Podcast Producer Course

PRODUCER TIPS

Plan your podcast

Planning is essential when you make a podcast. Even if it’s a live podcast that you just publish afterwards, you can be sure that a lot of planning went into making it. You might have a good idea of what your podcast should contain, and what you would like to cover in it, but in this SustainCast project the assignment is pretty simple. Find someone who wants to take a sustainability challenge, and document their progress in a fun and engaging way providing enough content for a 30 minute podcast episode. And then you have to do it again 5 more times.

Make a storyboard

You can make this a bit easier on yourself by dividing the episode into different parts. You will have to present the topic. For example, if the episode is about Food and water, you talk about the specific problems of why we are not being sustainable in our daily lives. Consult the E-book for good arguments here. Then you need to present the person that wants to make the change and take the challenge. You can either talk about who they are, or let them introduce themselves. Here you also talk about the specific challenge and why this is the thing the person wants to try to change.
Then you need to make people understand what they have been doing during the challenge. You can ask them to record their own reflections in the kitchen or in the supermarket, or you can arrange to meet with them and interview them while they are shopping and cooking, and ask them about their reflections.
When they are done you can arrange another interview where you ask them how it was to implement a change of lifestyle, if they want to continue, if they saved on money or lost weight or if the challenge had any other effect.

Finally you can ask them about their future plans, and if they would be willing to change other aspects of their life as well.
You can then round off the episode by talking about how we could all make this change, what the obstacles and benefits are, and then wrap it up by advertising the other episodes.

Interviews or narration

This basic outline should be able to give you around 30 minutes of quality podcast. Just make sure you speak calmly and ask relevant questions and give the person time to answer. The conversations are some of the best parts of the podcast if you can find somebody who has something to say. Otherwise you have to do most of the talking yourself.

Interviews
The interview format is an easy way to get a conversation flowing. By having a list of questions you can get the person to talk about their experiences and be sure to cover all the basics. Let the person talk as long as they have something to tell, you can always edit it out afterwards.
Interviews can be conducted in your “studio” or in their own homes, or even while shopping, driving or doing other stuff.

Narration
If you are the one who is taking on a challenge and you have to talk about it yourself, then you need to be able to narrate. Narration can be difficult for some people since it’s just you talking and you have to both ask the questions and answer them. But if you have some notes in front of you to keep you on the right track, you should be able to tell an interesting story to the audience. Feel free to address the audience directly like they were listening to you live. In a narrated podcast it might be even more important to have some actual real-life audio footage of you in different situations in order to keep it flowing better and give it a more real feel.
Talk to your phone while making decisions, and reflecting. Make short interviews with others where you ask them questions on how to do your own challenge.

Combine narration with "real audio"

In whatever way you construct your podcast, make sure that the listeners feel that they are part of the process. You have to have some kind of “Real audio” to show the process of the challenge. It can be small things such as. “So I’m here in my kitchen back from the supermarket. I just bought 5 kilos of washing detergent in a cardboards box. I didn’t even know they sold them like that anymore. Usually I buy 750 ml plastic bottles of liquid detergent, but this way I'm saving 6 bottles of plastic and I only have to get rid of a cardboard box.”

A clip like this can give so much information. And if you then combine with some narration of where you can buy them, and if this is actually a more sustainable option, and why - or why not, then, you have a great segment!

Remember, you don’t have to be an expert. The idea of the podcast is ONLY to show normal people trying to do better in one aspect at a time.

The English version

When you have 6 episodes of your podcast you should feel really proud of yourself. The final task is then to make a summary of all the episodes in an English version where you highlight the results from your different episodes.
You might feel at ease with narrating your English version on your own, but you can also get another person to speak the English parts for you.
If you can’t find such a person in your network, we - the project partnership - will lend a helping hand.
In the meantime you should make a script that talks about the different episodes and highlights the result of the challenges.
Make sure that you get some of the real life footage to make it seem real and engaging, and then explain what happened in English.
Each summary of the episodes should only be around 5 minutes and you can put some filler music in between.

Intros, music and skillers

In the project we are trying to get a uniform feel in all our podcast episodes. The partnership will make the artwork for the podcast episodes and select the intro music and the skillers between the segments. You will have to do your own introduction to the podcasts, and use the same intro for all the episodes.

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