In today’s world of easy livestreams and even easier video production, it’s nice to know that podcasts are still going strong. The simplicity and easy consumption of a podcast means they’ll probably never go out of style… Especially if our clients have anything to say about it!
Recording, editing, and publishing podcasts is a key part of our day-to-day work here at BCC Live. We’ve got podcasts on our schedule for people talking about triathlons, pop culture, their life story, pro athletes, and much more. It’s rewarding work, and we have a lot of different ways to record a podcast based on what the client wants… But more on that later.
What we want to talk about today is the story of our own podcasts… How they came to be… To show you how that workflow goes and what you can think about if you want to become a podcaster yourself. Let’s get into it!
HOW TO SKI IT PODCAST
How to Ski It has been a long-running project here at BCC Live. We’re an office full of passionate skiers, and we love talking about our favorite places to ski. How to Ski It was originally a video series that started out in early 2021. We talked about local ski runs and (of course) how to ski them. We’d been talking about how to expand the project into more than just video for more than a year when we finally bit the bullet and decided to make a podcast after a day on the slopes.
Fortunately for us, the fact that we’re A/V professionals with active podcast projects for our clients made this an easy undertaking. Though our studio is mostly set up for live broadcasts, we also keep hardware set up to record for post-production… So essentially all we had to do was walk into the studio, power on some gear, and get going. We’ll talk about this more later, but the number-one things stopping us from starting a podcast earlier was… just getting started!
We had talked for ages about elevating the idea… Getting guests to film in the studio, making custom songs and sound effects… But all of those things got in the way of just getting started. In the end, we ended up recording on some simple (but powerful) gear… A Rode RodeCaster mixer with two Rode ProCaster mics and two Sennheiser MD46s, and an assorted helping of headphones. For a podcast, the sound quality is just as good as our much more expensive kit. But the ease of use of the RodeCaster with its integrated recorder gave us that boost to get going.
And every time we sat down to record, we had a blast! Sure, it’s never going to hit the top-downloaded charts, but even with a few hundred to a few thousand listens per episode we get lots of feedback and ideas that keep us motivated to keep going. Once ski season picks up again, we’ll be right back at it in the studio to record some more. Generally speaking, we put in a good amount of effort to edit, master, and make promotional clips for How to Ski It, so we get episodes published within a day or two of recording.
But what if we could go even faster? Break down the barrier to just getting started even more?
500 CATS
This is where things get fun. 500 Cats started out as a running gag on How to Ski It: a podcast that didn’t exist. Since our main body of work is in the event industry, and the BCC team has been working events for 20 years now, we have a lot of fun stories and interesting opinions about the event scene—and whenever that came up on How to Ski It, we would just tell people to go listen to 500 Cats to hear the whole story. We figured people would get a good laugh trying to find a story that didn’t exist and then move on… but people kept asking where to find episodes!
This was going to be the state of affairs forever: we’d allude to a fun story or someone we like talking to, reference our second podcast that didn’t exist, and move on. But as time went on, it sounded like a better and better idea to actually tell some of these stories. This all came to a head as we prepared to fly out to our biggest event of the year: the IRONMAN World Championships in Kona. A bunch of our favorite people would be there to interview. And there’s always interesting stories, so what better time to start?
Problem is… we weren’t traveling light. In fact, we were traveling very heavy. Here’s a picture of all the bags of gear we were taking. This is for four people.
Even the reliable RodeCaster we use for How to Ski It would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. It was the last day before we flew out. There was only a tiny amount of room left in one bag, and no time to go get something new… but we still wanted to just get started. Just before the last zipper was closed, we grabbed a PodTrak P4 from our gear shelf—a simple audio recorder about the size of a club sandwich—and threw it in. We didn’t know if we would actually record anything. But the option was there.
And then, one morning onsite, the compulsion to get going hit us. We pulled four microphones from the camera cases we were going to use for the broadcast, dug some batteries out of the bottom of Dylan’s backpack to power the recorder, and walked out onto the pool deck trailing cables behind us like an angry squid. Total time elapsed from deciding to make our joke podcast real to being ready to record: about five minutes.
We didn’t have a sound-treated studio, a space to ourselves, or even some talking points. The ambient noise was loud enough that it was hard to hear each other—but we hit record and got going. What started out as a discussion about what we had accomplished on the island turned into a heartfelt experience as one of our longtime friends, Bob Gitsham, walked past and we persuaded him to join in and tell his story. Soon enough, we went from no talking points to all the talking points in the world… Why wouldn’t we have a new friend of the team on every episode?
There’s a lot to be said about spending a long time on a project to make sure that it’s perfect… Editing and revising and re-recording until you’ve made a perfect gem of a product. A lot of the podcasts we make for our clients go through weeks of revisions until they’re ready to ship. But our experience with 500 Cats showed us that with the right team, you can make something great in a very short time. Like this:
- We threw a recorder that hadn’t been used in months into our bag as a last-minute decision.
- We walked out to the nearest place with four chairs to record—first choice, best choice.
- While the episode was recording, Cate got an account set up to post it—and it was ready before the recording was done.
- Dylan made a rough mix of our audio while the recording was ongoing, then finalized the edit in a single skillful editing pass to get it ready to roll.
Total time elapsed: 45 minutes recording, 45 minutes editing, exporting and posting. An hour and a half from getting the idea to make a podcast to getting it out the door, and it sounds great! It can really be that easy to get your idea on the way to greatness. It’s all well and good to polish a gem of an idea, but as they say: “Perfect” is the enemy of “done”.
We’re still turning out episodes of 500 Cats on this breakneck pace… And once the ski season gets going, How to Ski It with its extra production work will back it up wonderfully. We’ve always been good at making content in record time. But this just goes to show that we can do more than we ever expected if we (say it with me) just get started.
Want to apply this to your idea for a podcast? We’ve got you covered! In an upcoming blog post, we’ll go over what you can do to get started, whether that’s a full-on studio production or a simple setup to get going fast. Stay tuned!