(Cha Krupka) The Goose Brothers Podcast

 Today was our last day of senior project before Express Fest tomorrow. It's pretty crazy to think about. These last two weeks have gone by incredibly fast, filled with both many highs albeit a few lows. For this final day, Max and I simply sat down and recorded a really light hearted segment for our final episode. We also thought it would be fun to walk around campus interviewing random students, asking them what their favorite songs are currently. Olivia Rodrigo, young and upcoming pop star, dominated many of these such interviews. I finished the night off with some editing, and worked on my final reflection. We also set up a plan for express fest tomorrow, we are pretty excited about it. Hope to see you there!

And so we head into our final week. Max and I woke up and decided it was best to get some stuff done before our seminar, as we knew we wouldn't be very productive in the afternoon. We recorded a bit before, and then went off to the JEDI meeting with Lori and Will. Afterwards, we hit lunch, and then returned back to the studio (our room) to get a bit more done before going off to play some tennis with a bunch of friends. It looks like we are in great shape and slated to finish off with a great episode. I can't believe we are so close to graduation. 

Weekly Reflection     The second week of our senior project went smoothly, and I am very happy with what we were able to produce. We stayed on track this week, publishing two episodes as planned. Our work schedule followed pretty similar to the previous week. It is a little surreal to think that we only have three days left of senior project, and six until graduation.  For these last three days, Max and I have one last episode to record. We will likely split the recording between Monday and Tuesday, trying out some different ideas and just getting some mass of content available for when we go to edit it all. Our final editing and episode will then be pushed out by Wednesday night, with editing done over the course of the morning and afternoon. We hope to include repeated segments but also mix in new stuff. The most difficult challenge this week was definitely rallying to get some new ideas down on paper for us to record. We had some really great ideas but transferring them over to

 After a beautiful day and vaccine shot, we woke up this morning feeling pretty groggy. I felt mostly fine, simply a little fatigued, by Max was hit pretty hard, and neither of us were in a mood to try and sit down and record. Instead, I went over what we had so far in terms of recordings, and began editing them together. I didn't do too much work today, as it was a saturday and we were still on schedule. It was spent mostly lying around with friends and going swimming. After working hard all week, we thought it would be best not to kill ourselves anymore than the shot had. We both went to the color fight though, and it was a total blast. 

 Vaccine day! Both Max and I got our shots today, around mid morning, leaving our schedule a bit up in the air. We tried to get a little work done in the morning, but it was far too nice out to sit inside our room, so we were pretty unsuccessful. We were able to nail down a plan for the following days, which was nice and relieved some stress. In the afternoon I headed off to Tilton for my final sports competition at Proctor. We swept their team, which was a fun send-off for my last game. Returning to school, it had begun to rain some, and I was beginning to feel a little exhausted so I spent the night doing a little editing on some of the segments. 

 Back to business today. While we found ourselves a little lazy as we woke up, by the afternoon we were back in the studio. We tried a bunch of different things out. Some videos, some audio segments, but eventually we were both just about done so we signed off for the day. We decided to push back the third episode out a few days and instead focus on the video segments we had been toying with. We still needed some more ideas though, so we mostly worked on that, as is usual, for the rest of the day. Hopefully we can get our next episode out either Friday or Saturday! 

Another mostly chill day. We really needed some new ideas to get started on the next episode. Luckily for us, however, we had lots of responses to our posts and began crafting an outline with these responses for recording tomorrow. Today was such a beautiful day that most of was spent outside, and as such no real recording was accomplished. We were okay with this though, I wouldn’t consider it a lost day in any measure. 

 Today was a bit of an off day. After uploading yesterday we spent the day communicating through and monitoring our social media. We tried to market this episode a little better as it can be hard once you lose some hype to regain said hype. We were very happy with the episode though, so this wasn’t much of a challenge. Tomorrow will likely be spent shaping up our next episode and outlining for the rest of the senior project time. 

We started today with a mission. We were going to re-record, and with good energy, the second episode of our podcast. After heading to breakfast, I played some early-morning tennis while Max pumped some iron in the gym. We returned to our room and settled down a studio session. After deciding what to keep and what to scrap, we began recording, and immediately were satisfied with how it was going. The final result was much better than our first attempt, and all that was left was the editing. I mixed and matched a few segments and mastered the sound to where it needed to be. Next I needed to export the segment and upload to our hosting site, which would then be reflected on our streaming services. Once it was all clear, I sent out the post on Instagram notifying our followers, and called it a day. 

