Blog Relations

Download Jeremy Strong Interview

[audio:http://media.libsyn.com/media/blogrelations/jeremystrong.mp3]

Packages are where audio editing gets creative. They are big part of BBC output, but not many podcasters make them. They are all about creating pictures with sound. You have to record plenty of ‘wild track’ atmosphere and mix it in with the words later.

This package comes, of course, from Storynory. It’s a visit to Reigate Priory Junior School to meet Jeremy Strong, author of The 100 Mile An Hour Dog. He was speaking to 600 school kids and did a wonderful speed-reading. It came about as part of our continuing friendly relationship with the children’s book publisher, Puffin. As I have mentioned before, I think Puffin understand the power of the Internet for reaching kids, as well as anyone.

For those who are interested, I mixed it in Sony SoundForge making ample use of Special Paste Cross-Fade and Mix. I also used plenty of fade out and fade in. Part of the trick is to make sure that a blast of atmosphere fades out and fades in gracefully. Also, you often start the atmos under that last few words of the preceding sentence, or even just ‘tuck” it under the last word. You might want to pick up the narration over the end of the atmos.

I could equally have done it in a multi-track program like GarageBand. The hardest part of recording it was to capture Jeremy’s words while he was speaking in front of the school. I sat on the floor near his feet, which didn’t look too silly as all the kids where doing the same.

Plosives are the bain of podcasters. They are the breathy sounds that sneak into the microphone, however hard you try to keep them out. “Ps’ are apt to explode all over the place. I often hear them popping out of the most experienced podcasters’ microphones.

As always, it’s best to avoid them in the first place. Haul a pop guard over your microphone, or even use a silk pop screen in front of a condenser mic. Point the microphone at your chin, rather than directly at the mouth. Try to hold in and soften those ps with your lips.

But despite your best efforts, some plosives are bound to find their way onto the track. But don’t despair. In many cases, it’s still possible to edit them out. Bump up the size of the sound wave on your screen, and you should be able to see the angry zig-zags, characterised by the wide spaces between the lines of the wave. Sometimes you will also see the explosion shooting up above the natural height of the words Try cutting out the nasty bit with your sound editor, and preview it to make sure it still sounds natural.

This sort of precision editing is quite time-consuming. Perhaps it’s mostly for perfectionists.

Now that I’m a “Mac User” I thought I had better get round to using Garage Band, Apple’s audio software and part of its iLife set that comes with the computer. It’s particularly good for multi-tracking and mixing in music and sound effects.The first fruit of my long labours with it can be heard over at Storynory.

At first I was baffled by Garage Band, and ended up investing 30 quid in the official Apple Book about it by Mary Plummer. The price of those books really hurts, but at least it told me what to do. Once I got into it, I discovered that there is a really nice collection of high quality music and Sound FX loops. But you can always do with more of a good thing, so I bought a couple of cheap Jingle Bells tracks for Bertie’s Christmas story. In the interests of taste, I used them fairly minimally, so that the episode didn’t sound like a shopping centre.

Apple had a more subtle “holiday bells” loop and some nice cinematic music, giving a Hollywood effect of sorts, along with bird song, footsteps, etc. In places I had four tracks going, including the narrator’s voice.

What I like:

You can master each track separately: so I could choose “female voice” for the narrator, and “jingles” for the music. This seems to make a big difference.

You have very good control of the volume dynamics of each track. Press “a” and you see a blue band beneath it. You can alter its shape to draw a fade in and fade out.

The sound loops that come with it really are top quality.

Once its exported and encoded as an Mp3 in iTunes, it sounds like high quality stuff. Encoding tracks mastered in other software in iTunes has never worked well for me.

What I don’t like:

The sound editor is very hard to use for precision edits. As I’ve said before. SoundForge is way ahead of the game in this respect.

As far as I can tell, you can’t export as a WAV file, which would be nice for making CDs. I think you can only get the project out as compressed MPEG or ACC.

It crashed several times and put my my highish spec Mac into a spin. Don’t believe the enthusiasts who say that Mac never crashes. It does, and I couldn’t even power the damn thing down, and had to pull the battery out.

–
You can also make an ‘enhanced’ podcast with different pictures for each chapter showing up in the iTunes / iPod window. This will end up as an MPEG 4 file (.4a). I’m still not sure if this plays on every machine out there, so stuck with MP3 audio only for now.

