After covering the progress of the project through my weekly posts, it’s finally over. We just finished the first episode of our podcasts, and as you may know from my previous posts, mine was about Warhammer. However, this project’s driving question was “Who is the greatest Canadian?”, and for this episode we had to talk about who we thought was the greatest Canadian. Before I get into what we did, I want to talk about the competencies. There were three competencies for this project:

I don’t want to spend too much time on them so I’ll cover them as I go, so let’s get into it.

With a driving question of “Who is the greatest Canadian?”, obviously we were going to have to answer it, which we started doing right away. There were some restrictions on who we could choose, for example they had to have been alive from 1982-today, but after some research I found someone who I thought was the greatest Canadian and also fit into my podcast. James Cameron is a Canadian director who directed famous films such as The Terminator, Titanic, Aliens, Avatar, and more. His work ended up inspiring lots of different sci-fi, Warhammer included. Here’s an example right here:

We couldn’t just pick someone and make our episode right away though. We had to learn about them and their history, and put it into a story spine covering their life. We also had to include our episode objective to show what we wanted to accomplish with our episode.

After our story spine we had to do additional research on them, and I ended up learning more about James Cameron than I thought I would. I knew he directed some famous movies, but I didn’t know about how he pioneered lots of special effects like CGI, or some of his smaller films that weren’t as famous. In fact, I think this was the perfect milestone show our use of the Establish Historical Significance competency, because we learned learned about our person’s achievements and why they were so significant.

After our research, we had a good understanding of our person, so now it was time to get into podcast production. The first thing we had to do was write a script. I had worked with scripts before but I had never personally written one, which made it an interesting experience. After writing it the first time, I realized my script would be a pain to read out, so I spaced it out and left room for where the interviews were going to be, as well as shortening it overall. I think this milestone was a good example of the comprehending text milestone, as we got to learn about and use different features in our own text.

After we made the script, we had to use it in the first draft of our podcasts. I started recording myself, but I also had to get some interviews for my podcast. I did one with my dad, who knows a lot about James Cameron’s films and has seen pretty much all of them, but I needed another. I decided to do one with my friend, who knows a lot about Warhammer and would be able to add to my podcast, but there was one problem. COVID exists, which means I couldn’t interview him in person. I’d never done an interview online before, but these were required, so I called him online and it was definitely a learning experience. I thought it worked out alright but I think I could have done a few things to improve the overall audio quality. I made some music for transitions and now it was time to mash it all together in GarageBand.

It was okay for a first draft, but it definitely wasn’t perfect. I got some feedback and found three major problems. The audio was bad, it was too long, and there wasn’t much music. I found out that the mic I got was faulty and got a new one. Unfortunately, this meant I had to re-record everything, but it didn’t take as long as I thought. I cut out a bunch of the beginning segment and parts of the interview that got repetitive, and shortened it from sixteen minutes to fourteen, a good improvement. Then I made some background music and thought I was good to go. I was wrong. Editing wasn’t too bad for the first draft, but this time all my audio clips were cut up, and I had more music to deal with. Some parts were too loud, some couldn’t be heard over the music, and there were little gaps everywhere. This was definitely the hardest part of the project for me, and it took a while, but eventually I put it together. While it was tedious, I did learn a few tricks that will definitely help me out the next time I deal with GarageBand, and I thought this version was ready to present.

It almost was, but it still needed a little tweaking. It was still too long, so I cut out a bit more interview and only used the most interesting clips. This brought it down to about ten minutes, which was pretty good. Now my podcast was ready to present to the world, and you can listen to it right here.

So overall, I learned a lot from this project. I now know the techniques and skills needed to make a full podcast episode, as well as learning about Canadian history and identity. I even think that our final podcast episodes were a great example of the Empowered Learner competency, because we used the technology we had to create something that would inform others and share our knowledge. I definitely think I’m going to have an easier time making my next episode in our next project (Spoilers: WW2).

That’s about it for this blog post, so make sure to stay tuned for more.