What it takes to make a video podcast.

by Jordan Allan. YouMore

Behind the Scenes: Filming the UnNoticed Entrepreneur Podcast

The UnNoticed Entrepreneur podcast has a special pilot series with NatWest Accelerator. The series highlights the stories of entrepreneurs who are part of the Accelerator community, illustrating how being a part of the Accelerator has impacted their journey. We filmed three entrepreneurs in Bristol:

Charlotte Laing - Founder of The Content Emporium.
Charlie Taylor - Founder of KASK Wines.
Amber Probyn - Co-founder of Peequal.

I met Jordan Allan and Alex Richards of YouMore at the recent BIZX event hosted by ActionCOACH. Impressed by their skills, good humour and professionalism, I brought them onto the project.

Jordan explains how they made they managed the shoot and produced great quality content.

The crew arrives for set up.

Coincidentally, Alex (YouMore's Director) was down in Bristol from Edinburgh, checking out how everything was going at YouMore's Bristol office, so the timing lined up perfectly when the shoot date came out.

We arrived super early at the NatWest Accelerator building in Trinity Street, overlooking the river in Bristol. Somehow managed to find a parking space in Bristol city centre (miracles do happen).

It was great to get to have Alex on site, as he has extensive experience with his own podcast, Edinburgh Business Stories.

Setting the scene.

The Accelerator room is big, colourful and full of character, but it needed a bit of work to make it podcast-ready. We moved furniture, rearranged bookshelves, and built a little nook that looked great on camera and gave guests and host Jim a bit of privacy. It’s super important to us that people feel comfortable and not like the whole room is listening in, especially when you want a natural, relaxed conversation.

We set the chairs at a slight angle to each other so the guest and host could see each other easily but still be seen by the cameras. The bookshelves were moved to create a backdrop, and we placed copies of Jim's books, The UnNoticed Entrepreneur Volumes 1, 2 & 3, so that they appeared in the frame.

The kit in use.

We positioned two of our Canon R cameras: one on the guest, one on Jim, both with a low aperture to keep the background soft and the focus on the person speaking.

For lighting, we used our Godox SL60Ws, each with an Aperture Light Dome attached to softly light the scene from the front. We also threw some LED light into the background in NatWest purple to give it a nice on-brand pop.

For audio, we went with the Rode PodMics for that lovely crisp sound. We did hit a small hiccup though - we had mic arms but nothing to clamp them onto… until we found a tiny table and weighed down the other side with kit bags (and a couple of fridge juices and beers) to stop it tipping over.

Call it improvisation !

Prepare for a conversation.

We always feel like a table helps the scene feel more natural psychologically, and creates a "safe" between the two speakers. It just gives the setup a more relaxed, conversational vibe. Plus, it’s always handy for putting glasses of water on to keep the guests hydrated. We also placed a laptop with a visible timer in Jim's line of sight to help him keep track of how long each podcast was running.

Sequence of events.

Guests came in at 10am, 12pm and 2pm. That kind of spacing gave us enough time to reset between podcasts and not feel like we were rushing. Before each recording, we gave Jim time to chat casually with each guest, helping them to feel at ease. Once everything was set, the filming itself was the easy bit. We hit record, kept an eye on the levels, and sat back to enjoy three really strong conversations, which Jim led expertly.

Recording the interviews.

We recorded video straight to SD cards and audio to our Zoom PodTrak P4, with each mic on its own track. That gave us clean files to balance and sync up in the edit. We also took some notes of some good points as the conversations happened, to make it easier in the edit to pick out the best snippets.

Filming the beginning, at the end.

Then at the end of the day, we got Jim to record all his podcast intros straight to camera. We did this after all the guests had left rather than at the start of each podcast recording because it meant it didn’t interrupt the flow of the actual conversations. He could dive straight into the questions without needing to “perform” to the camera, which helped him to focus solely on the conversation.

Once the conversations and intros were wrapped, it was time to pack down - on what turned out to be one of the hottest days of the year. We sweated our way through loading all the kit back into the car and drove back to the office, where our first priority is always to back up all the footage, both for peace of mind and to avoid any SD card disasters.

The next day, I started editing. From the shoot, we delivered:
- Full video episodes
- Full audio episodes
- 5 social media snippets per podcast
- Custom thumbnails for each

Making the content available.

File sharing takes place via a Frame.io, because it is a platform ready for the large file sizes that video podcasts have. A 35 minute video in full 4K can be over 5GB...and whilst google drive or dropbox can handle these, the storage is quickly used up. Frame.io also allows us to make nice folders, and has an app to quickly download the files.

Publishing the shows

Each show was then made into different assets, and thumbnails created. Jim wrote an article with key lessons from the interview, which got published on this newsletter site and on social media.

The interviews are ready to be shared on multiple platforms. The NatWest app hosts the video so that users can experience the show without leaving the app.

On BuzzSprout, a podcast host, the show is loaded and from there appears on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other players.

That's a Wrap

That's the end to end production, although we didn't talk about using Premiere Pro for the post production, as that's another topic altogether.

Video is increasingly important for podcasts, not least because Youtube is becoming the platform that more and more people listen and watch their podcasts on. Video makes a great impression, but it's still essential to have high fidelity audio.

As you can see, in a regular office setting, with a bit of creativity, portable equipment and some experienced technicians, the world really can be a stage!

If you'd like to have a podcast filmed, with me as a host or with the film crew only, then why not drop me a line or click the button below.