Podcasts are a great way to keep in touch with the world around us, especially during these times where the form of entertainment has been constantly changing. Although time-consuming, you can build stronger connections with the people you work with — or perhaps even meet new people!
Planning States:
Purpose & Content: global engagement, ethics of choices & actions
The first aspect of your project will be deciding on a purpose for your podcast. Do you want it to be a source of inspiration? Information? Entertainment? Do you want your podcast to take an interview approach? A musical approach? Who is your target audience? What is your podcast going to be about? Is it going to be a one-off podcast, or will it be a series of episodes? If there are episodes, what is the common theme between them? You need a reason for people to want to listen to your podcast, so what is going to be your drive?
Involvement: collaborative skills, strength, & growth
Who else do you want involved in your project? Do you want to work with one of your peers to craft the podcast? Or do you want to lead it yourself, but have other people feature / guest star on particular episodes of your podcast? Be sure to expand and reach out to ensure that you can get a wide variety of people involved with your podcast! You can learn so much from the people that you work with, so don’t pass up the opportunity to do so!
Timeline & Delegation: initiative & planning, challenge & skills, commitment & perseverance
A podcast can definitely be a time consuming project, so it is important that you plan out a timeline so that you can be the most organized when it comes to this project. However, as with all large projects, things may not always have the outcome that you expect. That is completely okay! To pull off such a project, you need to be flexible and committed to making things work anyway.
My CAS Project
For my CAS Project, I co-wrote and directed an original jukebox podcast musical — but that wasn’t always the plan! In the beginning of IB Y1, my co-director and I planned to create an original jukebox musical and stage it live, and we planned to have it occur in March 2021. We started our planning process in January 2020, and had decided on the plot and which songs we wanted to use. All of the music would come from Filipino artist Reese Lansangan.
Due to COVID-19, we wound up turning it into a podcast. We held virtual auditions in August, and by the beginning of September we had our cast members and were rehearsing virtually twice a week. Once COVID-19 restrictions loosened in October, we scheduled two recording sessions for the podcast. We then spent November editing our podcast musical and putting the final pieces together.
We released our podcast musical, ‘When You’re Done, I’ll Be Waiting’ on December 29th, 2020 on SoundCloud, and I couldn’t be prouder of the work that we accomplished. It was an incredible learning experience that I will really treasure going forward.
I believe that a podcast is an amazing project to spend your time on, whether for a CAS or as an independent project. You get to learn so much by being getting to wear the hat of a creator and director, and it teaches you skills that can be applied to a wide variety of future endeavours.
You may also like…
- Zeynep’s tips for boosting your CAS portfolio
- Cynthia’s creative anthology as a CAS Project