Quick guide to audio file management and naming conventions
I once asked a group of about eight audio makers about file management and the conversation almost ended in a
How David Stuart turned a YouTube series into a podcast
Note from Mike: We love to pigeon hole ourselves in media; ‘I’m a print person’, or ‘I do video’, or ‘audio is my thing’, etc. It makes life a whole lot easier when we sell ourselves to the world. But the truth is that most media projects, whether they be volunteer or for a major company, demand a breadth of skills. The good news is that a lot of skills are transferrable — probably more than you think. We hold ourselves back sometimes only because we’d chosen to box ourselves in. I was impressed at David and his brother’s attitude to jump mediums when they realised their story could be suited to podcast. It’s a solid example of how taking a leap and moving fast can open us up to a whole new audience. If you see yourself as an audio person specifically I’d be reading this asking, what new ways could I work with visuals?
Guest post by David Stuart.
My younger brother and I love our ‘brojects’ (yes, brothers doing projects = brojects).
Since the late nineties Joe and I have created a photo-frame production operation, a zine, an unpublished children’s book and countless videos.
He works as a graphic designer and I’m a video journalist so it’s no surprise that the majority of our brojects tend to be visual.
Some recent brojects include a skatepark etiquette guide and a challenge that saw us ride around Mount Fuji on ridiculously unsuitable bicycles.
Our latest broject was a YouTube series that we started earlier this year. It’s called The Kama and Blowy Show — based on our nicknames from 25-plus years ago.
Joe lives in Melbourne and I’ve just relocated to a small city called Shibushi in rural Japan. Although we were keen to create something together, being physically separated seemed to stand in our way.
But, as the overused saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention.
“Hey Dave, why don’t we record a phone conversation? We could take our cameras out for a walk and then combine the footage into one video afterwards,” said my brother.
I said I’d be happy to do it as long as he edited it.
“Yep, no problem,” he told me.
But somehow I edited the second episode and I’ve edited all of the even-numbered episodes since.
We created a new YouTube channel and we’ve published a half-hour episode without fail every Saturday morning.
We choose a story from our past, like getting malaria in Vanuatu or being the victim of a well-executed scam in Bali and discuss it at length, interrupting each other if we come across something interesting.
The speaker is shown on screen while the listener is shown in a smaller inset frame in the top right corner.
It’s a simple format that works. It’s easy but time consuming to edit.
We even got a mate’s punk band to create a catchy little theme song for our intro.
Best create a Twitter account… oh, Instagram too… and can’t forget a Facebook page either!
Our analytics paint a modest picture so it’s certainly not successful from a commercial perspective, but at the very least I’m happy to have a digital time capsule of chats with my brother.
Eight episodes into the YouTube series and Joe had a brainwave, “Why don’t we also release this as an audio podcast?”
Technically, creating an audio file from the 30-minute video is simple enough.
We’re also describing what we see to each other as we walk so that courtesy would automatically extend to any listeners.
Our audio quality game would need to improve though, especially mine. I was relying solely on the GoPro’s internal mic and my booming voice.
Releasing The Kama and Blowy Show as a podcast certainly made sense but I wasn’t keen on paying for any hosting and just thinking about distributing it to multiple platforms gave me a headache.
Video has been easy enough to upload to distribute to mass audiences at no cost since the late noughties, but it’s been a lot more involved to upload and share audio content in a similar way.
“Have you heard of Anchor?” he asked me.
The seafaring term I knew, but not the podcasting platform.
So I did some research and learned that there was a free platform that would take care of distributing the podcast to all the different platforms like Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts and all these others that I’d never heard of.
The decision was made and we haven’t looked back since. Distributing the podcast is intuitive and complete, unlike my experience distributing podcasts at my last full-time job.
To celebrate double digits we invited a friend on to the tenth episode and talked to him about the skateboard company he is creating.
The end product was encouraging, but Joe and I often asked questions at the same time and having another video clip in the mix definitely made the edit more finicky.
We’ve just recorded our sixteenth episode with our third guest and we’re keen to invite more guests onto the show.
Promotional activities will be ramped up once we hit episode 20 — we reason that we’ll have found our voice and ironed out any wrinkles by then and we’ll also have a nice back catalogue to offer new listeners.
How far are we going to take this? It’s hard to say but we’re not showing any signs of slowing down. We’ve still got a lot of stories to share and many guests to feature.
If you’re reading this you may be able to one-day say that you knew about The Kama and Blowy Show before it was cool.
Have a listen to the the Kama and Blowy show.
