Podcast Producer Course
What is the topic of your podcast?
So the topic of our podcast is how to live a more sustainable life. We have to make 6 episodes in each of the partner languages: Danish, Swedish, Hungarian (because the Romanian partner lives in a Hungarian speaking part of Romania) Greek, Spanish and Italian. After these 6 episodes we have to make ONE English episode each, that summarises the 6 episodes. In this way we will end up with 6 episodes in English and 6 episodes in each of the languages.
The Episodes topics are how to live sustainably in the following areas:
- Food & Water
- Clothing
- Transportation
- Energy
- Travel
- Plastic waste
You will have a high degree of creative freedom in how you want these topics to be presented, but each episode should be about 30 minutes long (give or take 10 minutes).
When you decide on how to frame your podcast you can sometimes benefit from focusing on a special case instead of a more general topic. Audiences that will find and listen to this podcast might find it more interesting to tune in, if the person portrayed in the episode has a specific challenge that they want to tackle. So if you are making an episode on plastic waste you might title it “How Maria cut down on her plastic waste by 50%” instead of “Minimise your plastic waste”
A little bit of click bait mindset may help here 🙂
What type of podcast will you make?
Podcasts can have different types or formats.
Live or recorded
Many podcasts on the internet are live shows either made for radio or a webcast, and then recorded and distributed as a podcast. This is a quick way of recording your podcast, but it takes a lot of preparation and you will have to know what you are going to say beforehand or be a very good improviser.
A recorded podcast is easier to work with in the “post-production”. The sound clips you have pre-recorded don’t need to relate to each other and you are able to tell the story as a narrator or in a conversation.
Conversation/Interview
This might be the easiest way of getting some interesting content on tape. By having a normal unscripted conversation in the “studio” you can ask some relevant questions and get a good conversation out of it, that can be edited and combined with some live audio, music or narration.
In the interview you need to know what you are going to ask, but you don’t have to write a script for the interview itself. You might want to have some notes for later when you add your own narration in the post-production.
Reportage
A reportage is basically you as the reporter going out in the field and recording some live footage of traffic, a shopping experience, the sewing machine working in the background or whatever can give your podcast some life and action. This can also be totally unscripted, and you can also do the interview part as a report in the field.
Who is on the podcast?
It could be a colleague or a friend who would like to cut down on plastic waste, or to change their diet to a more plant based one. If you have a challenge in mind that you would like to take, feel free to make an episode about your own experiences.
Make the challenge the focus of the interviews. Talk about the situation before, the reflections, the mindset that needs to be changed, the challenges and the possibilities for action and the process they go through. You can schedule frequent sessions where you interview them, or join them shopping, cooking, driving or sewing, or you can instruct them in recording their thoughts on their own phone and send them to you.
Audience
Since you are producing a localised version of this podcast you should consider your own audience and use them as a guide. You can also let the case person in your episode decide on the perspective. If they know a lot about being sustainable, then use that to learn from them. If they are beginners in this topic, find some aspects that you would like to have their opinion on and talk about those.
