Tag: Podcasts

Tomorrow’s podcast

Tomorrow I’ll be publishing the first of my series of 4 weekly podcasts!

I’m excited and I want to introduce the guest properly today so that you’re all ready with ears wide open tomorrow.

Carlos Amato (https://www.carlosamato.work/) is a cartoonist, illustrator and writer here in South Africa. Based in Johannesburg, Carlos is one of the foremost commentators on South African sport, politics and the zeitgeist for our times. He also chased his passion in cartoons from a very young age and recently landed a dream job at the Mail & Guardian, taking over from a local legend Jonathan Shapiro as the political cartoonist at the paper.

We talk about a lot, but you’ll get a feel for how he has managed to be true to himself and succeed in a challenging art form and an industry under strain.

I hope you enjoy it.

Podcast? Yes, podcast.

Lately, I have stretched myself and I have learned a lot. When’s the last time you could say that honestly? We tend to get distracted and veer towards the certainty of the mundane, the social media, the salt/sugar/fat, the pleasurable consumption.

This week on Chimpwithcans.com I am releasing my first podcast episode into the big bad world. I created it. I’ll let you all hear it. You can even let me know what you think of it. Just remember – it may not be for you, and that’s alright.

Every Friday I will release an episode. I’ll put one up on http://www.chimpwithcans.com every week for a month (4 episodes).

The internet is a huge all you can eat buffet – make your choices wisely!

Guests

In my early adventures in podcasting, I’ve learned something important: Guests need to be considered.

Guests are very important (obviously), but they don’t automatically know what you want from them. Already I have had guests who thought there would be videos of the chat posted on the internet (only audio btw), and who felt very uncomfortable with the whole idea of being recorded, right up to the point that I bullied them into a room to sit in front of a mic. I was oblivious to this. I thought they all wanted what I wanted and intrinsically knew my intentions – but why would they?

If you are going to interview people, you also need to work hard to line up a roster of interesting people. I have decided to start with a series of 4 interviews – one a week for a month. As a little teaser, let’s play have you ever.

Have you ever:

  • Devoted your life to art and wildlife?
  • Moved from Africa to Scandinavia?
  • Built a cabin in the wilderness?
  • Drawn cartoons for a living?

4 guests, 4 stories. Coming up on chimpwithcans.com

Embedding a track

Continuing with the podcast preparations, I am going to try and embed a Soundcloud track on this blog post.

This blog will be the primary place to go to hear my podcast. Therefore I want to be able to embed tracks so that they are playable without having to leave this site. This involves getting HTML code and pasting it into WordPress. I’ve never done this before, so here it goes with an old track I digitised from an LP a while ago:

Cute song. Radical embedding of audio!

One step closer to my podcast.

Types of podcast

Free form conversations. Structured research pieces. Reviews of products. Scientific discussions. Interviews. Creative stories. I want to create a podcast, but what sort of podcast should it be? I thought about this yesterday – I came up with a quick list of desirable characteristics:

  • I want it to be a long form conversation rather than a formal interview
  • I want it to be a weekly show if possible
  • I want to discuss in depth some ideas and stories that guests can bring with them
  • Topics of interest are as follows:
    • Philosophy
    • Psychology
    • Stories and narratives that affect our lives

After thinking about it for another day – I would stick with what i said, and I would focus on the stories as much as possible. Everyone has a story to tell, and humans relate to each other primarily through stories. Narratives. Archetypes.

I am going pretty well in lining up some guests. There are a few stories to tell already so we’re looking good. It’s an interesting exercise trying to find people to join you in a creative project like this. It forces you to look at your network of people around you, and to think of who might be interesting to listen to. It is the work that you have to go through to produce a series of podcasts. It is more intensive than i thought it would be.

I am already buzzing with my creative pursuit. It is happening alongside my office job career which is going just fine too. But the creativity is food for the soul.

Gimme fuel, gimme fire, gimme that which I desire.

Podcast Plans

One of my goals is to be more creative – specifically I want to create a podcast. So far I have gotten all the equipment, I have created a proof of concept and then a first pilot episode with my friends. These can be found here: https://soundcloud.com/chimpwithcans (you’ll also see some early soundcloud recordings I uploaded as a favour to my mum 🙂 )

All of this was done with the creative process in mind rather than the end goal (ie. wanting to just create SOMETHING, rather than knowing what sort of thing do I want to create). It has been fun. There is a long way to go, though.

Now I am trying to line up some guests for the more formal Chimpwithcans podcast. It is not an easy process and it is making me think more about what the goal of the podcast is. I thought to write down here what exactly I want to achieve from the podcast.

  • I want it to be a long form conversation rather than a formal interview
  • I want it to be a weekly show if possible
  • I want to discuss in depth some ideas and stories that guests can bring with them
  • Topics of interest are as follows:
    • Philosophy
    • Psychology
    • Stories and narratives that affect our lives

It’s broad and will be whittled down. I’m really looking forward to being more creative. I’ll keep updates here as they happen.