As I said in my last post, I’d be keeping you updated on what I’m doing in my podcast right now. If you haven’t read them, basically we had to do an episode on the greatest Canadian, in the context of our podcast. I ended up doing James Cameron, who directed The Terminator and lots of other films Warhammer take inspiration from. But all the research I did was from quite a while ago, and I want to talk about what I’m doing right now, which is the script. I have had some experience with scripts before, as I have been doing acting for a few years now, but our podcast scripts were a lot different from what I was used to.
For starters, it is only us talking, with the exception of interviews, so when we wrote it we were mostly thinking about ourselves. This made it interesting because we could either write exactly what we wanted to say, or just our main points and then improvise a little. I went with being specific, because I think it’s easier when you don’t have to remember certain things. Another new thing in the scripts were transitions and cues. Unlike acting scripts, there are no notes on physical motions, but instead we had to write where the transitions and cues are in our script. We also had to make spaces for our interviews, and mark out words we wanted to emphasize. It was definitely different, but I learned some new script writing techniques, and it was interesting to see how a podcast script is different from a film one. That’s about it for this blog post, but make sure to come back next week for more updates on the project.
Welcome to my weekly reflection post numero dos. This one is a little late, so sorry about that. I will repent by showing you a picture of a cute skeleton drone from the 41st millennium that I painted:
Okay, that’s cool and all, but what did I actually do in class this week? Well, I started making a podcast episode about him and James Cameron. I know that sounds confusing at first, so let me explain. We have been doing a project about the greatest Canadian (In the context of our podcast), which you may recall from this blog post I posted here. In case you didn’t read that post, my podcast is about Warhammer 40,000, which that little skeleton dude is from. But, what does he have to do with Canada at all, let alone a Canadian film director? Well, James Cameron directed a film called the Terminator, starring a killer robot with fake skin to disguise itself as a human. Do they look a little similar to you?
Well, maybe the Terminator did the skin part better…
I think it’s safe to assume that Warhammer took a little inspiration from The Terminator. But that’s okay, because Warhammer is a bit of a mish mash of everything thrown into a futuristic setting. If that sounds interesting, or you want to know more about Warhammer, James Cameron, or his films, you should stay tuned because I’m working on that podcast episode right now, and I’ll keep you updated through these weekly posts.
We just finished our first project of the year, which was all about podcasting and identity. This was an interesting project, because it’s the first project I’ve done that is mostly through audio, with the ultimate goal to create, you guessed it, our very own podcast.However, before we actually got into making the podcast, we had to figure out what we were going to make it about. And since identity was a big part of this project, we had to incorporate it into our podcasts as well. But before we could do that, we had to have a solid understanding of what identity is.
We did some research and activities on the subject, and then we had to make an animated gif representing our identity to show what we learned. Making the gif was pretty interesting, as we had to do something called a double exposure, which is basically two photos overlayed. I won’t explain it all here because I made an entire separate blog post about the gif and my understanding of identity, which is linked here. I’ll still show my gif in this post, because it looks really cool.
Now that we had a solid understanding of identity, it was time to take another look at podcasts. We started off by looking at several different podcast types and the techniques they used, which was pretty helpful. However, even though I had a better idea of how I could make my podcast, I still didn’t know what I wanted to make it about. I started watching podcasts for inspiration, and I found some good ones that gave me some inspiration. Those podcasts were The History of WW2 Podcast and Revolutions.
I thought these two podcasts were great for two reasons. First, they covered interesting topics. Second, they were presented in a way that makes you want to find out what happens next. They were both historical podcasts, but they weren’t boring or dull in any way. I’m not a big history buff, but I had the perfect idea for something I could do for my podcast.
One of my favourite hobbies is reading about and playing Warhammer 40,000, so much so I could even consider it part of my identity. Warhammer is a tabletop game, but it takes place in the far future, and has a surprisingly deep and interesting story. The story aspect is what I wanted to focus on for my podcast, because I know almost everything there is to know, and I enjoy it. I wanted to present it like I was explaining real history, like those historical podcasts I listened to. So I created a podcast plan, got feedback from peers and the teacher, and ended up getting approved.
I ended up calling my podcast Only Lore, and I created some cool artwork using photoshop to act as the cover art for the podcast.
