Unit 5: Investigating Audio Production and Technology - Task 3: Evaluation - Podcast

I created the podcast "The Fault in Our Films" along with Amiliyah. Here is the link to my edit of "The Fault in Our Films" Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/harriet-p-784066030/the-fault-in-our-films-podcast

Throughout my time working on the podcast, I found it very enjoyable, fun and also interesting as I have always really enjoyed listening to podcasts and having the opportunity to be able to create one was a really great learning experience. 

I think mine and Amiliyah's podcast was really good as we spoke about an issue that many people don't realise is actually happening. The film industry, I guess all media-based industries, struggle to recognise the great talents of women, as well as don't allow their voices to be heard or get hired for many job roles, especially creative jobs on a film set such as Director, Writer or Music Composer. It isn't just women behind the camera who also struggle and are mistreated, women who are in front of the camera get the same negative treatment. There is a lack of representation onscreen for women, causing this large issue of gender inequality in the film industry. I think this is also a very interesting topic to touch on and highlight as both me and Amiliyah are aspiring filmmakers, who are also both on a course for Film and TV Production, and to understand that women hardly get a chance to create and tell their stories is devastating, shocking and horrible. I also think this was a great issue to make aware in our podcast as me and Amiliyah are the only girls in our class, as the rest are boys, which allowed us to have a very different ideology and approach when it came to wanting to discuss film in a podcast. So, to be able to have our voices heard (for fifteen minutes) explaining why the industry needs to change and give women an equal opportunity to create films was really freeing and fun. This is also very personal to me and Amiliyah, as I said before, we are both wanting to be able to work in the film industry in the future and to hear and see all these obstacles for women is truly unfair. It's devastating to look up to your heroes and idols who understand you and are able to represent you onscreen and teach you a lesson yet get nothing in return. So, compared to the rest of the class, I think me and Amiliyah had quite a unique topic, being able to speak about women in the industry and what needs to change to benefit female filmmakers and female representation onscreen. 

The podcast category/genre this would be placed under is Film and TV, as me and Amiliyah are speaking about women in the film industry. I think this fits well into the category as me and Amiliyah researched and listened to many podcasts that discuss a similar topic. For example, "Black Girl Film Club" is a podcast by Britney Brinson and Ashley Ayer, two black women who discuss a film they have watched and talk about if it represented black people, particularly black women, or not. Again, this is a very serious subject matter as Brinson and Ayer speak about the hardship and problems the film industry produces when they create a film that lacks representation for black women. This a unique podcast as people have always discussed this issue but to hear it from the perspective of Brinson and Ayer and to understand how it affects them personally is really interesting. This is also a weekly show, where they discuss a different film each week, talk about if they liked it or not and how it represented them. This all, again, shows there needs to be change in the industry on how there is a lack of represent for female minorities. Another great example is the podcast "The Bechdel Cast" where Caitlin Durante and Jamie Loftus also speak about female representation in film, as each week they discuss a film and sees if it can pass all three rules of the Bechdel Test. This is also a very unique podcast as not many people mention or even know about the Bechdel Test, and to learn every week about how it works and is seen or not seen in a film is really interesting and again raises issues as to why this keeps happening in the film industry. So, looking from mine and Amiliyah's podcast compared to the two I have just mentioned, they are serious shows that also keep listeners entertained and aware of this topical issue for women in film. I'd still say "The Fault in Our Films" is very different as we aren't discussing a certain film on our podcast but, the industry on a whole and how all women don't get recognised enough and how they don't have the same chances as the men that dominate it. Again, I think this was great for me and Amiliyah to focus on in our podcast and give listeners insight about how the film industry mistreats women. 

The contribution from both me and Amiliyah was large as we really worked well together when it came to creating and developing our podcast. 

