More Podcasting Tips

     *Throws podcasting tips in your face and runs away*

1.  Record in the same room if at all possible

     When you don't have millions of dollars to throw at private recording studios and sound-proof walls, sound quality and background noise can be an issue.  If you can find a room to record in that's relatively impenetrable (windows shut, if you can't find a room with no windows), without fans, heaters, or air conditions, then you have your recording room right there!

     For me, this is difficult--at school all the rooms have air conditioning at all times of the year, and at home the walls are very thin.  My solution?  Try to find the room with the least sound, or sound you can best explain away, and stay there for at least the duration of that episode.

     Usually, I try to fit the episode's environment to the room--air conditioning and loud refrigerators can be an issue, but if your character lives in an abandoned carpet warehouse that runs on home-built generators and you have robots running around everywhere, the sound of air blowing and motors whirring makes sense.  But if the character is a teenage girl in her room, recording where you can hear wind chimes and birdsong might make the most sense.

     But really, people will tune anything out if it doesn't cause too much brain function--if birds are chirping when you're in a volcano, there might be some cognitive dissonance going on, but as for white noise, people will come to block it out if it doesn't interfere as long as it remains constant, and if you have that white-noise room, you can always add necessary sound effects in post.

2.  Kill your darlings (there can only be one)

   Okay, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration--you can have plenty of darlings.  Just not all of them.
   
     You've probably heard this phrase used in relation to writing before; it's one of those little tidbits of artistic life that apply to pretty much every medium.  If you're writing a podcast script, you obviously need to slay some darlings in the script writing process, but even once you record it, you'll sometimes come across bits that just don't fit.  Maybe the line isn't as funny spoken as it is written, or it throws the pacing off, or it's just not important or entertaining enough to warrant taking up the audience's precious time.

     You may have worked very hard on this darling little line; it may, on its own, be pure gold!  But if it doesn't work with the rest of the piece, it might as well be a show pony at a racetrack; at best it'll look pretty while it loses.

      At any and every step of the process you have to know when something adds value, and when it detracts; when it detracts, you have to cut, cut, cut.

     My experience is with story podcasting, of course, which means I don't know if this is true for interview or conversational podcasts, but if anyone with experience wants to drop a comment below, it would be nice to know!

3.  Print out a physical copy of the script

     It's only recently that I've had the good sense to start actually printing out my scripts--because I have two laptops (I use the much older one for recording and the newer one for school and writing), I've been in the bad habit of reading my script off my laptop.  On the few occasions that I did think to print out a copy, it was necessary to lend it to a co-actor that had forgotten to bring their own.

     Why is this important?

     It's cumbersome. first of all--either your laptop (or phone, as the case may be) is so small you have to squint, or so big it's a pain to transport.  If you do have something in between, the tapping of keys or glass often makes more noise than paper, which isn't great when you're trying to record.

     It's also easier to lose your place on a computer--not only can you lose your place on the page, but with one accidental flick of the mousepad or press of a button, you could lose the entire page itself, which is a huge pain in the ass.  The risk increases if you're skipping around, and it's harder to find the next place you need to record, because highlighting doesn't have the same effect on a computer that it does on paper.

     To remedy this, I would CTRL+F it and type the desired character name followed by a colon.  The thing is, this worked only when the character name wasn't separated from the colon by a parenthetical (since I write my scripts in the British format), which meant there were times when I would skip important lines by accident.  When they were just my lines it was fine, and I could record again later, but when it was someone else's lines, it became an ORDEAL.  I would either have to work around the omission, or call them in for another session, neither of which was desirable.

     All in all, it's beneficial to have a physical paper copy of the script in your hand, highlighted, pen-marked, hell, post-it-noted if you need it, ahead of time.

4.  Never throw out old scripts (digitally, at least)

     Much like with other writing projects, it's important to keep all your old drafts filed away somewhere; you never know when you'll need to check back to make sure you're staying on point with the continuity or character executions.

     Even when you scrap a script, keep what you've got filed somewhere--you might use the pieces again in the future, bit-by-bit, general ideas, or even chunks torn out wholesale.

     The worst that happens when you keep old scripts around is using up a few extra MilliBytes that never see the light of day again.  But chances are good that they will.