Tag Archives: planet money

Assessments, Media 1

PB4 inspiration

I happened to download this Planet Money episode on class action lawsuits the week we were choosing topics for PB4, so I listened to it with interest hoping to find formal elements we could borrow for use in our own essay. It turned out that Kat and Emily really liked the format too, so we decided that a Hack/Planet Money style podcast would be the perfect format for our PB4 audio essay.

Specifically, the elements we will be using in our audio essay include vox pops, a host providing context and driving the narrative, interviews with expert speakers, and sound effects/musical cues. With such a short production schedule and limited length our essay will necessarily be less in-depth than this Planet Money episode, but I think it’s still a handy model to try to emulate in limited form.

For the video component, Kat brought to the table a fantastic series of essays by PBS called Idea Channel, which “examines the connections between pop culture, technology and art”. There are dozens and dozens of such videos in the Idea Channel stable, and although they have a very particular style and personality (which we won’t be recreating exactly), some of the broader conceptual ideas on which Idea Channel is based will provide excellent reference for our own work.

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Media 1, Workshops

The elements of a podcast

In our Workshop this week we spent some time listening to the “Sleep” episode of Radiolab, a science/discovery podcast produced by WNYC Studios, and noted down some of the elements that make up narrative audio:

  • Music
  • Narration
  • Interviews / conversations
  • Sound effects
  • Atmosphere / sync sounds
  • Archival recordings
  • Vox pops

Apart from archival recordings and vox pops, the Radiolab episode used every single one of these elements — and in fact, often several were in use simultaneously.

Personally, I’ve tried to listen to Radiolab in the past (because the subject matter interests me), but in general I find their style far too busy and overly constructed to comfortably listen to. Compared to a show like This American Life or Planet Money, which are relatively unadorned and mostly let subjects/interviewees speak in full sentences, Radiolab barely goes a second without using some kind of audio edit, either by the host chiming in to lead the narrative, or an inserted sound effect, music, etc. This cacophony of sounds overwhelms my ears and I lose track of the narrative thread, which is a cardinal sin for documentary podcasts like Radiolab.

This episode of Planet Money, which aired this week, seems by comparison much easier to follow:

It still uses all the same elements as Radiolab (plus vox pops), but they are layered in a far more spacious way so they don’t conflict with one another.

A narrative documentary podcast is one format my group is considering for the audio essay in Project Brief 4, so seeing and dissecting how the professionals do it will help immensely.

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