BTS Ep 02. What Our Week (actually) Looks Like as Part Time Creatives

Friday January 12, 2024

Our planned schedule looks a little bit like this:

Weekly every Monday – New episode released at 7:00 am MST / 11:30 PM ACST

During the week – One of us takes on editing the long form audio + video edits for youtube & spotify. While the other works on the short form content for our socials. This has been working so well, as it helps break up the tasks quite nicely!

Alternating Fridays – We bulk record 2 future episodes. And we alternate who is the host of each episode as well. At first we thought about bulk recording 3 episodes in one day, but a 30 minute episode actually takes a lot longer to record and prepare for than we thought! So in order to stay energized during our chats, we decided to keep it to 2 episode recordings.

Preparation is Key

I spent all night yesterday working on prepping for the recording of our future episodes. There’s a lot of thought and preparation behind the recording of a podcast. First we pick a topic or idea to chat about. Then to ensure we have a good flow for our listeners, we think about what specific themes we want to be chatting about in the episode. We were never scripted in any of our conversations, but it helps to have an outline of what the episode will be about and an understanding of what value we want to be providing. I feel that we were really natural in our conversations and just allowed our own personalities come through in our dialogues!

With that being said, because I’m not a wing it type of person, I do like to intensely prepare for the recording phase. Like preparing for an interview, I at least want to have an idea of what it is that I want to share. That way in the moment, when feeling a bit under pressure, I at least have a few ideas to draw from if my mind suddenly goes blank or if I end up losing concentration. When you get into a state of nervousness, or have anxiety while doing public speaking, you can get a bit of a creative block and won’t be able to effectively access the executive functioning area of your brain – the ability to analyze, organize, plan and execute. My being prepared, I can feel my best in my delivery even when I falter.

This week has pushed my organizational skills to the test. I stayed up really late (12:30am) working on the preparation of the podcast, waking up this morning at 6am to finish up and further prepare for the day. We recorded 2 more episodes starting at 8:30 am and wrapping up at 1:30 pm! Watch our for our future episodes where we chat about Australian + Canadian cultures (ep. 03) and our personal wellness routines (ep. 04).

Now that the bulk of the recording day was finished, I chose one task to focus on on, which is, finish the Monday episode – Balancing Life and Content Creation.

Saturday January 13, 2024

I worked pretty much into the night getting the clips ready for the podcast (1:00 am … who am I?! I think Jay’s night own routine has rubbed off on me). I woke up at 9 am for some final edits, rewatching it again (and again) while cleaning up the home to ensure the audio sounds good. I added into + outro music and then sent the draft off to Jay by 11:00 am.

Sunday January 14, 2024

Technical Difficulties

Jay loved the video and there were only some minor edits which I revised really quickly this morning. I then added the finishing touches to it which was: adding subtitles. Adding subtitles in Premier Pro is quite easy, there is an auto-transcribe function and it was about 90% accurate to the voice overs. I went through the video again and change a couple words here and there so that the transcription was 100% accurate.

Then this is where the trouble came in… and it all went downhill for me.

When going to change the subtitle font, the program crashed. And then no matter what I did to get back to it, it would crash again. I did the adobe fixes that it suggested, researched forums online to understand how I could get back to my working document, but the struggle was real.

Luckily I had many auto saves of the project prior to the addition of subtitles. This allowed me to reopen a working file of before I added subtitles. But I had to redo some edits all over again. This lesson has taught me:

Auto backups of your adobe work projects are crucial.
Perfection can be your enemy. Export a version of your product even when it is 95% complete. Often times, this version is good enough and at least you’ll have something incase your working project crashes.
Ensure you have disc space and clean up your storage. Exporting in 4K takes up a lot of GB. During this process, I realized I had no more room on my mac for the 4K export. I wonder if that was why my document crashed in the first place. But I ended up taking a lot of time in my day to clean up my mac.
Trying to fix a critical issue can cause a lot of stress and frustration. Take breaks and step away from the problem so you can come back refreshed to solving it.

I finally got it exported at 10 pm. As I learn from these mistakes, I’ve learnt that there are some important fail safes when working on large project like this. When the inevitable happens, make sure you have backups throughout your editing process.

Monday January 15, 2024 – Launch day

Today is the launch of the second episode of the podcast!! I can’t believe it! I’m overwhelmed by this incredible experience. I can’t believe a stranger on the internet asked me to create a podcast and I said yes?! I haven’t pushed myself this hard on a project that I care about in so long. It’s not even really about the podcast, its about creating something from your imagination and bringing it to life. And I want to do more of this.