Hello everyone! My first podcast episode came out last week, “Episode 00: Welcome to Child of Ours.” It was an introductory podcast to introduce you to the mission and objective of my now found podcast. It will be talking about subject and topics pertaining to children in hopes to educate and inform adults on how to be better role models for their children, by teaching and helping children become the best they can be. Creating the first episode of my podcast, Child of Ours was so fun! It was a new experience and very challenged me in many ways. I enjoyed the creative process and how much I learned from trial and error. If you haven’t listened to the podcast yet, make sure you do that first. It will help you understand this post as I walk you through the episode’s creation process. I hope this post on the creation process of “Episode 00: Welcome to Child of Ours” is helpful to you and will aid you in creating your own podcast episode.
So, diving right in, the first thing I did was brainstorm on what my podcast will be about. It was rather simple for me because I already had a blog that I wanted my podcast to relate to. My blog was already about children, so it was easy for me to decide to make my podcast also about children. The reason for this is because I want my blog and podcast to work hand in hand. I know that some of my readers have different ways in which they learn, and they might want different mediums they might learn better from, so to satisfy my audience’s needs, having both a blog and podcast as my creative output is beneficial to all of us.
The second thing I did was lay out how my podcast would be organized and run. I wanted to start out organize so that I would’ve struggle or have difficulties later down the line. I think that having a general outline of what I want my podcast to look like is helpful, because then you can structure it in a manageable and efficient way that will make readers come back and help readers begin a routine. I decided to organize my podcasts into series. These series would address a particular subject or topic. Within the series would be episodes. The episodes would narrow down the topic into bite size pieces or questions to be answered, so that my audience will be able to digest the information shared and comment and ask more questions that I can organizationally address, either in my blog posts or in another podcast episode. I think organization is key to keeping an audience, because accessibility to the information they need is what will keep the interested and coming back for more. If they can’t find what they need they won’t stick around. Also, if I can’t find my own way around my podcast and subjects/topics that I am addressing, I can’t keep active and present within my own community of readers/listeners. So, organization is important.
The third thing I did was create my introductory episode. This episode welcomes your listeners and informs them about what your podcast will be all about. This introductory episode was my very first episode and will be the episode production process I walk you through. To create an episode, it’s good to have a goal which we already do for this episode, to introduce the podcast.
The first thing I did for this episode was script it. I used Microsoft Word to type out the script for my episode. I wrote down all the information I wanted to include in the episode and all the information I thought was important for my listeners to know about the podcast, especially the podcast’s mission and objective. After I figured out what was important, I began writing it out, creating a rough draft. Once I got the rough draft done, I read it out loud a few times to make sure the flow was good and there weren’t any weird pauses or run on sentences. I broke my script into sections and labeled each section with a time. I wanted to make sure I stayed within my time slot for my script, which was within 4-5 minutes without any music or special effects, just the voice.
After reading and recording myself quite a few times, I listened and adjusted as needed. I found out that I had more time to spare, so I added more information about the podcast into the script to fill up the time. I didn’t add any miscellaneous information, but important information that would be useful for the introductory episode, something about the podcast that will inform but also engage my audience to keep listening. Aside from adding more to the script, I also worked on my breathing and spacing in reading the script. The pauses and space in between words matter. The sound, level, and tone of your voice impact the length of the podcast and will influence whether or not your audience will want to continue listening.
Once the time was all good and I’ve perfected my voice and reading to the best of my abilities, I did my final recording of the script. It is okay if you mess up. I just paused for a few seconds and continued on wherever I wished. Through trial and error, I have found that having one long recording of the script with pauses in-between is better than having a handful of short recordings. When you have one long recording, there seems to be less feedback, changes in volume or tone, and it is easier to import it into the editing software application.
My recording was a mp4 recording on my phone, so I just shared it to my Google drive. On my laptop, I accessed my Google drive and downloaded my shared mp4 recording into my Digital Writing folder in my laptop, so I could retrieve it later to work on it in Adobe Audition. I opened Adobe Audition and imported my mp4 recording into the application. I edited my recording by cutting out the pauses and spacing my recording in matter that sounded natural and had a nice flow. I adjusted the volumes to make sure that it wasn’t to loud or quiet. I silenced any background noises present in the recording by zooming in on the audio recording and muting whatever small section was making the noise. I made sure to not over process it because it would ruin the sound quality and take away the rawness and natural tones of my voice.
Once I was done editing the mp4 recording, I placed it into the mixer. To add some pizzazz into my podcast and make it livelier, I searched for royalty-free music online. I found a site called Zapsplat, which had free sound effects and music. I searched for lively children’s music and was able to find a good tune that fit with the vibe I was aiming for in my podcast. I downloaded the music, saving it to my Digital Wiring folder again. I imported it into the session I was working on with the mp4 in Adobe Audition. After importing it, I worked on it and cropped and edited out the portions of the song I didn’t want and the portions I did want. After I was done editing, I placed the music snippets at the beginning and end of my edited mp4 recording.
To make sure that the transitions were smooth between the music and the recording, I made sure to work on the fading. I worked with the fading to make sure there weren’t any harsh endings or abrupt beginnings. I wanted it to be seamless and I wanted the music to blend in, right into the dialogue.
After I fixed all the transitions, and listened to the entire podcast from start to finish a couple times to make sure everything flowed well and there weren’t any harsh beginnings or endings or too large of a gap between words or phrases, I exported the mix into a mp4 recording. Once it was done mixing into an mp4 recording, I named it “Episode 00: Welcome to Child of Ours” and I saved it into my Digital Writing folder, to later submit it to my teacher and post it online to my blog.
The steps I took to create “Episode 00” Welcome to Child of Ours” were roughly experimental as I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but a little help from Google was all I need to make this podcast. Creating a podcast and producing your own episode is fairly easy and doesn’t take too much energy. It is a creative and fun process that I’d suggest everyone try sometime. I hope this has helped inform you in some way and I hope you, as my readers, try creating a podcast episode of your own someday. If you have any questions always feel free to reach out to me. I’ll be glad to help!
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