Developing a Podcast - Week 2 (tri 2)

For this project, I am a part of a six people team. We began this lecture by splitting our team members into separate roles.

Julia (Me) - Host, Producer

Lee - Host, Director

Cassie - Host, Technician

Will - Host, Editor

Betty - Host, Artist

Oriana - Host, Marketing

We all wanted to be present in the podcast itself. Let's be honest, host is the coolest role to have. To avoid us talking over each other I have decided to slip the podcast into two parts. This means that we will split our team members into two groups of three.

Group One would feature me, Lee and Betty, meaning that Group Two will have Will, Cassie and Oriana.

But, what is our Podcast actually about?

What brought us together as a group is the one thing that we all have in common - we are immigrants, but why does that one word connotes so many negative stereotypes? In fact, immigrants are all over Cambridge, England, everywhere, yet we view that word as something bad. We want to explore this in our podcast, as well as talk about our experiences being bilingual and moving across the world.

Topics we wish to cover:

• bullying

• culture shocks

• food

• language barriers

• education

• stereotypes

Target Audience

People who are immigrants and want to find people with similar struggles, people immigrating to the UK, advice, struggling with moving, consequences of being an immigrant (eg. Student finance), being homesick

iTunes Categories

1. Self-improvement

2. Personal Journals

3. Places and Travel

Description of the Podcast

"Friends from across the world talk about struggles regarding being an immigrant in the UK in a pyjama party setting bringing light to social and educational struggles. If you are an immigrant, tune in to hear us moan about the stereotypes we’re associated with."

#immigrant #migration #brexit #immigrantsinUK #international #comedy #pyjamas #chill #videopodcast #bereal

Title "Immigrant Nuggets"

As silly as it sounds this is the title we have eventually settled on. We knew from the beginning that we wanted our title to include the word 'immigrant'. Initially we wanted to be called "The Immigrants", however, what we didn't realise is that we have to make sure that our title is not taken.

We have used the Podcast Name Generator to help us find a unique name that would meet the briefs requirements. We have settled on the "Immigrant Nuggets" since the pair of these words sounds silly - and that's exactly what we want our podcast to be. Yes, we are covering serious themes, but we want to show our listeners that life gets better. Who doesn't enjoy a bit of humour after all?

Organising The Team

As the Producer, I have decided to create a set of deadlines our group will have to follow. I did this to avoid confusion and make sure all the work is completed on time. It was a stressful experience managing so many people, especially since people had to cancel last second due to personal reasons.

Our Amazing Logo Design

From the beginning we knew we wanted to feature an actual chicken nugget as our logo - we really took our name seriously. Betty did an amazing job at bringing our ideas to life!

Recording time! - Episode One

Here's a small video collage of all the photos I took while we were recording! It was a lot of fun setting up the room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbptMNNsBvI

For day one, it was me, Betty and Lee on camera, but Cassie being our technician with the camera work. We rented two cameras for the set up, one was still-image and pointing directly in front of us, and the second camera Cassie moved to whoever is talking. We also rented the Sound Caster, a set of three microphones and headphones, as well as LED lights to be used as a prop. These were recommended by our lecturer and were very easy to use.

It took us a little while to get into the podcaster mindset as we were all very new to this. Once we started the actual recording it felt much more natural. We also had snacks from each of our home countries, which we talked about and tried during the podcast. We had Cassie's laptop in front of us with the topics to talk about in this episode, and we covered culture shocks, differences in our home countries education system VS England's one, religions, foods, and struggles of applying to university as an immigrant.

We only really stumbled into one problem: the cameras stopped recording thirty minutes into the session, but Cassie reacted quickly and got the cameras rolling again. This was a minor issue, as the sound caster kept recording so we still had audio, which we could work around in post-production. Apart from that, I think the recording went well because we got through everything successfully and we have now earned new skills.

Big Issue

Future Julia here, sadly the episode one got completely corrupted... Our editor Will tried to save it from its ultimate doom, but it was of no use... Well, at least we got episode two up and running!

Episode Two

Well... I wasn't in the episode two of our podcast but I must say it went just as smoothly. Humans adjusted pretty fast to the whole podcasting thing and... well you just gotta see it yourself! Big thanks to Will for his AMAZING editing skills and knowledge.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKubeWSVMZU

Reflections

Overall, note to self, never ever again be a part of such a big group. It was amazing working with such talented people, however managing uni students is something else. Apart from the small miss ups and adjustments here and there, I must say the whole project went pretty smooth. I suppose we had an advantage in numbers and it really shows! I am quite sad about the episode one collapsing on us, in the future we would 100% do anything to prevent that (oh and RIP Wills laptop, in some cases, some stuff are unpreventable).