BLOG
This page serves as an opportunity to document our progress on the production and recording of our sports podcast. We will post bimonthly updates on completed work, and what we intend to do next. We will also provide updates whenever an episode is posted/recorded to media platforms.
Since our last update, we have been very busy. To start, our microphones arrived and we have begun testing them. We each found locations within our houses that provided the best sound quality and lighting. This is to ensure our podcasts recorded from home are still very professional. We have officially scheduled three of our guests, and we are in contact with many others. We are also in the process of planning an in-person interview with two of our guests. Looking forward, we plan on recording our first episode with Severn's own Elijah Bryan next week. Recording our first episode is a weight we look forward to lifting off our backs. Our first interview being Elijah, someone we both know personally, allows us to be much confident and gives us a real opportunity to build our skills for our other interviews.
0 Comments
We are now officially Fellows! After our presentation, we decided to begin scheduling our guests. This has been more complicated than anticipated, but we have not been discouraged and have set a new goal for ourselves: 2 episodes recorded, edited, and published by the end of October. We are giving ourselves plenty of time for these first episodes, because we assume it will take awhile to get the hang of editing episodes for the first time. Besides that, we have been having internal discussions about setting our Fall Goals. We may have finally found a lead on a potential big-fish guest (a middle school parent who played in the NFL), so we are very excited to see if we can work something out on that front. Besides that, we have been working on making our YouTube page more professional looking.
As we adapt to returning to school, we are hitting our stride. First, we secured three new guests since our last update. Mansoor Delane, Anto Saka, and KJ Winston all agreed to be interviewed. We reached out to Dr. Grimes in the alumni office, who is currently working to connect us with NFL broadcaster Evan Washburn. He will likely be unavailable for interviews until the NFL season wraps up in February, but he would stand out as one of our best guests. We also visited the Severn studio to test our knowledge of the technology required. Mr. Donn, along with other students using the studio, agreed to help us when recording to ensure everything runs as smooth as possible. We have also been working hard to wrap up our presentation of our summer work. We are both thrilled with how things are going, and it's time to start recording! We have began reaching out to our athletes to schedule their interviews. While this process is somewhat complicated and frustrating, as it is hard for things to align perfectly, we are excited to begin this next step in our project.
We are back in school! Since our last update, we have been focusing on the production and recording of our podcast. We practiced asking each other questions, which showed us that we need a little more work before we record our first episode. While somewhat straightforward, we also made sure we knew how to properly record a ZOOM call and export it into editing software. While we were a little disappointed that our first episode was delayed, we hope that this extra preparation will make the final product that much better. We have also uploaded the general script for our interviews to our website. We designed our script to ensure that we could adjust on the fly and keep the interview exciting. We also finalized all our questions for our confirmed guests, and will be posting those shortly alongside the general script. We plan on getting into the Severn Studio as soon as tomorrow or Friday, record another rough draft, and learn from that where we need the most work. We are planning on recording and publishing our first official episode sometime next week, depending on guest scheduling. Throughout all of this, we are still contacting more people in hopes of reaching our goal of ten people. While the decision to delay our first episode was a little disheartening, we are looking to bounce back this week and get our first episode posted by September 10th.
At this point, we have a confirmed list of 6 guests. We are still talking to a couple other possible guests to try and get on the show. We have also made a generic script of questions that we can use for every guests. We are doing research into each of our guests to get a good background on each one and to try and formulate more specific questions to create a more engaging dialogue.
Since our last update, our progress has been somewhat stagnant. Our goal during this time was to secure our final guest list, but contacting them proved much more difficult than we thought. After messaging dozens of athletes, very few got back to us. We did manage to secure an interview with one of our dream guests in Landon Tengwall, the highest ranked high school football player in Maryland. Landing such a well-known guest was a huge victory for the podcast, and it inspired us to keep messaging athletes. In the meantime, we have used our interview template to create questions for all but one of our confirmed guests. We also reached out to Mr. Giddings with general questions about pacing and segmentation for our podcasts. We then decided to move forward with the production of episodes, even though our guest list is not finalized. We are both very excited to start recording, and we feel waiting for our final guests would be a waste of time. We are currently planning on doing a very rough draft of an interview with a friend within the first week of August. This will be recorded on a cellphone and serve as an opportunity for us to work on our interviewing skills. We then plan on coming in for draft interview using the studio equipment. This is all leading up to our first real episode, which we hope to record in mid-to-late August. Our first guest will most likely be Coach Tyler, since he will be the easiest to schedule and the person we are most excited to interview. While our work this month has been tedious and repetitive, we are hoping it will pay off with a star-studded guest lists for our podcast.
We have been very busy since the last update. Mr. Donn informed us that the Severn studio likely has all required equipment to produce a podcast, so our focus shifted to how we want the product to look. We decided we want an audio version of the podcast to be posted on all major sites (Spotify, Apple Music, etc...) alongside a video version of the podcast on YouTube. We created a YouTube channel and are now working on personalizing it. We also spent time researching the best way to publish podcasts, and it appears simply applying manually to each platform is the easiest and cheapest option (albeit tedious). Most podcast platforms allow users to apply for free, so that is no worry. We also decided on Adobe Creative Cloud for our editing software to produce our podcast. Alongside several minor tweaks to the website, we have added a new page which displays the confirmed guests of our podcast. While we only have one guest confirmed at the moment, we have begun reaching out to prospective guests and expect the list to grow very quickly. We posted our expenses sheet to our process page, and our working to finalize our yearlong timeline. Looking forward, we will be spending most of our time drafting questions for our confirmed guests. We will also be learning how to use the editing software once we purchase it. We are both very excited at the pace at which we are moving, and we look forward to securing our final guest list in the coming days.
Since our last update, we have been working tirelessly to make our podcast a reality. To start, we created a logo for our podcast, which is displayed in the top left corner of this website. We also began creating graphics for our podcast. While this work is likely not the most relevant this early in the project, we enjoyed the process of creating them so we really sunk some time into them. We also created an "About Us" section on our homepage. We then reached out to Mr. Donn regarding using Severn's studio and the required equipment for producing our podcast. We are still waiting to complete our expenses and timeline sheets, as these are both dependent on our use of the Severn Studio. We also drafted a template for interviews. This is so our interviews can all maintain similar structure, while also feeling fresh with each guest. As we enter the month of July we our excited to end our research period and really dive into the project. We will soon begin reaching out to potential guests, adding a page for confirmed guests on our website, as well as finalizing our expenses and timeline sheets.
To start off our Fellows project, we have been working on the logistics spreadsheet as well as the project timeline. We have begun researching the equipment required to record and produce a podcast. On top of this, we have also been discussing potential guests for our show. We have created a "dream cast" for our podcast. This list of names is very preliminary and many of the names would be considered long shots. We wanted to start with a master list and slowly narrow it down to our perfect selection of interviewees. After discussing our ideas with our mentor, Mr. Laffey, and learning how to turn these ideas into fruition at the Leadership Lab, we are excited to throw ourselves into this project.
|
|