S3:E17 // what the adventure can teach us
JANUARY 13, 2022
Episode description: What can you learn about life when working with your spouse?
Laura’s first two resolutions for 2022 — playfulness and creative solutions to work — are the frame for this reflection on what we learned making the last episode. In this chat between Laura and Nate, we dig into the value of conflict, letting go of ego, and the value of timers and taking breaks.
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Laura: I love making new year's resolutions, because even if I don't manage to stick with every one, it makes me feel better to find tangible ways to move forward, toward the person that I want. And the life that I'd like to live
So this past week, I finally did make some resolutions. I realized that I probably needed them. When I looked at my journal those first few days of January and realized that I'd gotten the date wrong without fail every single day.
A side note here that my journaling practice is one of the few resolutions that I have actually managed to continue. It's a gratitude journaling practice that I learned from my friend Patrick Vaughn, who learned it from his neuropsychologist after he got into a bike accident and had to learn to live with a traumatic brain injury. You can hear about that conversation way back in season one in an episode called help. But back to those resolutions, when I glanced back at all of my January, 2022 entries in that gratitude journal, I saw that not only did I put the date as 20, 21, a common mistake that I often make this time of year, but I'd even gotten the month wrong, my brain, apparently still thinks that it's December. I was writing 12 instead of one for the month and 21 instead of 22 for the year.
It was at that point that I realized my resolutions needed to be different than the ones I've made in the past. Not the usual, I'm going to be in the best shape of my life or eat less sugar, but the kind of resolutions that could actually give me what I need rest and relief from what has felt like an increasingly frenetic pace of life.
My first resolution is to play more. I like to play, but I'm not that good at it. I find it much easier to work. But I want to change that in 2022, I found that when I let myself be silly and carve out time for laughter, I'm able to approach the hard moments of life with a lot more grace.
My second resolution is to find creative solutions when the work piles up, not just a solution that involves me working. As an entrepreneur and weekly podcaster and director of our Kasama collective training and mentorship program, and a mom of three kids, the work is always piling up. Often in the past, my response to this was just to work more, to get up earlier or stay up late.
But my general exhaustion coming into 2022 is proof to me that there need to be creative solutions to the work that actually give me relief from it, not just more of it.
I have other resolutions to snuggle with my kids. Mar take a walk with my husband, Nate, every day, let Sundays be true. Rest.
But those first two resolutions, playfulness and creative solutions to work, or the umbrella over all of the rest, which is a decent introduction to today's episode. which is My first attempt to implement these resolutions. One of the components of our Kasama labs course is that we share a real-time observations in the wake of creating our episodes.
And so today we're going to share with you one of those conversations about last week's episode, which was called choose your own audio adventure, and was the most fun that we've had in a long time even though Nate and I were putting it together in a week, when we were feeling very worn out by life, it's an episode we created, because we needed to have fun.
Before we get to that, if you're a podcaster who wants to master the art and science of narrative podcasting, or you're brand new to podcasting, and you want to learn how to create a podcast from scratch, make sure to head to our website shelter in place podcasts.
To sign up for our Kasama labs. There's just one week left to get our early bird price. And the self-paced online course starts in February. Here's our reflections conversation on choosing your own audio adventure.
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One of the questions that we address in this episode, choose your own audio adventure, which we address in every episode. Is why create, It's one of these questions that's deceptively simple, but it can tell you a lot, not just about your reasons for doing your project, but where you're headed.
In the beginning, we were creating this episode. Because I wanted to take people inside our production process in a way that was fun, that really showed them the intricacies of it, and gave them a preview of what they could expect if they were thinking about the Kasama labs.
What ended up in the outtake is kind of where we started . And. Ultimately that question, why we create my answer for it was the same one that we get to in this, hypothetical character, in this episode, we're creating because we want to have fun
And that was something that I didn't realize when I started this, but it was something that I came to an ended up actually changing all of the decisions from that point forward, from the way the script was written to the sound design, to the energy we were bringing to it,
We were coming into 20, 22, very tired. And feeling like we needed relief from just the constant onslaught of work. We just needed to be playful about it.
Nate: We had started off this episode with the idea that we would go in sort of a numerical list, through the. Different major aspects of creating a podcast episode but then as Laura and I started collaborating the choose your own adventure idea came up and I could tell how much fun she was having and I realized, okay, this is now going to turn into something different. That was hard because I realized my draft, most of those words were never going to see the light of day.
But they ended up being the springboard that she was able to jump off, to get to this second draft, which flowed really easily. Sometimes you have to be prepared to let go of that idea that you initially had and sometimes it will happen with a collaborator or sometimes even working on a project by yourself where you put a lot of work in and then realize, oh wait, this will actually be better if it's something else.
