How To Record A Podcast At A Noisy Event
Posted on 26th January 2020 at 18:25
Made4U Podcasts is out on the road in Lancashire in the north of England this week, busy making podcasts. This time we’re recording some audio and vox pops to use to highlight our client’s annual event.
The challenge is to cope in a noisy, crowded environment and to find the right people to pluck out of the throng for quick interviews.
What we need and what our client has helpfully provided is a member of their team to identify these interviewees, grab them and politely escort them to our quiet corner of the room. (Politely escort being another way of saying frog march!)
Our client knows which of the event guests are most likely to be articulate and useful interviewees, and has already agreed with them in advance that they will contribute to the event podcast. For our part, we produced a brief to give interviewees, preparing them for the kind of questions they’ll be asked.
It’s this sort of pre-recording preparation that makes for the best production possible.
And it’s entirely necessary because at a big event where old friends and colleagues are meeting up for a jolly day away from the daily grind, it can be a challenge to find and extract them from the crowd and focus their minds on making sensible comments.
Another challenge is to find the right place to conduct the interview. One option is to whip guests away to a small, quiet, carpeted room behind the scenes. You can record material here for use on the event podcast but also for future use because the lack of background crowd noise gives it an evergreen potential.
A useful audio trick is to record lots of chatty room atmosphere and later, during the mixing phase, play it under the interviews you have recorded in that quiet room. This way you capture the buzz of the event.
However, locating a nice quiet room may just not be possible in which case choose the quietest corner you can find. Make sure you wear your headphones during recording as this will help you identify extraneous noises that interfere in a way you wouldn’t otherwise notice.
Do not hesitate to ask your interviewee to repeat what was just said if a crashing plate or guffawing laugh ruined the first “take”.
There is a whole blog waiting to be written about how to get an interviewee to retake in a way that makes for an easy audio edit at a later stage.
All too often they’ll pick up from where they stopped in a way that’s impossible to use. Try to get them to start the sentence and the thought again. That means listening really carefully to what they’re saying throughout.
Should you be unlucky enough not to have help from one of your client’s team, you’ll need to get stuck in yourself. Feel free to dive in and interrupt conversations and ask for what you want. People are always amazingly accommodating to those wielding microphones!
But beware of agreeing to interview someone later or “after lunch”. Inevitably, they’ll disappear and you will have lost your precious chance to record them.
Grab them while you can and frog march them to your recording corner!
What we do to help
If you’re interested in launching a podcast for your business or organisation, Made4U Podcasts offers a full podcast production service as well as podcast skills training courses for in-house teams.
Contact us anytime for more information on serena@made4U-podcasts.co.uk.
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