A peek behind the scenes

We’re reaching the end of what I’ve called “season 1” — the seven episodes I definitely wanted to produce, regardless of whether this show was a “success” or not. So I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the process, what it’s been like, and how things are going to change moving forward.

A breakdown of my time

I decided to do this kind of solo podcast because I knew it would be the simplest format and require the least amount of my time.

For each episode, I write a script and record a rough-cut, which I send to my executive producer Alicia for notes. Things like “Does this make sense?” or “What do people need to know to understand the point I’m trying to make?”

Once I get her notes, I make the revisions and do sound design (basically just two music cues to break up the monotony). I run my audio through iZotope RX to clean up any technical issues (like one episode for some reason every time I said an “s” it sounded like a “z” so I had to hunt down a de-sibilance plugin to fix it).

I upload the audio to Substack, ask my saintly cryptid housemate to make sure the episode transcription is correct / transcribe any soundbites that I dumped it without incorporating into the script, and then make a video version for YouTube, which basically just involves dropping a few graphics on the video timeline, exporting, and uploading.

Once the transcription is correct, I put it into Substack along with all the annotations, write a brief little intro, edit the copy that will go into the Apple Podcasts/etc. description, and schedule it for release.

Turns out, all of this still takes a fair amount of time!

This doesn’t include the hours I spend actually listening to the podcasts I cover (since I’m generally doing other things while listening, like playing a video game) or the time I spent working on development before I decided to actually track my time.

This works out to about 30 hours of work per episode. Which, since I’m now behind schedule (I haven’t even finished the script for the next episode and it releases next Friday, oops), I can’t really afford to do.

What’s eating the time?

A fair amount of that time was probably dedicated to things that won’t apply to future episodes — I remember spending a good number of hours playing with Adobe Animator to see how hard it would be to make animations to liven up the YouTube version, before deciding it was taking up too much time, and another good chunk of it was creating templates & graphics to use in the future.

Another thing that’s been taking up a fair amount of time is sound design. Finding music to use, testing out different songs, different placements, adjusting the levels so you can still hear my voice… It’s a lot of work, and turns out, I don’t really enjoy doing it that much. The only episode whose music I’m genuinely happy with is Double Love; the rest of the episodes feel (to me) like they include music because I’m “supposed” to have music.

It’s time to experiment!

I thought I needed music so that people wouldn’t get bored listening to my voice alone for twenty minutes, but after talking with my executive producer and with my housemate, I’m going to try nixing the music. The theme song will still be there, but the rest of the podcast will be just me and the soundbites.

Let me know what you think! Do you like having a little sound design for variety? Do you prefer a more dialogue-only sound?

I’m also thinking of taking a week off from the podcast, once I finish the planned episodes, and seeing if I can use that time to build up a back catalogue. Or maybe doing shorter, more free-form episodes. If there’s something you’d like to hear, let me know!