Sometimes the only way to get to the final product is to put in a bunch of work and then realize that it's going to go in a different direction.
I think this is a really important point because There are these points in the creative process where you think you're headed in a certain direction, and especially when you're working with the partner or with a team, and you have multiple people in the script writing process, you might start off with actually like a pretty good first draft.
That first draft was him writing through these different points of kind of our creative ethos with sound design and, , interviews and script writing.
And it was very good. And I think we'll probably use that information somewhere else, but it was that question of why create and that realization that this episode was really just calling for some playfulness. It takes seeing those ideas and sometimes pages and pages of writing to get the next idea.
Something that I've noticed again and again, is when people start to get territorial about their work, it gets very, very hard to move through the creative process at that point.
And you're not really collaborating when that happens. Like at the point that that happens. You basically either have to say, okay, we're going to push through this and figure it out. Or maybe we just kind of do like a, you do your part. I do my part. Let's see where we end up.
In this case, Nate's draft mostly didn't see the light of the day. But that didn't mean it wasn't essential. It was actually the thing that helped us to get to where we needed to be. And that process is actually incredibly fun. If you can embrace that part of the process as a really necessary part of scriptwriting, It actually ends up being quite fun. Like it's actually my favorite part of the creative process. When I get to that point with somebody where we start asking those questions and we're both open that is so fun. It's invigorating, it's exciting. It's this sort of electric energy that you feel. Feeding off of each other, and being like, well, what about this? But what about this? And what if we went here and that's where the real energy starts to come in the episode.
I think it's important to acknowledge that moment can be very touchy. If you can let your ego go long enough to realize that it's actually a really necessary part of the creative process. It can be one of the most fun parts of this whole thing.
Nate: Sometimes the best thing you can do for the creative process is to take a break and that can be. Because you're stuck or in the case of this afternoon, cause you were about to start throwing houseplants because we were so angry at each other.
And then I went to the grocery store, Laura talked to a friend and then eventually we were able to come back together. And now here we are in a much better frame of mind. Able to talk about this. It is one more example of how there's a rhythm to the process. In this case, it can be, coming together and then stepping apart or sitting down and focusing, and then going and thinking about something else.
It's especially true, the more you share with people, the closer you get to the. The harder, it can be not to rub each other the wrong way. And yet if you're able to work through that and as Laura just noted, put aside the ego for a little while and be able to let go, then ultimately the work can really be better coming out the other side.
The other thing you reminded me of today was this:
Creative differences are actually okay.
Like that creative conflict. It's not fun at the time. Conduct doesn't feel fun, but it does move things along. And that is also true in the creative process. Just like it, isn't a great story. I can deal with conflict, but I really don't like it. So when I have a conflict with somebody, my instinct is to see it as a really bad thing. But actually that conflict it's often a very necessary part of the creative process and it's a necessary part of life.
Sometimes we need conflict to tell us, Hey, you need to do something different here. The thing you're doing the way you're doing it, isn't working. You need to have this hard conversation. You need to change your rhythms . A lot of times, those conflicts are really a clue that we need to do something differently. And sometimes it is just take a break
on the note of kind of rhythms, one of the crucial things that we did in this episode, That was so, so helpful that we actually hadn't done quite in this way before was to block out our time.
So that we were working on similar tasks at the same time. We we use Palm at our timers a lot, which are 25 minute timers that give you a series of five minute breaks and then 15 minute breaks in between there. I love this app and this practice because it not only forces me to focus on one task for 25 minutes, but it prompts me to rest and to take a break and to go get a snack or go to the bathroom or go for a walk around the block or whatever it is, which I think is actually probably just as important, if not more important than that work time.
I've been using those timers for a very long time. It's something I often recommend to our trainees and our Kasama collective program and in our Kasama labs. But we actually tried this week, something new, which was starting Monday morning, we went for a walk in the morning, which is a rhythm we've developed.
Instead of meeting, we go for a walk and we talk about work and what we're going to do that day. Sometimes it's really short. Sometimes it's a little longer like half an hour, but we found that to be a good rhythm to set up our Workday. And then we got back to the shed, and we set the 25 minute timer and we both worked in the same Google doc, different parts, but we both worked in it together for that 25.
Then we paused for five minutes, chatted about it a little bit, came back and did it again. And we were in that rhythm, I think for Monday, Tuesday, and most of Wednesday. And I have not felt that productive creatively in quite a long time. It was really energizing to know that Nate was working on it at the same time as me, I felt extremely accountable to stay on task.
