So I’m doing my internship for a media company, combining my writing and audio production skills to produce podcast episodes for them.
And since Substack has been offering podcasts for a while now, I thought it’ll be a great idea to document my podcast production process. Given that I’ve just produced an episode and started working on the next 2 days ago.
Some of the main takeaways I’ve learned from my most recent podcast production include:
The process of podcast production, how each stage is implemented
Organising ideas — which isn’t exactly my strongest suit. I often have many ideas but struggle to organise them well and clear enough for someone else to comprehend the same way.
Pitching skills, since I have to pitch ideas to my boss
Interviewing skills — which I find really interesting, having met and talked to local artists from Singapore (where I’m based), people I’ve never thought I’ll get the chance to in my lifetime
Scriptwriting skills
Voiceover narration recording — it was my first time! It’s not as easy as it sounds, or so I imagined…
So what exactly is a soundbite podcast?
According to Wikipedia, a sound bite is a short clip of speech or music extracted from a longer piece of audio.
To put it simply, in the context of this podcast, it means to have an extract of your interviewee’s response weaved into the podcast.
For example, in my last episode, I explored the local music scene in Singapore. In one of the segments, I talked about the support given to the local arts scene and weaved in the response of one or two of my interviewees to support my points. In this case, it lets my listeners learn from several perspectives of industry practitioners.
So why soundbite podcasts, instead of having just one narrator, or have an interview be the entire podcast episode?
Well, I questioned that too. But several advantages were explained to me.
Soundbite podcasts give us full control over the production of each episode. For example, if the interview runs over the ideal run time for listeners of your niche and publishing frequency, or if your guests aren’t the most well-articulated people. These factors can affect the overall performance of the episode but are things you can control since you're about to edit them out. You could then decide how interesting you want your episode to be and the runtime.
It also easily allows you to scale up or down. If you wish to have more interviewees, you could. Less? Sure, why not?
I'm not saying soundbites are the best or only format for podcasts. These are just the way the company prefers. These are just several advantages explained to me that I later observed to be true.
To be fair, this format requires quite a bit of work. I would personally not opt for this format as a permanent format if I were to produce my own podcast series in future. (not that I'm thinking of right now, but who knows what will happen in the future!)
Here’s the breakdown of each stage of the production process:
Pre-production:
Ideation, pitching ideas, planning and researching
Writing outline of episode
Reaching out to potential interviewees, crafting questions
Interview + recording of each interview
Transcription of interview(s)
Choosing parts of the interview to use as soundbites based on the outline
Production:
Drafting script for voice over, and deciding where to weave in each soundbite response
Recording the voice-over narration
Post-production
Combine the audio clips of soundbites with your narration
Audio editing
Selecting accompanying music and sound effects, if any
I hope the above list didn’t scare you! To be completely honest, it is a lot of work. But it’s doable in about 2 weeks or so, and I will be as honest as I can about documenting this entire process.
I’m starting this new series to break down each similar stage of the production process into separate, digestible issues, as divided above.
I also thought it’ll be cool if I synced these issues for each production stage with the progress that I’m currently at for work so that I could provide live insights and updates into the new episode production. I hope this would be cool for you too!
But above all, I truly hope it’ll be a great guide/insight for someone else, especially if they’re thinking of producing podcasts. Do share this if you know someone who’s been thinking about podcasting for content!