I am here with Melissa Lynch, who you all have met before in our conversation about, in the tunnel and we're talking today, because finding the Fuego was really the episode that. Began the process that we use now in terms of episode structure, and specifically in the ways that audio editing and script writing integrate She was helping edit audio for this episode and that was the first reason that I wanted Melissa in this conversation. But the other reason is that Melissa was in our , very first cohort of the Kasama collective. And so she saw more than a year before finding the way go came out.

She saw our process at that point too. The evolution of how we do episodes at shelter in place. Over the course of those 200 episodes. , we have found different points in time where we just found a better, more efficient way to do things.

So I thought that we could talk. First Melissa, about this bigger question of , what do we both feel like the biggest challenges are and episode production for you personally, and I'll speak to this as well. .

So thanks so much for having me on again, Laura, I think one of the biggest challenges for me in episode production is something actually that you talk about a little bit, , which is the messy middle. If you are listening and are not familiar with this term, it really is in the script writing process. When you have a first draft done and you're trying to get it to the final stage and you're thinking, how far can I go? Is this ready? Am I done? Especially with narrative podcasts. And I think part of that is cutting it down, which is a very big challenge. And I know that.

, that goes hand-in-hand with structure in terms of what parts of the story you want to keep, versus what parts do you think are not as necessary? There's a lot of good stuff that happens in interviews, but you have to think about what is essential to the story. And so that's one part of it shaping the script and getting it to that stage of completion.

And I even think that there's a messy middle in audio editing, which is really how far can I go and making the sound as good as possible. So maybe there are edits that are working that you want to do. Maybe there are some that are not working. How much effort should I put to make something into what I wanted to be?

And I think that one of the refrains that I definitely learned at shelter in place is that done is better than perfect. And so that's something definitely that I learned to get me through this messy middle part, but I still find it to be really challenging. What about you,

laura?

I resonate with all of that so much and

an upcoming module that we have in this course is called the messy middle, because I think it deserves a whole module in and of itself. Because I think it is, the most challenging part of this process for me still.

One of the reasons that I was so excited to talk to you, Melissa, is that I think for me, that messy middle for a really long time, there was one particular pain point. That I would just continually come to and I would, I would see it happen for myself. I would say it happened for our trainees. And that was specifically with audio editing. As it integrates with the script. So you have this interview, right? Maybe it's an hour long. In the case of Brianna and this episode, finding the fuego , it was a long interview, normally I would cap interviews at an hour and I would suggest that actually, I think it's a good discipline, but in this case I didn't, .

And so what we ended up with was this , very long conversation, and she had a lot of great things to say. And so trying to get that down to, , a half an hour to an hour, somewhere in that range episode felt so overwhelming even having done this , many times at this point,

If we're talking about 30 minute episode, probably your amount of interview tape is going to be somewhere for our episodes. Anyway, between 11 and 20 minutes, it's not going to be that much time. You don't just want the essential facts you want. A sense of who this person is. That process had always been such a pain point because either, , doing that cut. Right up front would mean we ended up cutting things that later we had to go back and pull back in , or it just would take forever.

, even if we did make all the right cuts, it was very early in the episode production process to be spending that much time on audio editing . So. That process changed , but Melissa, I think it would be helpful for people to hear. What was that audio editing process like when we were, , shelter in place, season two, we're about halfway through the season when you joined the collective and you were just starting to learn how to do this stuff.

When Laura needs started the training program, they had to figure out how are we going to bring people into this process and make this a production team rather than Laura doing most of it by herself. So this was the process in season two, when I joined.

first we had for audio editing, a full pass. So that would mean you put the interview in the script and you would go from top to bottom, taking out all the pauses, making it sound good, taking out anything unnecessary. Basically editing the transcript in descript as if all of it was going to be used in the episode.

And then from there, the descript file would also get pulled into a word document and people would start working in the script. People would start free writing. They'd start choosing parts of the script that they'd want along with the free writing, if there was an interview and really putting. All the pieces together into a first draft, then we would have a script to read through.