My contribution to the podcast was first coming up with the idea for the podcast. Firstly, me and Amiliyah had many ideas that would've liked to have also done but, we couldn't actually decide which one we wanted to talk the most about, as well as which idea and topic we would be the most passionate speaking about. It was at this point when the Oscars was about to happen and for our courses film production company, Ufilms Productions, we created videos on YouTube for the 2020 series of the Oscars Rundown. For my segment I spoke about sexism at the Oscars, discussing how women are never recognised for their talents which results in them not getting nominated or winning many awards. I was devastated that now, for two years in a row, no women have been nominated in the Best Director, I was especially devastated that Greta Gerwig didn't get nominated in this category for "Little Women". So, whilst doing the research for that project and still thinking about what to do for the podcast, I thought it would be a great idea for me and Amiliyah to speak about this issue in each episode of our podcast (this then became only one episode as we weren't able to record anymore episodes in the following weeks because of the coronavirus outbreak). 

At this point, me and Amiliyah were a little bit bored with having to repeat ourselves about the Oscars again, especially if it was going to be for a whole episode, so we decided we would talk about different issues for women in each episode. I told Amiliyah that we should probably focus on:

1. Gender Inequality in the Film Industry - Huge issue for female filmmakers not being able to showcase their talents and let their voices be heard onscreen. We also wanted to speak about the female filmmakers we love and need to be seen more, as well as talk about women who we look up to and aspire to hopefully be one day.
2. The Bechdel Test - Discussing films that pass and don't pass the test and explaining if it is important towards female representation onscreen.
3. The Representation of Women in Film - How women are represented onscreen, are they natural? Are they good role models? Who writes these characters in film? How much representation is there for women onscreen?

We both discussed together, for Episode #3, whether we would have a guest on the show (the guest being a woman who is working or has worked in the film industry and ask them about their experiences) or spoke about the representation of women in film. This was mostly a contingency plan incase we weren't able to get ahold of a guest. 

I also contributed by getting a lot of research for our project, some of the research being from the Oscars Rundown segment, as well as research I had found for each episode's topic. I had also watched a documentary called "This Changes Everything" that discusses everything about women, on and off screen, in the film industry, talking about the issues of recognition, employment, mistreatment and misrepresentation women face. This mostly focuses around everything in Hollywood but it is still so important as the US makes up 80% of the world's media, with Hollywood being the biggest place for film. I listed down everything from the documentary, which then became mine and Amiliyah's script for our podcast episode.

I also created a Pinterest board (https://pin.it/5qo5Kph) that me and Amiliyah could look back on for more inspiration to do with the information for our podcast, as well as the design of our podcast, as we started to think more about the thumbnail/artwork for when we uploaded out podcast to SoundCloud.

Again, me and Amiliyah did contribute a lot of work to this project as we discussed and agreed on everything together, as well as created out pitch and proposal together. We also came up with the podcast name together "The Fault in Our Films" derived from the novel and film "The Fault in Our Stars". We chose to use this films name to be part of our podcast name as "The Fault" stands for the film industries "Faults" in letting women be able to have freedom when it comes to creating their own work, as well as not allowing them to have equal chances as men. We also thought it would be great to use the title from "The Fault in Our Stars" as the story follows a strong female protagonist named Hazel Grace Lancaster who suffers and lives with terminal thyroid cancer. 

Amiliyah contributed to creating the artwork/thumbnail for our podcast which she created on an app on her iPad. This is a brilliant logo as it definitely shows that it is a podcast because of the picture of the microphone and headphones, as well as having the understanding that it is a podcast by women with the purple and pink colours. The title also clearly states it is a podcast about films (maybe not exactly stating it's more about women in the film industry). 

In the end we only ended up doing one episode because of the outbreak of coronavirus, so we weren't able to record all of our episodes the following week as the college is shut for a while. The episode we did was mostly a mixture of Episode #1 (Gender Inequality in the Film Industry) and #3 (Female Representation in Film), we didn't get onto speaking about the Bechdel Test during our podcast.

