A couple of weeks ago we quietly added a second horse to the Futurilla stable: The Doom Ray podcast sprang from the brain of recent BIAD alumni Kyle Jobson, who also collaborated with us on the iBooks project. Kyle's a self-confessed geek and lover of all that geek culture entails, so it was pretty much a no brainier to schedule and record a weekly call in which he could let off steam on games, films and comic book culture, with me acting as a co-host and as someone to bounce ideas off. So far we've talked about The Dark Knight Returns, House of Cards, Ni No Kuni, PS4, and a bunch of films that Kyle's selected for BIAD's MA film screenings. Last week's show on Terry Gilliam's Brazil was, in my humble opinion, the best yet, and if you haven't listened to Doom Ray yet, you should start there.
While we've wanted to do a Doom Ray podcast for some time (indeed we started with a pilot episode last year), we began planning in December to try and do it in a way that we could learn from, with the intention of getting better at the business of recording and distributing audio media, and of learning how we might scale and extend it to other topics. In the course of our daily work we come across lots of fascinating, informed and opinionated people, and we'd love to find a platform for more of them. Some of these people get invited into BIAD to give lectures (which we're generally poor at capturing), some of them become trusted advisers and eventual collaborators. Audio is a fast medium for capturing and disseminating these various conversations and dialogues.
Doom Ray has been then, the beginning of this learning process. We've begun to put in place, test, and iterate the workflows and processes that allow us to record, process, and distribute podcasts. We've made (and will continue to make) lots of mistakes, and to learn from them (quickly!). It's hard to practice this stuff in private, and we've had to launch the show quietly into the public domain in order to make the experiment real, though the focus has definitely been on learning as a team, rather than on building an audience. We've told almost no-one about the shows up until now, though we're still getting a handful of downloads (we're building for scale nonetheless—it's absolutely our intention to be able to deal with a large number of listeners for future shows).
So, now we're moving into the next stage by developing a second show. Again, it's an idea that we've been discussing for over a year, and in that time it's moved from being a written project to an audio one. It's taken a month to think through what we needed in terms of recording a pilot show, and developing a strategy and timetable. We're very excited about the topic and the format, and we've got some big new things planned for this one. I'll be sharing more details as the week progresses, both here and on twitter (@sharl).