Then there would be revisions. Then there was another read through then if a trainee was writing the script, then Laura would take her own pass through it. And then maybe there's another read through. Until you eventually get to a final edit and you record the VO and at the same time, In the audio editing process.

. You've done the full pass through to script. Maybe you've done one or two read throughs. You see what is going to be included in the script. Then you make audio grams at the same time that the script is being created, where you're pulling selections from the script that isn't fully realized yet, but there's still an idea of what is going to happen.

And then you make audio grams From from those selections. And then, , after the VO is created, then all of the pieces are put together from Laura's VO to the interview. And there's also music that's being added so, . Whoever was the assistant sound editor would also help Laura choose music for the episode and then they'd also be put into the doll and then Laura at the end would put everything together, ,

Even as I hear you go through that list, I'm remembering that. There were even points in that process where we started to shift it as we were doing it. And so in the beginning, I think the only audio that made it into de script was the interview.

My voiceover was just something I'd record in the dark. . And then I would sort of piece together. Once I got done with that cleaning. , . We know which sections we're going to use. We'll export that out of de script, put it into a doll, have it be in its own track and have my voice ever be in the other track. And then at some point in that process, we realized actually we can import my voice over recording into D script as well.

And that actually speeds up that process of editing a little bit. So, , we've got one composition that has the voiceover, we've got another composition that has the interview tape, and then we have a third composition which was compiling the episode in D script.

So we could actually copy and paste from my voiceover and from the interview tape and piece that together. Now I will say that part is one that I still go back and forth on a little bit, because when you have remote interviews and you have two different room tones, it's advantageous to have your voiceover in one track and any interview tape, each voice on its own track in the dot and the final mix.

I've tried it both ways, going back and forth of keeping them separate and do script versus keeping them together. And I found that actually, it's still easier when I build it in the door for the final mix to have that compiled. At full episode that has my voice and whatever voices. And then put them on their own tracks and the dot, , I don't know, I may evolve beyond that at some point, but at this point in time, I still find that process to be a pretty quick one, because if I have already laid it out in de script and everything, the spacing is there and all the timing is right.

It's a pretty quick thing to splice those tracks in between voices. And move them on the separate tracks. And then I can do whatever I need to, , , noise reduction or, , if I needed to play with the IQ for one of the voices or something like that,

I want to jump in here and say, yes, that happened in the last episode that I did for my part of the training program. But that's the advantage of using a program like Descript? Versus a dot and that indescript, you can actually see all of the words that are being presented to you. And it's so much easier doing the arrangement than it is an, a dog where you just have wave forms to work with.

Exactly. So let's talk about. Where we went from there and, and what changed and finding the fuego so , maybe you can just talk about what was that conversation like that we had when we kind of made the decision that we were gonna let that process evolve a little bit further?

Yes. So this plays into structure and cutting down an episode and how to choose what you want that structure to be and how to choose what to key versus what not to keep.

And this was. Life changing. I use this practice in my own podcast where today, but Laura sends me a Voxer and she says that she has a new way of structuring the scripts. And so beforehand, We would have the script in a Google doc, Laura would, , scroll up and down the script, read all the pars, try to make the parts, make sense with each other, rearrange things, cut things out.

And what she started to incorporate into the production process is basically a short hand to structure, which is this post-it note exercise. So what she would do is. She would take each part of the script. And for every part that is kind of a thematic part, that, that it can be grouped together. She would have a posted note with a heading that reflected what that section of the script was about.

And he would go down the script. And make a post-it note for each section and write it out. And then you have all these post-it notes with all of the sections of the script. And that is so much easier to visualize where you can say, okay, this section seems like it can go with this section.

And after arranging all of these. This one doesn't even make sense anymore. And so I think it's a great visual, tactile tool to be able to move things around with your hands in a way that you can not do in an online

document.

Yeah. And I just want to say a little more about that because one of the things you'll see in this module is you'll see my post-it notes.

I've included some images and I. Took a picture of the actual post-it notes. So the process that we went through here, was the first thing that we did , was upload that audio file from, , Audriana's interview , uploaded that to de script transcribed. It automatically.

