Project Pathways

Now with a grand upheaval of the website, only about eight months too late.
​For my project pathways project, I chose to do a podcast, because I like writing things and I figured I could transform a neat script with some audio editing and nice effects as well as some research from other podcasts, it would be a lot more interesting than me just reading an essay. In my pre planning phase, I had to do research on the podcast I took the inspiration from: 
Welcome to Nightvale is a podcast about creepy paranormal stories in a weird town reported on by the town radio broadcast, and is wildly popular. I cannot state enough how huge the internet community for Nightvale is, with many books compiling the episodes and other stories being written. Also wildly popular with the same crowd is the work of author H.P Lovecraft, a horror writer from the 1920s. While he was mostly forgotten while he lived, his works have gained popularity with millions nowadays. So, do the "Welcome to Nightvale" style with Lovecraft source information and inspiration, and I thought it would be a recipe for success. Which means I had to balance having references to the works of Lovecraft that fans could look into and recognize, I also had to do it in a format that kept the stories entertaining to people who didn't know anything. So, the Arkham Advertiser (Arkham being the town where Lovecraft's works took place) was wrote. Which took a lot of different efforts in a lot of places.
I had to research radio broadcast frequencies in the area of Massachusetts so I could make a realistic station signature, radio broadcasts from the 1920s to get the general theme of the broadcast, and a lot of writing, rewriting, getting some friends to voice random people, and finally recording and getting things together in Final Cut.
The biggest challenge I had was audio mastery, which, while seeming obvious while working with a podcast, was tricky for a reason I didn't find out until it was blasted out loud to the entire class at a loud sound: I had been editing the podcast with a lower volume on my Mac, so I made everything a bit louder which ended up being a fatal error from a innocent mistake. So, while editing things went well- especially the "creepy ghost interruption" in the middle, which was fun to splice together, I had to double back and rearrange the audio levels to be quiet. 
One of the surprises for me was exactly how long this thing took to write, because a typical podcast episode is pretty long and I wanted to at least create a mini episode of that, which meant a lot of writing which had to itself go through a lot of revisions. Funnily enough, rearranging the audio files in Final Cut Pro and reassembling my script as I wrote it was pretty similar to each other.
Overall, looking back on the finished product, I'm happy enough with the end product but I'm worried that it doesn't have enough substance. While it's gimmicks and novelty may carry it a bit, a lot of the stories I put in there seemed a bit repetitive and the general format was as well. It's good to open strong and end with something nice, which is what I tried to do, but the middle seemed like it could have done something more with it.