Important: You may work on Creative Project 3 in teams of up to 3 people, if you so desire. Sometimes podcasts are nicer when they’re a conversation. If you want to do that, reach out to me for additional training about how to record a conversation between multiple people.
Podcasting is at once very easy and very hard. It doesn’t take a lot of skill to just talk into a mic, but it does take a lot of skill to craft a story that people actually want to listen to.
Podcasting starts with paper and pencil, believe it or not–getting your plan ready is the first step to a great podcast. Here’s your brief for Creative Project 3:
- Record and produce a podcast telling one story about your topic. In other words, I don’t want just an audio version of a timeline, or an encyclopedia—tell me a story.
- Your podcast should be 7-8 minutes long.
- You should reference at least two primary sources (like the ones you collected for Base Project 3) and two secondary sources (like the ones you collected for Base Project 2).
- You do not NEED to include music, but if you want to, you can. (More on that down below.)
- Embed your audio in a WordPress post—you should be able to do this without first uploading to an audio hosting service, but if you really want to put it out on an audio hosting service (like SoundCloud, anchor.fm, etc.), PodBean is a good option because there’s a free version.
- Also in your blog post, write about the challenges you overcame in creating this podcast and the potential challenges of doing podcasting for history in general.
- Submit to our Creative Projects submission form.
HOW TO MAKE A PODCAST
You need a few supplies:
- A decent mic and headphones; believe it or not, one of the best ways to get good audio without an external microphone (like ones you see in studios) is to use your phone’s voice memos app and talk into your phone like you’re having a normal phone conversation with the phone to your ear.
- Audacity
- A good script
Watch this video to learn how to write a good script:
The nice thing about audio is that if you mess up part of what you’re saying, it’s pretty easy to fix without re-recording your entire bit. To do that, you need to use an audio editor like Audacity. (If you’re already familiar with another digital audio workstation, feel free to use that instead.)
Audacity or audio workstations also allow you to include music and sound effects, if you wish to. Here’s a tutorial about Audacity:
A brief word about music: I do encourage you to use music! HOWEVER, you may not use music that is copyrighted! This includes pretty much every song you could sing or hum a particular version of. Even if the song itself isn’t in copyright, each artist’s version of it is copyrightable on its own. You may not use this. But there is public domain music out there (same with sound effects)!
The best place to find royalty-free public-domain music is the Free Music Archive. But know before you include: the licensing for each piece on this site is individual. You’re using it for non-commercial use, so you shouldn’t need to pay anything to the creator, but make sure you take note of whether the license asks for attribution (that’s saying the artist’s name in the credits or somewhere).
For sound effects, the same deal applies–make sure you take note of whether you need to attribute your sounds or not! The best place to get free sounds is FreeSound.
