Critical Self-Reflection (Podcast)

Me and my teammates, Kanna, Erina and Hugo, have created a podcast for this project, along with a social media account to advertise our podcast. Our podcast, Unsolved, is an unsolved true crime podcast and it is targeted towards people ages 15-19. The first episode of our podcast discusses The Black Dahlia and the second episode discusses Jack the Ripper.

HOW DO YOUR PRODUCTS REPRESENT SOCIAL GROUPS OR ISSUES?

Our podcast represents white people. We have chosen to represent them in both episodes of our podcast because based on our survey on students, they prefer consuming classic, white, western crime cases. Our podcast conforms to traditional thinking because we used stereotypes of white, British people. The main character of our podcast, Vienna Raymond, is a white, British woman and she spoke with a stereotypical British accent. We used this stereotype because using the stereotypical British accent can let audiences easily know that she is a British woman by just hearing her voice. Post-colonialism in the media has also brainwashed people into viewing white, British people as highly educated and smart, which fits our main character well, since she is a United Nations Officer.

HOW DO THE ELEMENTS OF YOUR PRODUCTION TO CREATE A SENSE OF BRANDING?

Steve Neale’s genre theory has stated that it is best for media to convey genre conventions to make it easy for audiences to recognize the genre easily, but also subvert the genre conventions enough to make it unique. I have watched and analyzed different true crime podcasts to see how our advert compares to them. My podcast conforms to a few different features that are usually present in true crime podcasts. Our podcast conforms a few genre conventions. Our podcast’s thumbnail uses a red and black color palette, red strings and blood splashes, which often can be seen in most crime podcast thumbnails. Our podcast title is “Unsolved” which is very straightforward and makes audiences easily tell that it is an unsolved true crime podcast. It is important to make the genre obvious to the audience so it can attract existing fans of the genre

Audiences often expect to experience a sense of adrenaline rush or chills when watching a true crime podcast. We made our podcast as how we think audiences would expect a true crime podcast to sound like to satisfy their expectations. We added sound effects and thrilling/scary BGM to make it more “real” so the audiences can better imagine the scenes and what the characters are feeling. I added an old radio sound effect for the dialogues in our podcast to make it seem like it was an actual recording from back then which makes it seem more realistic. The dialogues of Jack the Ripper are also said in an unserious, psychotic tone to give creeps to the audience.

HOW DO YOUR PRODUCTS ENGAGE WITH THE AUDIENCE?

We created a social media page for our podcast on Instagram to advertise our podcast and to interact with our audiences. On our page, we created interactive polls and Q&A boxes and suggestion boxes so we can interact two-ways with our audiences and make the audiences more active rather than passive. The interactive polls also allow audiences to build a community with other audiences to discuss theories of the crime cases we discussed in the podcasts. We also created merchandise so our audiences can support our podcast while advertising our podcast and interact with other fans who have our merchandise. Instagram also allows audiences to easily share our links and posts to other people.

HOW DID YOUR RESEARCH INFORM YOUR PRODUCTS AND THE WAY THEY USE OR CHALLENGE CONVENTIONS?

I listened to a lot of different true crime podcasts on Spotify, a music and podcast platform, and YouTube and took a lot of inspiration from the Parcast’s Solved Murders podcast. We liked how the podcast was structured and how it made use of both narrative and narrator based storytelling to tell the story of the crime scenes, however we didn’t like how they used more than 2 narrators which made it a little confusing, so took note of that and made our podcast with only 1 narrator. We also took inspiration from our concept of a police officer reading police files from the podcast “The Magnus Archives”. We also took inspiration from the podcast “Slow Burn” for the outro part of the podcast. We liked how there was an advert, a preview, their social media accounts and credits, so we implemented those into our podcast.

PRODUCTION AND REFLECTION

I have learnt a lot of new design skills while making this project. Firstly, I  learned how to make T-shirt mockups using a Free online website. Secondly, I also helped give feedback and advice to my teammate Kanna while she was designing the social media and because of this, my taste in design has improved. My editing skills also improved a lot. I learned how to add the old radio effect to audios and generally I can combine and edit audios more smoothly and cleanly now.

I have used various softwares to help me throughout this project. I used Google, Spotify and YouTube to find references, inspirations and to research, analyze other podcasts and find SFXs and BGMs for the podcast. I edited both episodes of the podcast using Adobe Premiere Pro, a video editing program, because it has all the features that I need to edit the audio and I have a lot of experience editing with Premiere Pro which made me able to edit the podcasts quickly and comfortably.  Blogspot has helped me organize and put all my plans, ideas, theories, terminologies and my project progress into one platform. This way, if i ever forgot any theories, terminologies or if i want to look back at my plans and ideas, I can easily look for it on my blog. It also helped me as a submission platform to submit all my final projects in one place so my teacher can grade my submissions. 

I used my Macbook and iPad for a second screen while editing the podcast. Switching screens back and forth from premiere pro to the script is not very convenient so I learned how to make my iPad as a second screen by using the screen mirroring feature. This way I can easily look at the script while editing. I relied on my Airpods a lot to edit the podcast anywhere I want. I also used my Macbook to record my own SFX for the podcasts.

We have made a lot of big changes to our podcast. We changed our podcast title before recording the podcast. We started with Unsolved International and found it a little unpleasing to the ears so we changed into just Unsolved. Other than that I also changed a few things while editing the podcast. The biggest change we made was to replace the voice actor from Erina to other voice actors for the dialogues to make the podcast more interesting.

In conclusion, I was very intimidated at first because I do not listen to a lot of podcasts, but I had a lot of fun making this project. I have gained a lot of new skills and experiences, including editing, designing and also teamworking skills. I also learned a lot of interesting and useful media theories and terminologies throughout the project.