However, the big thing I would be creating for my podcast was the trailer. We had done some listening to other podcast trailers, and I knew how important a podcasts trailer is for starting the podcast off strong. I immediately knew I that I was going to capitalize on the strategy that the history podcasts used, drawing in listeners and piquing their curiosity. I wrote a script that would be a brief introduction to the setting, and would encourage listeners to tune in when it was released. However, things didn’t turn out so well during the recording process, as I didn’t use the microphone properly and so the audio quality wasn’t the best. I also didn’t have any music, but thankfully it was only the first draft, and we got some feedback to work with for our second draft. What I got from my feedback was that the script accomplished it’s goal of drawing viewers in, but the audio quality could be better.
Now that I knew my script had accomplished it’s mission, I only made minor changes to it. I made sure to use the mic properly this time, and I took lots of takes until I thought the quality was good enough. Then I went on to the music, and that’s where things got a little trickier. I already had a good idea of what I wanted to do, but the first time I had to use iMovie a bit because I couldn’t figure it out in GarageBand. After some trial and error, I finally got the result I wanted, and managed to perfectly line up the music with my best recording in GarageBand. It sounded like this, and I think it turned out pretty good.
I definitely learned a lot from this project, because I had barely listened to any podcasts beforehand. I learned all the basics and techniques of podcasting, as well as learning about identity and how to express it using the new podcasting skills I had acquired. I am really happy with the result, and I think that my podcast trailer turned out really well. However, my podcasting learning experience is far from over, as I’ve heard we will be using our podcasts in various other projects throughout the year. But that’s about it for this blog post, so make sure to stay tuned for more!
This post is going to be a bit different from my usual learning portfolio posts, because instead of reflecting on a project, I’m going to be reflecting on my week. This will become a regular part of my blog now, so expect one before each weekend. But for this week, there are a couple of things that happened which were pretty important. The first was the conclusion of our first project of the year, which was about identity, podcasting, and more. However, I’m going to be writing an entire reflection post on that project, so I won’t write about it again here just to say the exact same thing in a couple of days. So for that reason, and the fact that not much happened in the final week of the project anyways, I’m not going to talk about it too much in this post.
However, there is another project I’m actually going to be talking about, that we just started this week. It’s called “The Greatest Canadian”, and that’s exactly what we talked about in the first class of the project. We started off by defining great, and then as a group we had to come up with some great people around the world. I thought of Stanislav Petrov, who I had been reading about earlier that day.
He was an officer in the Soviet military, and was operating a nuclear early warning system that malfunctioned, and said that the U.S.A had launched nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Had he relayed the information, there probably would have been a nuclear war. But he did not relay the information as he was supposed to, as he believed that the U.S. would attack with all of their weapons at once, so he marked it as a false alarm. He ended up stopping a nuclear war, and that certainly is a big accomplishment, but does that make him great? Well, the class agreed that great people were known for certain attributes or things that they did, so I do think Petrov classifies as great.
However, the project is about great Canadians, and the next thing we did was learn about a few examples of great Canadians. Apparently, there was a tv show with the same name as our project, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
It had a goal similar to ours, identifying people in Canadian history who were great. We watched part of an episode about Terry Fox, which helped cement our understanding of what people thought of as great and why Terry was considered to be just that.
Now that we knew what we could define as great, we got to look at the project plan and see what we were going to do with such knowledge. Well, apparently our podcasts from the previous project were not a one off thing, as we are going to be making a podcast episode in the near future. The subject of this podcast episode? Well, the greatest Canadian. The project plan also mentioned an interview, which I assume will be part of the podcast episode we are making. However, we don’t know what the interview would be about yet, so I started thinking about the other parts of the episode, and it’s a good thing we did that entire project on podcasting, or this project would probably take an extremely long time. I think my skills have definitely improved on that front, so my main problem is coming up with someone who I truly think is the greatest Canadian. I did quite a bit of thinking about it, but I couldn’t really think of anyone outside of the obvious Canadian heroes like Terry Fox or Wayne Gretzky. I’m sure I’ll have more time to do research and think about it, so I’ll have to wait until next week to write about it. That pretty much sums up my thoughts for the week, at this point I’m just looking forward to what’s in store. So, that’s about it for this blog post, see you next week.
