The Podcast Hackathon was a mini project we completed in response to reading the book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Were faced with the challenge of creating a short podcast from the perspective of a character from the book in only three days. This allowed us to focus on a specific themes in the book that were relevant to our character by bringing them to life in our podcast. We also learned the fundamentals about making a podcast, from writing the script to editing the final product.
My groups character was Grandma Spirit, the main character, Arnold's spunky and greatly loved grandma.
My groups character was Grandma Spirit, the main character, Arnold's spunky and greatly loved grandma.
Chapter brainstorm
Our Chapter Brainstorm was a tool that we used to study our character, their thoughts and actions. We divided a lot of the work during this stage because of our deadline, so I worked more on the Character Development sheet. Some of the main themes we found through this sheet were Grandma Spirit feeling proud of her grandson and also her values.
Character Analysis Sheet
The Character Analysis Sheet was used to asses the different aspects of our character and how we could put them in our podcast. I focused a lot on how Arnold described her and how much he loved her. He also described her as a very tolerant and loving woman and we tried to embody that in our podcast by talking about her travels and her open mindedness. I completed most of this document while my team members were working on other tasks.
Our Script
To write our script we started with a few rough ideas of what we wanted our scenes to portray and then expanded them into full dialogues and scenes. We took multiple excerpts from the book and added them. I did a lot of the physical writing of how things would be worded while my group mates came up with main ideas. Since this project was time sensitive, we didn't get to critique the script as much as I hoped. We tried to record a lot of the podcast at school but we constantly ran into the issue of background noise.
Scrum Board
Final Product
Our final product was a 5 minute podcast from the perspective of Grandma Spirit.
Cast the roles were pretty simple everyone in my group was willing to compromise and had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted our podcast to be. We used a program called Audacity to record and edit the podcast. Recording it was a bit more time consuming than we expected. Since we were recording at school it was not easy to find a place with little background noise. We ended up breaking up the recordings and asking each group member to do part of their recordings in a quite place at home. Getting familiarized with the editing program and cutting the clips into exactly what we wanted took longer than we thought. With lots of hard work we were able to finish writing, recording, and editing our podcast.
Cast the roles were pretty simple everyone in my group was willing to compromise and had a pretty clear idea of what we wanted our podcast to be. We used a program called Audacity to record and edit the podcast. Recording it was a bit more time consuming than we expected. Since we were recording at school it was not easy to find a place with little background noise. We ended up breaking up the recordings and asking each group member to do part of their recordings in a quite place at home. Getting familiarized with the editing program and cutting the clips into exactly what we wanted took longer than we thought. With lots of hard work we were able to finish writing, recording, and editing our podcast.