Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian Podcast Hackathon
At the beginning of this year we read a book about a native american boy named junior and it followed his life on the reservation. To prepare us for the next project we created small podcasts, in groups, from the point of view of one of the characters. This allowed us to dig deeper into the book by basically putting ourselves into this characters shoes, so that we could get an accurate script.
I did the majority of the chapter brain storm, where I just skimmed through the chapters of the book and wrote down everything that I thought the grandmother would have a strong opinion about or was a part of. In reality we didn't end up using a lot of what we had written down but I do think we included the most important parts. I do wish we would have had her speak about what she felt like when Mary ran off to get married because I think she would have had an interesting perspective on the situation.
The character sheet was just an overview of the character we were creating the podcast for. I didn't really do much of it since we were trying to split it evenly, two of us worked on the character sheet and two of us focused more on the chapter brainstorm. I think we followed what we wrote about her behavior pretty well, I wish we would have included things that showed different sides of her rather than focus on one thing, which I think we did.
I personally feel that our script was missing something, maybe like different characters voices every once in a while. I'm still really proud of this because script writing is honestly so hard, especially when you don't relate to the character and are having a hard time putting yourself in their shoes. I wrote a lot of the first scene and edited most of the others. I do wish I would have written more of the script to even out the work a little bit, but it was difficult because it felt like I couldn't do anything, I probably should have asked what I could do. Our script didn't really change much in my opinion, we just added a lot of new details. There was a point however, where we had to figure out a way to add a new voice which was pretty difficult at first. I think we figured it out pretty well, we added grandmothers friend saying hello before the powwow.
My group used to keep organized and to know what we should work on next. We would just have sticky notes with something that had to do with the mini project and stuck them underneath the categories of need to do, in progress, needs critique, and finished.
Recording and editing were hands down the hardest parts of creating our audio diary. We tried to record inside of the teachers office but you could hear the chemistry class in the background and that wouldn't really fit into grandmother spirits story, so we decided to record outside. This was actually a lot more stressful than we expected, there were loud people outside, air planes going over us , cars and motorcycles and everything was very distracting. However we were able to get through it and when it finally got relatively quiet we were able to record our scenes. Editing was incredibly difficult as well, I had no experience in audio editing before and It was a lot to learn in a little time. The program was confusing, but after asking several questions, I finally understood what I was doing so I finished the editing and was so proud of myself. I am glad I tried something new and actually tried even though I didn't know a single thing about it at first.