And then Melissa, I think at that point you did do some visual edits. Where you went in and you said, okay, we know we're not gonna use Laura's voice for this. So you just went in and you cut out any place where the wave form was really tiny because we knew that that was where I was speaking and asking the questions and then any chit chat at the beginning

so that was a pretty quick visual edit. And then , once we had, , basically anything and everything that we might use, oh. And taking the ums and UHS, that was the other thing that we always do right up front, even before taking out those spaces, when I upload a file, I'll just do, edit, . Remove filler words. Accept all with a click of a button. And then at that point that's when, you did the visual edits from that point, , and this is where the process changed. I copied that entire transcript from Descript.

I pasted it into a Google doc. So I had just one big messy, , automatically transcribed script. And then I went through in that document and I, chose a

different color of text and I made a heading, like Adrianna leaves venezuela, , that would be a heading in a section where she talks about that.

And I would try to just look at that entire document and any time the topic changed, I would put a new heading and then all of those headings were what my post-it notes were. So I took those headings. I made a post-it note for each of them. I put them up on the wall in the order that they happened.

And then the very next thing that I did, and you'll see this in one of the images that I included. Before I reordered anything, I looked for, what is the central conflict of this episode? And, any good story we'll have more than one central conflict.

You look at the post-it notes and you can see, there are a lot of ways we could have taken this episode. There are many, many things that Adrianna talks about that could have been the central conflict of the episode. If we'd shaped it that way. And so what I did is I identified with the orange post-it notes that you see in that image, anything that was conflict or created tension that maybe could be our central conflict, , any moment where this character has been thrown out of balance.

Something in her life has happened to throw her out of balance. And then from those orange post-it notes, those moments of tension, I really tried to look at the whole thing and say, if I had to pick just one thing. That this episode was going to be centered around one conflict. What would it be? And what's that one conflict that all of these other moments of tension can kind of follow from.

And in this episode it really became that the central conflict that I saw, was Adrianna, really embracing who she was. And getting comfortable with herself, both as an artist and as a dancer and, , that included body image stuff and all of that.

Then the next step after that was , how can we move these post-it notes around, , looking at them first in the order that they actually happened and then trying to figure out how do we reorder them so that the conflict is pretty close to the front, and then it follows from there. These moments of tension that will keep us interested all the way to the resolution at the end, which is her, , coming into her own dancing in this business that she now has called making waves studios, and just all that that's meant for her, both as a business owner, dance instructor, and as an artist. The other part of that post-it note exercise that was really helpful. And that was new for me, honestly. And the way that I thought about structure was noticing categories. So, , storytelling, most of us are not linear storytellers unless we're making an,, intention to do it that way.

If we're really planning it out, we might be. But the way we typically talk to people in conversation, Is more cyclical. It's almost more like a spiral where you might come back around to the same ideas again and again, but it might take you a little while to get to the conflict. And that definitely happened.

You can see that in the original order of how the conversation played out, that there were a lot of different categories that she kept circling back to. And once I could see them with the post-it notes, I could group those things together. And then that helped to know, . When we got to the point where we'd kind of reordered those sayings, we'd looked at categories.

, in some cases I collapsed categories. So you'll see if you look at that first picture of the post-it notes that I took, versus the image on the screen where I actually, , have little graphics for them. There are a lot more post-it notes originally than what I ended up with in that kind of graphic.

Version of the post-it note exercise. So I could break it down by category. I could reorder the categories and then once I had my order and I knew what my conflict was, I knew what my resolution was. I knew the key moments of tension that I wanted to move through. It was just a matter of making sure that I ordered my script and that same way, , since I had those color coded titles to signify each post-it note.

And again, this is without ever putting headphones on, this is all just visual. . I could reorder that not only in my script, but in D script as well. And then it started to emerge from there. I could see, okay, now that I know what order this is happening in, where are the places in here where I need voice over to connect these pieces together and make it feel like a natural progression rather than just , random blocks of. tape being pasted together.