And mostly, I just found this 25 minutes flew by. It was, it was easy to do the work because I knew there was somebody else there in it with me. And there was kind of some comfort in that. So it's a brand new thing that we've tried and I think we'll probably do it again because it worked so well. It's something that I'm really thinking about. And as I think about 20, 22, how I want to work better and smarter, I think, especially if you're working with a partner or a team trying to set up those times, those work sessions where you're not only doing the work and kind of holding yourself accountable to staying focused,
Nate: My final observation from this episode was the power of music to create different moods because you say, choose your own adventure. And that suggests something kind of suspenseful, a journey or exploration.
And we had a number of tracks that contributed to that, but whether it was. The dogs barking, which added a humorous element or creaky doors opening and closing, which made it seem a little scarier or the footsteps going down the hall to create a sense of dimensionality, or then the more kind of Zen music at a sort of climactic point and everything from the cheesy laundry detergent, commercial track, which we put in as a joke to the casual jazz music. It really underscored the way that music can create a richness and. Mental picture and either reinforce or convey the opposite mood of what the script might be saying.
And another little side note on that is that I put 30 or 35 tracks in the folder on story blocks. And some of those still weren't even exactly right. Laura found a few more, but. It was, it was a fun exercise in conveying different moods within a script that was unified around a single idea. So thanks. And we'll look forward to talking again next week.
Coming back to that first thing that I said about why create and how this episode, I realized at some point. What I really wanted, why I was grading. I wanted listeners to have the same kind of fun that I was having
there were a lot of tracks in this episode that I normally would not have used from used in episodes of shelter in place. If I were really sarcastic and witty and cutting, I could get away with the sort of heartfelt piano or the Synthi emotional movie kind of music. But because I am a pretty earnest person. The wrong music can make what we're doing, seem super cheesy. So, I think I'm allergic to anything that feels even remotely cheesy. However, for this episode, I just let myself go full tilt, cheesy, full tilt, dramatic.
It was fun to just give myself permission to do whatever off the wall music and sound effects, choices that I wanted that felt right for that moment. One of my favorite moments in this episode is when. The protagonist goes, they're in this cave and they see what looks like a wine rack with all these corks and these bottles that they can very easily pull out and put in.
And each time they pull out a cork, a different music score comes out. And it was very fun to in a matter of seconds, showcase five different possible soundtracks for that scene and get applause.
And one of the things that I find fascinating about sound design is that our first instinct is often not the one we should pay attention to.
I will often tell people you should think about three different folders of music and sound effects. the first one. Is your gut instinct. So whatever kind of jumps out at you, when you read the script, when you hear this voice over, when you hear this interview tape, what is the thing that immediately seemed right to you and try to come up with, at least five or six different options for that.
The second folder is what's a reach. Maybe this is a little strange . And then the third folder is the totally off the wall. Trying some kind of silly things just having fun with it. Almost always that third folder ends up being the most fruitful . The first folder rarely is especially when people are learning, it's almost never the gut inside.
Usually it's not even the second folder, the reach it's often the third folder that ends up being surprising and delightful and ironic sometimes and humorous, music and sound effects can do all of these wonderful things that in the best moments of sound design, they will not only draw your attention. To something that you would otherwise glaze over or miss an episode, but they might even bring something new to the table. This whole new dimension to the way that you're viewing the story that you're being told.
As I say in the episode, I went through a long period of my life. Where I was obsessed with these books and I still remember that feeling of, I have no idea where we're going, but I'm completely intrigued.
And that's the feeling that we want to create for listeners, no matter what kind of episode we're doing with, whether it's fiction or narrative nonfiction or something else, giving them. That feeling of being on an adventure of wanting to keep listening sometimes without even really understanding why they're engaged, but just giving them that presence of the moment that they're feeling drawn into that is its own kind of creative magic.
And I hope you enjoyed it. In this episode. I had such a blast putting it together. Even on a week when I was really tired . It was still just a delight to put that episode out. And I hope you feel that in listening to it too. So there's a couple other things I want to just take note of for our Kasama labs students.
And that is. Mistakes that were made that I knew immediately as soon as I made them, but I didn't have time to correct them. So one of those is that prior to this episode, I had been using a blue Yeti mic. And those of you who have heard me talk about my voice ever said it before, know that I record under a blanket for it.
That little moment in the episode where I talk about a child's blanket for it, that's real. I mean that I still, to this day, I record my voiceover. What is basically a blanket Fort and I use a lot of pillows and I have a little clam shell sound shield. And because I am reading off a computer screen, my computer fan noise is an issue that I always have to think about.
I have an external monitor, which helps a little bit, but it still doesn't completely shut it out. The space that I'm recording in is a hundred square foot. Beautiful shed. You know, hard surfaces and windows all over the place. So even though I have a rug down here and I have all of these setups, the blanket Fort really helps me to get to that intimate studio sound, which by the way, I'm not using right now, I have sort of a halfway in between set up right now where I have my clam shell sound dampener thing, I have one of those screen dividers with blanket Stripe over it. And I actually have something draped over the top of my mic and that clam shell as well.
