My first podcast was “published” last week on Dana Gardner’s blog. Doing a podcast was definitely an interesting experience. I’m not going to comment on the content here. Go listen to the podcast or read the transcript. 🙂 Instead, I want to describe the process about how the podcast content was created.
I’m sure a lot of podcasts are created with a simple “sit down, chat, all in one take” type process. This wasn’t that way. Part of that was because this was our (my employers) first podcast to be involved in. We kind of wanted a couple walk throughs and such so we could get a feel of what it would be like ahead of time. We had a couple meeting ahead of time to discuss what the podcast was going to be about, the types of questions that would be asked, the general outline, etc… A lot of that is important. With less than an hour or so of time, you need to make sure the podcast is focused on the important points. These discussions definitely helped narrow the discussion points and were very valuable in making the podcast a better production.
The next step in our process was a “practice” run. We kind of set up things like it would for a full production run. All the audio was taped and such. This did last a bit long, but that’s ok. Things can always be cut during editing. The raw audio from this was sent around to a few people for comment and suggestions. We got several good comments and ideas, but for the most part, everything was very good. We decided to then have the “final” taping.
After the final taping, the audio was then passed around and we kind of discovered that the first “practice” session was actually better. The second one sounded more scripted, more rehearsed. A lot of the “spontaneity” wasn’t there. Thus, we actually ended up using most of the stuff from the first taping.
Thus, the moral of the story is:
If at first you don’t succeed in making it perfect, don’t worry, most likely if you try again, it won’t be as good anyway. 🙂