I think the podcast recording went really well as it was just me and Amiliyah having a normal and natural conversation whilst also trying to throw in facts and statistics about the problems for women in the film industry. I think the topics we brought up were very good from the lack of nominations for women in certain categories at the Oscars (Best Cinematography and Best Director) to Geena Davis and the Institute she has created (Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media). We also tried to not make the podcast so negative and tried to end it on a much happier not, saying the industry is changing and that it will hopefully change more to benefit all women and also me and Amiliyah for when we, one day, start working in the industry. I would say a downside is that I talked way too much in the podcast, this was mostly because I was nervous and wanted to fill the silence and wasted space of audio with more information that we could potentially use in the podcast, as well as highlighting important and necessary facts, statements and statistics that listeners may find interesting and shocking. Our podcast time came to around thirty-eight minutes long, much longer than the five-fifteen timeframe we have to keep within. This actually wasn't too bad as mine and Amiliyah's actual conversation came to around fifteen-sixteen minutes long, as the extra audio was pauses, slip-ups, discussing what to try and bring up next, as for the beginning of the podcast we were speaking to our teacher about how to project our voice into the microphone as well as how to sound entertaining to listeners. 

When recording the podcast, I think I could have improved on the projection and delivery of my voice, as when I listened back to my own voice (which I don't like anyway) I sounded quite quiet and I felt like I came across as boring. Amiliyah's voice was very powerful and strong, making her statements much more entertaining and interesting to a listener, as well as showing a listener that she understands the topic and issues she is speaking about. If I ever get the chance to do another podcast, possibly in the future, I will make sure to not be so nervous and just act naturally, making my voice much more entertaining for listeners.

As we now only had one episode and are not able to meet up with each other because of the coronavirus, both me and Amiliyah had to each edit our own version of the episode. I think I was mostly worried about this as I had only been on the Adobe Audition software once but once I started to edit the podcast, cutting out audio, as well as cutting it down, piecing audio together, fixing problems with awkwardly fit pieces of audio and adding in sweepers and music, it actually wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. I found the software was very similar to Adobe Premiere Pro, which I have used many times now on previous projects. I felt very comfortable after a few minutes working on the podcast as I then had the hang of how to work the software, as well as getting some help from Amiliyah over the phone. I did have a small issue the day after I started editing the podcast as my laptop had a virus on it, this took a few days to fix, leaving me without a device to be able to work on. Luckily, I let my teacher know about the issue and he was able to help by asking the college if I was able to take one of their computers home. As soon as I got it home and set it up, I was then able to finish the edit. At this point I already had the structure of the podcast laid out on Audition, I now just needed to place sweepers, intro and outro music into the podcast. In the end, I decided not to have background music throughout the podcast as I didn't think it would fit the serious tone of the podcast, as well as distract from the information that we are trying to bring across to listeners. 

I think I did my best with editing the podcast, I kept almost all of our conversation in the podcast. I think I only took out the part where me and Amiliyah started to speak about the recent sentencing of Harvey Weinstein. I know that he has left a huge mark on the film industry because of his horrific allegations and crimes, as well as being a terrible man, but I felt that this was a very mature topic to bring into the podcast that may be inappropriate and sensitive to listeners. I also think my intro and outro music was good, as they both identify our podcast is about film and the music itself is very upbeat, again showing that me and Amiliyah are young and aspiring filmmakers. I also thought the sweepers I added between mine and Amiliyah's discussion were good, as they focused on female filmmakers and positive female representation, as well as making the podcast seem much more professional. The sweepers were great to put in between some of mine and Amiliyah's audio as not all the audio could be cut and then pieced together to create a natural and normal sounding conversation. 

Although I did my best with editing, I think I could improve on the way I edited audio together as a lot of times you could tell when audio was cut out and then pieced to another piece of audio. This doesn't sound great as it can put off a listener as they can then only focus on how strange the conversation sounds, instead of listening to what we are actually speaking about. I also felt like the podcast sounded very rushed as I cut out a lot of the pauses and sounds of breathing, this was mainly to not have wasted time from these huge chunks of silence, as well as the breathing not sounding very nice to listeners when they hear the podcast. 

Altogether, I think both me and Amiliyah did a really great job on the podcast as we both work really well together, especially when we are working together on a topic that is very personal to us and that we are very passionate to speak about. It's a project that I have definitely enjoyed a lot and would love to do something else like this one and possibly even come across in the future.