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Today I wanted to share a bit about our process for putting an episode of Full Story together, I really loved our episode yesterday on Australia’s possible exit strategies and it’s a pretty straight forward one to go through so let’s start with that https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/audio/2020/apr/15/australias-exit-strategy-for-coronavirus
We have a huuuuggee running list of episodes we’d like to do and they all come together in different ways, sometimes in tandem with a @GuardianAus reporter, sometimes after they have finished a story and other times completely independent of something a reporter is doing.
I’d wanted to do an exit strategy episode for a while but we started this episode on Monday based off of @BenDohertyCorro excellent weekend feature and published it on Wed morning: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/11/the-covid-19-exit-strategy-when-will-australia-know-the-coronavirus-battle-is-over
Our host @lauramoates & producer @EllenLeabeater do a lot of the early heavy lifting when we start an episode, pulling together research from various sources and then mapping out the best way we think we can tell the story in a document like this.
At the moment we’re all working remotely and so we put Ben under a blanket for the interview. For our show we find it’s very important to pace how we reveal information, the document allows us to plan that with the reporter- But things do often change in the interview
Once we’re done the Queen of Cuts @EllenLeabeater usually take apart the interview, she’s a lightning fast editor & loves thinking about the pacing of a story, her edit will usually take a few hours and she will often add a small amount of archival as well, this is her edit:
Here I've marked up what each track is, you can see she's already added some key press conference audio and also suggest more that could be inserted in other sections
Then anywhere between 2 to 5 people will all listen to the edit and make notes on what we want to change, things we want to cut, things we want to add back in, questions that need tweaking, additional archival we want to find, etc
This is a key part of making the show and is something a lot of the big narrative documentary shows do: have a big democratic listen. We all discuss what’s working and what’s not and 95% of the time all decisions are by agreement in the team
Once we’re happy with what we call ‘the base’ it usually goes to our other producer @jskoning. As well as being a great producer Joe is a musician & he will add a lot more archival to the session. The purple track here is archival and you can see there’s a lot more once he’s done
As he does this he also adds music, in this shot the blue tracks are the music. I’ll do a separate thread about how we use music in the future but this can take a whole day, I think he spent around six hours adding archive & music for this episode as well as smoothing things out
After that: we listen again! Then I will often do the final pass, make any last changes and mix the piece. This is just a slight tweaking of levels and a few EQ and compression tweaks before exporting the final render.
And usually there's ONE LAST LISTEN that @lauramoates or another producer will do, just incase i’ve accidentally moved something or tried to publish the wrong episode, etc (historical precedent exists). And then we schedule it to come out at 3:30am the next day.
And that’s how we make an episode! This is not representative of everything we do, the team does shift around to do different things and we also often break up a session and have multiple people working on different parts but I think this should give you an idea of what we do
If you have any questions let me know, I'm already planning to do future threads on music, why Reaper is the only DAW you should be using and break apart some different styles of episodes too, let me know what you are interested in
