she introduces me to the sound engineer who I guess woke up from his car and scrambled up behind me, that didn’t freak me out or anything, we go into the studio and I never saw her again. So much for the sisterhood, right? What proceeded was me explaining what I was doing and needed from him, then what I can only explain as an opera. He gave me the opera of rants. The tirade ranged from “How dare I hire a sound mastering studio to edit – a – podcast?” To, “You don’t even know what you’re doing.” He spared no insult, this guy. I mean it was epic, and by the way looking back now, it was in a sound proof studio, so no one would know if something horrible happened to me. Again, so much for the sisterhood, right? But at that moment all I saw was this sweating, red faced wanker throwing a hissy fit, like a demented character from some Don Giovanni opera. And I laughed at him, because it was funny to me, and I said, “I know, it’s crazy.” And honestly, I would not recommend this to anyone, if that ever happens to you, leave. Leave the precious memory hard drive, just leave. But for some reason after that he calmly sat back down in the editing chair and was like ‘okay, what do you need to know.’ And then showed me the basics of how to edit the show. Not the mastering part but the stitching part. I left an hour later, really glad, A. I was in one piece, and B. I got him to show me some basic editing. 

The second editor I hired, ghosted me. After we met at their studio and I explained what I was doing and what I needed they just stopped answering the phone. The third editors I thought would work out, but I had explicitly asked them to bleep out the cuss words for two reasons, one of the characters is foul mouthed and I think it’s funny to just have one character have to be constantly bleeped while no one else has to be bleeped. Here’s this show that’s a cross of Scooby Doo and Murder, She Wrote and you have one character who’s just constantly cussing. And also, I didn’t want the expletive rating from the Apple podcasts. But they kept leaving it in which meant they were only mastering the show which meant they weren’t doing what I was paying them for. 

Then finally, my upstairs neighbor enrolled in a sound editing school, Blessed be to Tim. I bought the Adobe sound editing suite and he was able, over a few sessions to calmly and methodically, take me through it and teach me what I needed to know. Tim did a quick diddy for the intro music for me and to do the Foley work I used the digital sound editing tapes which is why all the doors shutting, car doors, really all the sound work sounds the same throughout the series. I think I did it once and called it a day. Because by now I’m trying to learn code to build the website and the RSS feed.

The Website and RSS feed

I think there were about 4 maybe 5 podcatchers? Apple was of course the main one. Podcatchers were what we now call distributors. So, you loaded up your podcast to your website and with the RSS feed you directed all the distributors or podcatchers to list on their site back to your website and the pods would get downloaded from there. This meant you needed, at a bare minimum, to know some HTML code. Luckily, there was a used bookstore in town, or maybe it was a Good Will or something but I got my hands on a how to write HTML code book. I wish I still had it to be honest it was the easiest part of the whole website building. Originally, I had used the iWeb app from the Apple to design it, but by the time I finished coding and building the site I scrapped the app and used my own hobbled together code.  I then had to buy the domain name, website hosting service with the most download memory for the cheapest price. The cool thing, and I don’t know if they still do this but, they had this traffic tracker or traffic facts maybe it was called; but it gave you all the information down to the who, when, where and how of information. It was awesome because instead of giving that information to a third party, who could be anybody as in marketers or pollsters or whatever corporation, it was yours. Like it was between you and your listeners. 

The funny thing now is it used to take, I’m not kidding, all night to upload the show. Like hours and hours of downloading it to this software, then editing, then uploading it back again. After I finished editing the show I would start the upload and go to bed. I remember once I woke up at the computer with my head dangling around my neck I literally fell asleep mid-edit.
So I now had a website, and four full episodes, and know how to edit for myself and direct the podcatchers to the show and a general understanding of how to move forward with the show. And I did. 44 episodes worth. I got the cycle down. Write 4 episodes, bring the cast in – which by the way, never got solved, we just kept recording in the echo-y living room. I recast the part I was playing after like the 4th episode when it became quite apparent I could not do that and run the show, so I ended up playing the other bit parts. Edit together the shows and do the load up. I was always running the shows a month ahead of time so I could take breaks here and there and there was always the juggle of when the cast would have time to meet together so I had to have a time cushion for that as well. I had finally had all the moving parts working together and everything was moving smoothly so about half way through the series, I thought it would be a worth a try to see if I could get some advertisers in, I mean, I had the numbers for downloads and the Guardian Newspaper from England had included us in an article about the new Audio Drama podcasts to listen for. After the first season I was inspired to go forward as the downloads were world-wide and especially in Europe and the UK, those people love some Audio Drama. What could go wrong? I approached everyone I could think of from the independent shops, mom and pop shops, to smaller corporations for advertising, advertising agencies. No one. Not a peep. Sometimes just a curt note reiterating their corporate by laws regarding blah blah blah. So, I put it on the back burner for a bit as I was still writing, editing – the whole thing. 

Finally I saw one of the podcatchers were talking about putting advertising into the podcasts and I thought, yes, that’s fine, I’ll do that. But there was a catch, and my biggest mistake, they wanted all the information, all the emails and traffic facts for the subscribers and listeners. Now this was like 2009? I think, there about-s. And I just thought - that would be the biggest betrayal ever to just hand over the personal information of people visited the website and who listened to the show. In the old time radio shows did the radio stations take all that information from people who listened in to the George and Gracey show? No they did not. They just put the show out there for all to enjoy. People don’t expect to be tracked, I’d have to put in some type of disclaimer or record at the very least some type of statement that said, ‘hey listeners just so you know we got some advertising money to pay for the show but you should also know you’re now being tracked by the advertising company that’s paying for it.’ HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA. Meanwhile, like 2 years later people are handing over their information and emails to stores for a 5% discount on a 15 dollar sales item in stores. Turns out, no one cares! It’s just the accepted way of life now. A ruse de guerre, if you will, rules of engagement.
So, I stopped doing the show. All that work, all those hours, all that money (frankly) wasn’t for nothing. I got to do the show, I learned a new medium with Audio Drama, I learned sound editing, I made some great friends. One actor, by the way, decided she loved doing voice over work so much she began doing it professionally, which was the coolest thing. But I just couldn’t imagine having to reformat all those episodes for the advertising and having any kind of audience stick around for it. Silly me.
Which all leads me to the re-boot. I’m again listing the O line Mysteries. I’m not remastering the show or anything fancy, this isn’t the remastered classics in HD. But they are just sitting here like a shadow so why not? The episodes will be listed everywhere you get your podcasts under The O Line Mysteries. The first four episodes are technically dodgy as all get out, because we were still figuring it all out, but I stand by this creation as a whole. And this time, I’m putting in the advertising. Enjoy and thanks for listeneing.