Yes. And I want to jump on that visual aspect and say that also for the audio editing, Laura challenged me to not even have headphones on myself when I was doing the visual editing and descript. So I would go through and just look at the way form, look at the text on the script and make these big sweeping cuts and that really challenged me to do things very quickly and that, convinced me that that part of the production process could be done faster than I expected it to in that not listening to the words, I didn't get distracted by wanting to make every single little edit that I could and really, , working fast or the production process.

This is a point that can't be emphasized enough that you're going to have to put headphones on and listen from beginning to end. At some point , I would never ever recommend that somebody publish an episode without doing that. But I think as I've learned to build this kind of structure into episode production, I've gotten to that point with the headphones later in, later in the process.

And I found that if I can do as much as possible, the way you're talking about Melissa, where I'm just making visual edits, I'm trying to. Set a timer and push myself to work fast through those visual edits, knowing that, , the nice thing about de script is you can always pull things back in if you need to.

And sometimes I'll make a copy of the uncut interview just in case I cut a little too much and I need to go back and pull something back in. But those visual edits. You can push yourself to do that very, very quickly.

Versus if you're putting your headphones on the second, you upload that file into de script or put it in your Dar or whatever you're working in, , you can spend dozens of hours , just cleaning up tape. And again, I do think it's important to do that at the final point, when you're getting ready to publish your episode and you're bringing it into the door and you want to make sure everything sounds right.

The last thing that I do in D script is once that episode is compiled, I put on my headphones, I listen from start to finish, and that is a very puttsy tedious process , because I'm not just cleaning up the interview tape. But I'm making sure that all of the spaces are where I want them to be.

You If there needs to be a beat in between something, say Adrianna says, and then when my voice ever comes in, or if I need to space out some of her really fast talking to give the listener a chance to catch up with things, that's where I'm doing it at that point in D script. And I'm not exporting from D script until the timing is right on all of that stuff.

And until I've taken out all of the. , audible breaths, all of the lip smacking and, , noises, I don't want in that tape. So that is a very slow process. And then I'll listen to it again in the door , once I put in music , , just to make sure that beginning to end everything is exactly how I want it.

And we'll get into that more in the sound design module, but I do want to emphasize that the more you can do upfront. With those quick visual edits, the more you'll be able to just reduce the overall time that you spend on an episode, because there are some parts of it.

You're just not going to speed up. \

I agree. This ties into the crappy first draft quote unquote, in that you want to focus less on the small details and spending hours to get it to sound good before the script is even ready. And I think through this new process, We saved a lot of time, not fixing things that we are just not going to use.

So I think that the first audio pass can be done quickly. I definitely think that this post-it note exercise can give you a mental shortcut to do these visual edits and I've incorporated. A lot of this into my own podcast practice, because as much as I want the work to be good, I also don't want to have that feeling of being stuck as well.

And I'm glad you brought up scriptwriting. Cause I think it's worth saying, even though this isn't a script-writing module and , , we've talked about that elsewhere and we will continue to talk about it that as you're writing, , especially if you're writing voiceover, that is.

Either interspersed in the interview, the way that our episodes have them, or even just that's in the front of the episode, introducing the interview or in the credits or whatever it is trying to just get something down fast and letting it be okay that it's not perfect upfront can get you a long way to getting that episode where it needs to be.

I can't emphasize enough. Set a timer. , I used Pomodoro timers a lot where they're 25 minute timers. That give you five minute breaks in between. When I'm working on a new script or when I'm doing the visual edits, or if I'm doing this post-it note exercise, I will set that parameter.

And I will work as fast as I can for 25 minutes. And I won't worry if it's not good because I have time to get it better through that process. But in the beginning, you just want to put that structure together and you want to get the order of your post-it notes. You want to figure out, , just something as a placeholder for your voiceover.

So you have something there it's so much easier than once you have that to go back and then really Polish up the language and, , whatever you need to do to make it great. You can do that later. But again, the more that you can push yourself to work fast in the beginning, the quicker that you're going to have the episode come together and be able to get to the point where you have something that you can really see the whole narrative arc, you can see it come together and you start to really get a vision for , this is what's going to make this episode great.