I was up into the wee hours doing this, and had big christening party for young Misha this weekend, so a very bleary Monday morning. I’m not sure whether I can do this every time, but will certainly be mixing music and sound effects into storynories for special occasions.

Storynory – our podcast for kids – is a year old. Apart from anything, it’s the most enjoyable project that I’ve ever been involved in. I enjoy working with Matthew on the stories about Bertie the Frog – we have a lot of laughs. I enjoy working with Natasha, the actress we hire to read the stories. Creativity is very satisfying. Often I’m up late fiddling with the site or editing the audio, but it never bothers me like a normal job might.

Our aim is to build a children’s brand. It’s a big ambition for a couple of guys with families to feed, but in these days of Web 2.0 almost anything is possible. I think we’ve already succeeded in one way. Storynory is up there with the big Kids and Family brands in iTunes in most parts of the world, and in many territories it’s ahead of them. Of course to become a brand we have to be more than a podcast. We would really like a book deal with a big publishing company to make that first step. This is really what we are hoping for next year. We would also like a sponsor who can understand the sensitivities of speaking to children. These two developments would transform it into a profitable venture.

I believe that the important thing about funding a loss-making business, is at least to have a viable idea about where the revenues might come from in the nearish term. I don’t thing our ambitions are pie-in-the-sky, but we aren’t really the best people at pulling off deals. We might have to get some help with this.

Our syndicated feed, which is basically people downloading our stories from iTunes, is at a record high, with 2,510 subscribers hitting it yesterday. Downloads seem steady at around 75,000 per month. Storynory grows in fits and spurts, and we hope to get an upward lift in December. This is a very targeted and hard-to-reach audience that identifies closely with our product. It’s not hard to see that its value could be huge.

Most people find us in iTunes (thanks Apple!). The website has far fewer listeners than our syndicated feed, but it is growing – and this is important for us, as right now it is our only source of income, bringing us clicks on Google AdSense. We get about 50 to 60 Adsense clicks a day. They are much more valuable to us at times like Easter and Halloween when the Kids and Family ad rates go up. Frustratingly, Google doesn’t seem to be sending us any Christmas ads right now. Bizarrely, it likes to advertise paid-for-audio stories on a site that’s full of free ones.

Matthew points out that last month we had a million hits on the website, and in dotcom days we would have sold it for about $10 million. Unfortunately people are wiser now, and buyers are clued up to the fact that a hit represents one file downloaded – and a webpage is made up of several files including pictures and audio links. Still, it’s a nice sounding stat. Google analytics shows us getting over 800 unique visitors a day this week. Visitors stay with our site for quite a few minutes – up to 20 sometimes – as they listen to stories. They tend to come back too, and they head straight for our archive of over 50 stories.

What makes us different from most of the other indie podcasts is that we’ve invested in talent, namely Natasha Gostwick, a young up-and-coming actress who reads the stories. We aren’t in this because we like the sound of our own voices. We realise that she can read them so much better than we could, and the listeners love her. Strangely I have to reply to emails either addressed to “Natasha” or “Bertie the Frog”.

That’s not to say that we aren’t creative. A lot thought goes into each story. Even the out-of-copyright ones are carefully edited. I enjoy the role of producer, trying to bring out the best in a creative talent, and it’s new and interesting for me to work with an actor, rather than a broadcast journalist. It’s important to keep Natasha stretched to keep her interested. She’s enjoying Alice In Wonderland, which is a demanding text, and she throws herself into the poems like Shock-Headed Peter.

So we’ve invested money as well as time in Storynory. This is why we are really concerned about building an audience, and don’t have the luxury that some podcasters have to say that it doesn’t matter whether or not we please anybody but ourselves.

It’s a long game to build a web presence on a shoestring. We have to manage our costs. Matthew and I think it will take another couple of years to really start hitting the kind of numbers we want. We would like to add some zeros onto the figures quoted above…

There are threats on the horizon. We’ve heard rumours of the director, Sir. Peter Hall, doing some sort of story podcast. I always think that competition is good (for other people). Not so sure about how good it will be for us….

If we can pull this off, I think it will be good for anyone who wants to build a podcast into a business. So please wish us luck.