Weekly Reflection This week was exciting. I was initially a little worried, as our equipment was not slated to arrive until late in the week, but was pleasantly surprised when it showed up over Tuesday and Wednesday. After a bunch of testing, we began to record. The episodes were a total blast to record. Unfortunately, though, we messed up our first recording and had to re-record the entire thing. It wasn't an issue, though, as our re-recorded episode turned out better than the original, in my opinion. It was super cool to see our podcast up on official streaming services, along with a logo that turned out great, although it did take a few tries to get that right. We are most likely going to keep experimenting with more formats to continue approaching the marketing aspect of our project. These would probably be social media-based, catering towards shorter lengths and catchy moments to draw attention to the much longer and more attention episodes. It is just a matter of whether

Not much was accomplished today, simply due to it being game day for the Men's Tennis team. We were away, and at Dublin nonetheless, which meant an early departure and late return. As such, I simply slept in to get some good prep for my match. We won, our first win for the team as a whole. We were super pumped.  Returning late, I rushed off to dinner and then returned back to the room. Max and I contemplated recording an episode, but we didn't have the drive to produce what we thought would have been great so we held off.  We spent the rest of the night just hanging with our friends and having a great second-to-last weekend on campus. 

After our minorly successful recording session last night, we woke up focused on the podcast. We decided to give the next episode a shot, and picked a few ideas that we thought would be interesting. The recording lasted only about 30 minutes, but the editing took much longer as we went in a more fleshed out direction for some segments of the podcast. This meant I had to splice in pieces of music, which proved to me much more of a hassle than I had expected. After exporting the podcast and listening to it back though, we weren't very happy with the outcome. It was definitely more focused and reigned in, but nearly too much. It lacked some of the energy found in our pilot episode, and so after further contemplation we decided to vault it. There were some parts we really enjoyed though, particularly towards the end, and so we will definitely use those. 

Today was a bit of a lazy day for us. After publishing our pilot episode last night, we mainly spent the day gathering feedback and reflecting on the episode. We started to craft a framework for our next episode, considering whether we wanted it to be more funny or more introspective. We also played around with some other formats, such as a video-styled segment in which we would rank rappers on a tier list. After I made one on a handy website, we sat down and simply gave it shot. We took many takes, but it was getting late and we were beginning to lose our focus and the episodes took a turn much more down the comedy lane, not for the better but for worse. However, we still liked portions of them so we may push those out in the future, in a shortened format. 

Lucky for us, the rest of our equipment arrived and we got right to setting it up. With the boom arms and cables, we finally had everything we needed to begin recording. Our first task was to set up the equipment with the software we had downloaded. It was a bit of a struggle at first, trying to make sure it sounded good and was recording us well. Eventually though, we were able to get it to where we wanted in terms of quality. We began recording that evening, and after a little bit of editing, sent our first episode out. We were able to get it up on SoundCloud and Spotify only at first, as Apple Podcasts proved to be a bit of a hassle. 

Not expecting much for today besides some further outlining and idea producing, it was a pleasant surprise when the equipment arrived in the early afternoon. We brought it back to our room and immediately began unboxing it all. After it was all said and done, our room was littered with packing tissue and random accessories. It was time to assemble everything and plug it all in. Before we could finish this, however, we immediately noticed that we were missing something very important: the cables and mic arm to connect the mics to the amp. We had to halt there and instead decided to set up the software side of things in preparation for when they would arrive. I spent the evening continuing more or less of the same on the software side of things.  

Relaxed day. Woke up stress-free, got some breakfast, and headed off to assembly to announce school leader results. As our equipment hasn't arrived yet, Max and I spent the day writing down ideas for our podcast and planning for the first few. We met with Scott to discuss what we had done and our direction for the entirety of the two weeks, and he was able to offer us some good advice. I won't lie, it was incredibly nice to be done with classes and homework. Hopefully tomorrow all of the equipment will arrive and we will be able to get it all set up. I am super excited for the first episode! I may post a sneak peek here.