Blog Post #8: Final Reflections

 Oh, how time flies. It feels like just yesterday I was still in the early stages of planning the project, and now it's all over. I was originally inspired to create this project mostly by my partner in this project, Luke. He pitched the idea of making an anthology podcast along the lines of some podcasts we'd both listened to and discussed extensively, and I thought it sounded like a lot of fun, so of course I said yes. I've always had the vague notion that making a podcast would be a fun endeavor, and I figured this would be by far my best chance to give it a go.

Overall, I would say that the project went quite well. While our initial goals for the podcast were quite ambitious, I am really really happy with our output over these few weeks. I am particularly happy with how the podcast sounds. I really didn't expect us to be able to make a podcast that actually sounds decent and, not to self aggrandize, but I think the audio really sounds decently professional. In general, I'm just quite happy with how the quality of the podcast turned out. Another success of the project was the voice acting. This wasn't necessarily completely Luke and my's doing, but we were very lucky to have both a lot of willing voice actors and lots of people who are very good at voice acting volunteering to help us in our project. The final part of the project I'd like to highlight as something I think went really well was the creative dynamic between Luke and I. I am very happy that there really weren't a ton of huge creative disagreements and we could generally agree on what the best course of action was for any given creative decision, which I think led to a lot less friction and allowed writing to progress with relative ease.

The biggest constraints on our project were time and access to professional equipment/spaces. Three weeks really just isn't that long in the world of podcast production, particularly when it comes to heavily edited podcasts. This meant that we had to move quite quickly throughout the project and we often had to adjust our goals. For instance, before the project began, we were thinking a reasonable goal would be to make 10 episodes. We soon realized this was a ludicrous goal and readjusted to 5 episodes, though even that proved to be quite an ambitious goal. This lack of time did lead to the aforementioned need to readjust goals, though at the end of the day, I'm ok with that. I'd rather aim a bit too high than not strive for excellence. In terms of access to equipment and space, we felt this most acutely in terms of audio quality. We had access to decent recording equipment through Hawken, though it could have been much more ideal. The much bigger issue was the lack of particularly quiet spaces at Hawken, which meant that there is sometimes a bit of background noise in some scenes that we really just can't account for.

I would separate my learning in this project into two main categories: the specific technical skills and the more broadly applicable lessons. In terms of skills, there are some rather obvious ones. I now know how to edit audio, apply effects to audio, publish podcasts, and just generally do the things needed to make a podcast. I did not know any of those things beforehand. My acquisition of that knowledge is evidenced by the fact that the podcast does indeed exist now. In addition to these skills specifically applicable to podcast production, there were some things I learned just from being involved in a collaborative and mostly self-guided project to create a specific product in a contained amount of time. The main lesson I learned was how important it is to create structure and orient oneself to what they are trying to accomplish. It became a very important routine every morning for Luke and I to write a daily agenda of the things we hoped to accomplish in the day. This was very useful and I think helped to keep us on track as we worked.

Wrapping up, I would really like to thank our mentor on this project, Jim Harold, for all of his help in mentoring us throughout the project. His expertise in podcast production was absolutely vital, and seriously helped make the production of our podcast go significantly better than I believe it otherwise would have. My biggest piece of advice to any future seniors working on a Hawken project is to make sure that you pick something you'll enjoy working on and to make sure you create some structure to ensure that the work gets done. Finally, my biggest takeaway from this project is just how fun and satisfying it is to create something. The moment when I went to Spotify and saw that our podcast was actually there, that all the work amounted to something and it was real was one of the most satisfying moments of the whole project, and I want to carry that attitude with me into future endeavors.

Thank you for reading this blog, and if you haven't had a chance yet, be sure to check out the podcast:

https://open.spotify.com/show/1EoPBj1XzzNmwpwElkTb5h?si=40937d1f26254368