Over the school year in humanities,the PLP 10 class has had somewhat of a theme in podcast projects and podcast creation. The goal of this is to refine podcast skills and have really great podcasts by the end of the year. Our recent project, The People’s Podcast was no exception. For this podcast, 5 groups in our class all created a podcast on a different minority in Canada. My group, Me, Logan, Melika and Jamie chose Japanese Canadians as our minority. We chose them because we all had some interest in Japanese people and we felt their history in Canada wasn’t really talked about. The first step was to research.

I did a lot of research for my group especially around internment camps and the early 20th century area. While researching I definitely gained a lot of knowledge in the sense of cold hard facts but I feel like an even more valuable skill that will help me throughout my life is the ability to research quickly end effectively. The more I do research the better I can pick out the essential and key pieces of information to put into my notes. After we researched it was time to put my foot on the gas and start creating.

My group created a work plan that shared work between us pretty evenly but left holes for certain people’s skills. A lot of these holes happened to coincide with my skills. Music and editing mainly were put into my hands. Il start off with music. I solely created all of the music for my group. I wanted to make music that fell into several categories. First off, because we focused on Japanese Canadians I wanted the music to sound somewhat Japanese. Unfortunately, garage band only had Classical Chinese instruments. I used Chinese instruments and a few modern drums so that I could replicate traditional Japanese music as closely as I could. I learned a lot of new GarageBand skill in mixing live loops with custom music and just by spending more time on GarageBand. I also wanted music that was really clean and short so I used live loops for some of the base instruments.

For our final podcast, everyone edited their own parts. When it came to putting everyone’s parts together though, me Logan and Melika all worked as a team. Putting everything together wasn’t hard to do but it definitely required a lot of group coordination. Also, we had to add music into some of the spots where it was missing and do little touch ups here or there. The final editing stage is what really makes the podcast seem polished and I think that it was an important stage for us to come together on. This stage also helped me realize that group coordination is everyone’s responsibility and never should lie on one person. At times I felt like it was all me trying to get everyone together and and other times it was someone else but you really have to synergize with everyone for it to come together perfectly.

Throughout the podcast we also did a lot of personal editing, recording, script writing etc, but I feel like the areas of this project that I got the most out of are the ones that should be highlighted, otherwise the blog posts turn into detailed lists. In other posts I also talk a lot about these processes. I think that in reflection, this was a great project for me. I learned lots of technical skills, learned lost of historical information and most importantly, learned lessons that will help improve my final products for projects to come. One thing that I would definitely change change for next time is to make sure everyone has more than one line of communication open with each other at all times, this way if there’s any emergencies or last minute fixes they can be resolved. Although a lot of our projects have focused on podcasts, I feel like this project was the most distinct and open ended compared to the others, allowing our groups to create any type of podcast we wanted.