Unit 5 – Audio & Podcasts – Filip Witkowski

Overlook

For this unit we are tasked with working with audio processing software such as Adobe Audience. For the audio that we are going to be working with in groups of 3-5 in creating and producing a singular podcast episode.

I am working in a group of 4 with:
-Filip Witkowski (me)
-Jayden Redley
-Joseph Ruckwood
-Jack O’Driscoll

We have named our podcast “Let’s Talk Indie”, the main point of it is to generally discuss indie games as whole or focus on one game in an episode and discuss topics surrounding it or its lore directly.

Research

To get a better understanding of podcasts, I decided to listen to a couple of different podcasts to get an idea of how they work. I decided to listen to 3 podcasts: ‘Chuckle Sandwich’ a conversation, interviews and general news podcast where 3 popular YouTubers, ‘JSchlatt’, ‘Slimecicle’, and ‘Ted Nivison’ generally talk together about a certain topic or they bounce between topics in some episodes. They also interview other celebrities on the podcast. They don’t do as much sound effects nor music, its only just their voices in the recording.

Another podcast I listened to was ‘Dimension 20; Fantasy High’, a Dungeons and Dragons podcast ran by Brennan Lee Mulligan, a legendary Dungeon Master with the first season cast being Lou Wilson, Ally Beardsley, Siobahn Thompson, Zac Oyama, Emily Axford and Brian Murphy where the party gets up to mischief while attending their school and going on quests as the school’s hope for peace. This podcast focuses on storytelling while showing friends and actors having fun with a nice hint of comedy. The tone of the actors changes between them talking as themselves and as when they are in character.

The third podcast I looked at was ‘The Magnus Archives’ – one of the most popular horror anthology podcasts, an entirely fictional podcast set in 2016-2020 Great Britain which mentions physical locations. This podcast focuses solely on fiction and storytelling and staying in a set character with different voice actors. – A lot of the episodes include an eerie bass-hum in the background during the story telling segments as well as a higher pitch violin screeching when the stories get more and more intense. The main actor in the show is Jonathan Sims, both the name of the character and actor. He is the character who talks the most in the entire show with a low voice, but done in a way that there is a character that is telling the story with interest – there is also a filter put on most of the voices to give the effect of everything being recorded on hundreds of different cassette tapes.

After discussion with the team, we as a group have decided that we are going to call our podcast name “Let’s Talk Indie” with our main podcast view being general discussion about indie games and/or indie news.

Plan

After discussion, we have decided that we are going to call our podcast name “Let’s Talk Indie”, our main podcast view is going to be general discussion about indie games, in the episode that we will be recording called “FNaF, indie or not?” the main point of disussion is whether or not Five Nights at Freddy’s is an indie game or not as well as heavy lore discussion where Jayden dives deep into discussing the fnaf lore while Filip and Jack find flaws and holes in the lore to talk about; leading into the decision whether FNaF is an indie game or not.

This podcast is styled as a review as well as a discussion of the game that we chose, where we review the lore and discuss what are the good and bad things about it. We aim for the main target audience be teens and adults as that is very similar to the demographic of indie games as a whole as well as for this episode, Five Nights at Freddy’s.
We also aim for our podcast to be aimed at people who enjoy conversational podcasts where it is either 1 or more people just talking and discussing a topic.

The roles in the group are:

Production

Summary 14/1/26
Post-Recording Notes: It was very easy to talk and the conversations flowed pretty well and naturally, It was hard to stick to the plan however as it was only a rough draft of a plan and needs more fleshing out. The recording equipment was good however we did have to mess around with different positions and only figured out a good place to put it at the end of the practice recording, the room for the recording was also really good.

Upon listening back to the recording however, a lot seemed awkward as it was our first time doing something like this, and i found out that I stutter a lot more than I thought I do which would either need to be edited out or I would need to improve how I speak to reduce the stutter.

Summary 28/01/26
Post-Recording Notes: We recorded a lot of footage that we will use in our podcast, this time however, we tried putting the tripod on the floor and it improved a lot of the quality of the audio itself leaving out the echo and picking up any small sounds that any of us would have made while talking such as tapping on tables and other sounds.
We then recorded all of the scenes including the intro, outro and the main disciussions.

I assigned different section of our recordings to be edited by different people; Jack did the intro and outro, Jayden did the first discussion being the smallest section as Jayden was doing the most talking throughout the recording, I did the second discussion and Joseph did the third section of discussion which ended up being the longest section to be edited because Joseph had done the least amount of editing. (You can see their versions on their portfolios linked above)

After recording, I began editing my chosen section where I had to cut out a lot of filler words that were used in production, it was mostly me saying “umm” a lot throughout the recording which had to be cut out mostly out of the audio roll.

I then added some background bass humming in the background similar to how The Magnus Archives do in their episodes to add something else for the listener to have in their ear apart from a singular person just talking.

After all of the sections were edited and done, I had to piece all of the sections seamlessly so that it would be difficult for the audience to hear the difference and cuts between each section and point of discussion. The only part you could really hear it would be when the discussion ended and the outro was placed into the mix.

I then worked on adding some more sound effects and some sections of ambient sombre and mellow music throughout the podcast whenever there was a larger section of Jayden speaking to add more sound that the audience can listen to to keep the audience’s attention.

Reflection

My role in this unit was the leader and host of the podcast, I had to give people their work to do and I had to keep everyone in check from getting too off-track. There was some issues when it came to exporting files and I managed to come up with solutions that kept all the file structure intact and allowed us to keep working smoothly. I think something that went well in the production of the podcast is the recording and the editing segments of it, everybody in the group had done their editing in a timely fashion with efficiency and with high quality. The music that I had to add at the end of everything also went really well and I think that it fits longer segments. I think that next time, we would definately try to expand our topic of discussion and attempt to talk about multiple games rather than just sticking to one game. Throughout the course of this unit, I learnt how to effectively use Adobe Audience and how to edit audio while making the audio seemless and for it to not include the cuts that I had made.

Throughout the process, a challenge that I faced was organisation and working with shared file strucutre as it had to be done by roundabout ways where we all could share our own designated files in another way.

You can listen to the podcast on YT here!