And I have tested this out a lot and gotten to. A pretty good place with being able to create really quiet, intimate voiceover . And then I got this wonderful new mic when I won the international women's podcast awards that the prize was this wonderful SM seven Mike, this wonderful microphone, the shore microphone.
This wonderful, shorter microphone that I finally got a cloud lifter to plug it into so that I could use it. And so this episode was the first time I had ever used that and what I didn't realize. That I had this hiss sound happening. I knew it was great equipment, but I didn't realize that there was going to be such a difference in that ambient sound, that hiss. And so one thing that I learned from recording, this was anytime you change equipment, It doesn't matter how long you've been doing this.
It doesn't matter if you're under your blanket Fort, make sure that you do your homework on your equipment before you start using it so that you do a really thorough sound check. So that if there is anything like that coming up, you have the time to go back and watch the YouTube videos and do the research and, read the instruction manual so that you can fix that.
And I ended up actually putting the voiceover through isotope RX. It's still it fixed the HES, but then it kind of made my voice sound a little too dampened. So I ended up actually using a mix of the untampered with voiceover that had the hiss.
And I tried to do some things within logic that didn't completely fix it, but it helped. And then I had a second track that I sometimes use when it wasn't too kind of dampened and kinda muffled sounding from the RF, the isotope RX version.
In the moment, when I talk about there being like an echo-y cave and my voice in multiple different versions, it was actually kind of advantageous to have my voice on multiple tracks. And then I brought them both in, but I just wished in retrospect, I had been able to do my homework ahead of time to figure out what I needed to do to make my mic sound is clean as I could
The other thing that is a mistake I've made before, and that I'm very grateful to my friend Adrianna, who gave me the heads up that I had two tracks that were overlapping two voiceover tracks that were playing at the same time.
It was clearly a mistake. And I know exactly what happened. It was late at night. I was doing the final listen through that. I always do with episodes. And in logic pro X, there is a function where you can do no overlap, prayer tracks. If you're moving them around or you can do shuffle left or shuffle, right.
Or crossfade, there's a couple of different options. And I had it on shuffle left and I did not realize that I had it on shuffle left. I had listened through the entire episode. I was right at the end and I was just tweaking some things and I deleted a little piece of a track, not realizing that I had it on shuffle that. So the second half of the episode shuffled left at the beginning, when I cut that little piece out, which then resulted in overlapping tracks, overlapping voiceover, which was again, clearly a mistake. And I didn't notice it because I had already listened through.
This is a mistake I've made before. I know better at this point, I've done this over 180 times. I've probably made that exact mistake a dozen times of just forgetting to put it from shuffle left back to no overlap. And then really, even beyond that, doing the, not the full listen through again, but just the click through of, okay
Let's put my play head at five seconds in five minutes and, you know, just click it through quickly to make sure that everything is sounding good and normal, and the volume levels are consistent and all those things that you've already checked, hopefully at that point.
And I didn't do that cause I was tired cause it was 10 o'clock at night. I had to get the episode out and it is just a good reminder to me that no matter how many times you do this, It's always worth it before you bounce or export that that project is an MP3 to upload to your podcast.
Whatever your hosting site is, it's always worth it to go through and just check and make sure that nothing has moved around. Nothing is wonky. 90% of the time, everything is fine, but there's always that 10% where something weird happened. And you won't catch it unless you do that little final check .
I think I fixed the whole thing in about 15 minutes and you can do that if you know exactly what the problem is, but the bottom line. , it's always, always good to have one final check through. If you can have somebody else or even yourself, listen through the MP3, once you've bounced it or export it. That's even better because then somebody can say, Hey, I noticed at, you know, 10, 15 timestamp, the volume is a little off here.
Maybe you should bring the music down again. I mean, these are things that you try to guard for as you're building the episode, but there's just, you know, especially as an indie podcasts, there are going to be things that, that you miss. And so I think both setting up the safeguards to try to prevent against.
And then also just submitting to yourself, like if it happens, it's not the end of the world. Like we are not, nobody died here. You know, go fix it, do the thing that you need to do to, to update it. And life goes on.
So I hope this helps you as you are building your own podcast episodes. I think that the overall message of this episode isn't just have fun, but also just realize it's a process you're going to keep growing. You're going to keep changing. You're going to develop your own creative ethos.
And most of all, I hope that listening did feel like an adventure and that you can embrace your life as this creative journey that it is.
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Outtake
Fricking planes. It's like, as soon as I start recording, it never fails.
If you're going to be stressed out, you should just go out. Well, I was already to go and then you disappeared for like half an hour and we don't actually have that much time to record this. So just come back in five minutes.