The Cake is a Lie Podcast Reflection
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The Portal podcast was split between the co-producers, Sam Grant and Brady Dolan (myself). Since Sam had already played Portal in the past, he watched Youtube videos to jog his memory while I played through the game. We both made sure to split the work relatively evenly. After he and I were aware of the playthrough, we brainstormed what we could take away from the game in an online call—both suggesting themes for the podcasts, resembling the podcast to other previous episodes, and how to make our episode stand out, which was the primary goal of the episode. Though we continuously argued back in forth between the podcast’s theme, we were able to produce an episode that shared both of our ideals.
We decided about the episode by reading articles and online videos about the lore behind the game and hidden meanings. After we decided upon a central idea for the podcast, we went through the vocabulary to search for terms that we noticed in Portal, writing what Portal aspects related to the word.
After constructing that aspect, we chose orders to put the terms in the podcast, allowing us to introduce the terms as we chronologically went through the game. In our Portal podcast episode, we focused on gameplay first, then the backstory, and finally the connections of our central theme to Portal, allowing an understanding of all of Portal’s details by the viewers. From our peers’ podcast episodes, we understood we had to restrain ourselves from only giving positive feedback about the game, including our fair share of criticism. Though our episode revolved around quarantine, we chose to invest in the pandemic’s emotional aspect of our relationships with others.
After we went over the podcast script, we attempted the podcast several times to fix the script’s issues not sounding natural. By the end of the podcast, we had established an idea of how to format the avatar, description, title, and background music. As Sam begin to edit the podcast, I worked on the remaining material. I favored this splitting of the work because I am not experienced with editing, and I already had an idea in mind of how I wanted the podcast’s avatar to look. Our collaboration throughout the podcast made the production a lot simpler despite it being on two members. We had to look at writing our podcast as a process that takes time to produce, not cramming all podcast production into a day. Sam and I created a podcast with minimal experience, but I believe we did a great job with the tools with had.
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