Joining the pod people.
I’ve been sidelined by a bit of mild food poisoning for a couple of days, so when I wasn’t stuck in the bathroom for hours, I’ve tried my hand at podcasting for the first time. (Don’t worry, none of this was done in the bathroom itself – that would be a poocast. Not that I might not do one of those in the future…) My first podcasting experiments will be revealed on Friday the 17th, as I launch a series – or maybe I should say a tentative series – of Doctor Who podcasts to accompany Sci-Fi Channel’s broadcasts of the new series in the U.S.; the idea here is to help draw continuity connections between the old series and the new for casual fans or new fans. (If you’re a longtime dedicated fan, well, probably nothing new for you here.)
I wound up talking almost non-stop through Rose, though there were a couple of significant pauses for The End Of The World. I quickly discovered the value of keeping an ample supply of beverages on hand for this activity, and lived in fear of the weather alert radio behind me going off during yet another stormy day. (Not long after I finished End Of The World, I was getting things set up to record The Unquiet Dead when the first alarm sounded, followed about ten minutes later by the second one, and I figured “well, that’s about it for today.”)
I also discovered that I’m really not too well equipped for this whole endeavour of casting from my particular pod. I still don’t have a microphone (which certainly would’ve helped when I was trying to record the Voice of Odyssey a few weeks ago), so it’s currently a convoluted process of recording my voice with my camcorder (with the lens cover closed) for 45-odd minutes, and then spending another 45-odd minutes dumping that audio to CD, and then more time to finalize that disc, rip it to my hard drive, and edit the top and tails (I’m assuming you don’t want to hear me do a TV-style 3-2-1 count-in here.) A microphone would let me just do my damage straight to the CD-RW and cut something like an hour out of the process.
Ah well. It’s really strange how multimedia this whole thing is becoming. Oh, to quit my day job and do this all day. Assuming anyone likes these, I’ll be looking for other podcasting opportunities in the future…I just have no idea what they’d be. If anyone’s got any ideas, I’m all ears.… Read more
