Creative Stars Update: Podcasting, 14 June 2011

This week the Creative Stars had their very first podcasting workshop!

Not many people are familiar with the idea of a podcast. Personally, I’ve always been a huge podcast listener, a subscriber to more than 20 different podcasts, it often makes me feel like I need to listen to more music than podcasts!

A podcast is like a radio programme that is recorded for listening to whenever you want. All you need to do is just subscribe and download the podcast to your iPod. It can be either audio or video depending on the content. As a new medium of broadcasting, podcast initially had an ‘Identity Crisis’ stuck between Audiobook and Radio. Now, with the rising popularity of the podcast a lot of radio shows are available in the form of a podcast too! Of course there are lots of podcasts that don’t go on air though. In Britain, in terms of content the comedy podcast is still the most popular in the downloading charts, but interviews, comments, reviews, fiction and plays are producing more and more great productions.

Cornerhouse has it’s very own podcast, which is available on http://www.cornerhouse.org/resources?resource-type=audio-resource

The creative stars were divided into 5 groups, each with our own mac computer, microphone, headset and GarageBand.

I have tried producing my own podcast before but it was quite a struggle since it was just me and my laptop. Also, it is quite hard to talk about films, music or books by yourself. Conversation is a crucial part in podcasting, it is not like radio where things have the flexibility to be very improvised. In a podcast the topics are fixed, yet it is only interesting when the conversation has the possibility to become ‘stretched’.

Back to the workshop; we were all given 40 minutes to come up with our very own short podcasts. In my pair, Liz and I were trying really hard to figure out what we wanted to talk about. Liz is a great photographer while I have experience in radio, after a while we felt like we just needed to go for it-  press the ‘ Record’  button and record anything we said. Things got way easier once we started, our conversation started from me introducing the book ‘Making Movie‘ by the recently deceased director Sidney Lumet, to Liz describing her experience of combining her photography work with her school TV station Job. It is kind of hard to stop once you get the conversation flowing! We ended up having the longest podcast of roughly 9 minutes! With some contemporary jazz music in background I would describe it as ‘an elegant piece of work’.

All of us did something different yet equally as interesting. Paddy’s group shared thoughts on their favourite bands and music. Katie’s trio discussed their upcoming summer plans which included a very professional sounding intro of ‘This is a Cornerhouse podcast’ to kick it off and Liam’s pair debated whether the Prodigy was an overrated band or not. Finally, Mike and Kennedy, without a microphone, recorded their piece on an iPod nano. Mike discussed his recent movie experience: X-MEN First Class and they added some funky music to the background.

Everyone seemed to have great fun, and I can’t wait to create a longer podcast in the future, what I like about podcasts are that they can be a discussion about new films, new album releases, pretty much anything creative!

That’s it for the Creative Stars weekly update, we are looking forward to more workshops to come in the summer.

By the way, Alastair, Neetu and Maisie won the chance to go to the Bjork concert in July, lucky them!

Written by Creative Star, Zack Peng  (June 2011)