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From the student radio producers of Brown University
Inside Out Stories
Use these links to listen and learn more about the stories
One of the happy effects of the success of “This American Life” is that more people, and younger people, are hearing and telling their stories on public radio.
One pocket of such endeavor is at Brown University (Ira Glass’s alma mater) where students produce a weekly series called “Inside Out” for the student radio station. They submitted their work to us, and we chose three vaguely representative pieces from their series: Spookyworld,
Personal Historians, &
Rail Riders
Full descriptions are further below along links to their audio. Here’s Executive Producer Paul McCarthy with more on what they’re doing in Providence:
About Inside Out
The Inside Out radio series on Brown Student Radio is an ongoing product of collaboration between more than a dozen Brown University undergraduate students, none of whom have previously produced for radio. The series is not a product of academic-related work, but rather a purely volunteer-driven project — in fact, the University doesn’t even have a journalism program.
These pieces are amongst the first we produced for the series – interviewing for the first time, editing for the second or third time, etc. The show is organized in a format much like This American Life; it’s an audiozine that explores a different theme each week with documentaries, commentaries, short fiction, and interviews.
Since it’s a weekly show, we often had some intense deadlines to meet – unlike most of the pieces that you may see on Transom.org. Does it show? Perhaps. We’d love to hear from you in the
Talk section of Transom.
All of our stuff is produced with consumer-grade portable minidisc recorders and low-end ($100-) handheld shure mics. We edit it all on a single g4 running protools free, and at the time when all these pieces were produced, we didn’t even have direct digital inputs to the computer.
If you like what you hear, you can listen to all our shows archived online at www.bsrlive.com/insideout. Since these pieces were taken out of the context of the greater edition environment, it will be interesting to see how they are received as stand alone pieces.
- Paul McCarthy, Executive Producer – Inside Out
Spookyworld
Produced by Elana Berkowitz
(Editor’s Note: We uploaded two versions. The original version and a much-shortened one. At Transom.org, we’re interested in behind-the-scenes choices and demands of broadcast. We thought it interesting to do a big cut, to measure the differences in impact, story flow, pace, etc. It is not unusual to need to make cuts, especially at the last minute, and this seemed an interesting opportunity to gauge the effects. We spent less than a hour at ProTools shortening it, simulating a deadline.)
Introduction
“Spookyworld, Massachussets’ own four-million-dollar haunted scream park may seem to be a chaotic rabble of headless ghouls, evil clowns and nouveau witches, but in reality it is a precisely timed and staged production with one aim: to make you scared to turn out the light. Meet the men and women behind the masks.”
Background
This piece was part of a larger Halloween episode of inside/out. My interest in the story was piqued by my lifelong interest in Halloween. Growing up in a fairly religious Jewish household, Halloween, pagan as it is at its roots, was fairly off limits. So Halloween has always been exciting because it annoyed my parents.
Spookyworld itself is an amazing place, which I found out about through the discount coupons that were showing up all around campus. After my first visit, I was concerned that given the sort of elaborate baroque absurdity of the place that my piece would come off too snide and snarky. But after spending real time there all cynicism left my body and ultimately, I felt that the actors and builders I interviewed were artists in their own right who had a serious passion and commitment to the art of the scare. I became enchanted with the place and they allowed me fairly open access to record the variety of training sessions – from zombie walking to how to scream appropriately – as well as letting me record corpse building, costume design and special events makeup. I ended up visiting Spookyworld a total of six times (the final trip being a just for fun trip on opening night.)This piece never would have been completed with out the help and expertise of Paul McCarthy or without the support of my documentary class at Brown.
- Elana
Personal Historians
Produced by Melissa Brough and Dana Turken
Introduction
What is it about nostalgia that makes it such a profound force
in shaping our culture and our personal lives? This piece is part of
our “Nostalgia” show, that explores the ways in which we constantly
reconstruct history.
“From “Kodak moments” to “Hallmark holidays” to “scrappers,” our nostalgia supports many thriving industries. “Personal Historians” Mandy Syers and Jason Friedman make their living in the memory business. They get paid to record a life’s worth of memories for each of their clients. Truth and reality are only debatably relevant. Their job is much more than transcription – it’s a process of editing and shaping the moments that each client wants to be remembered by.”
Background
Dana (who is now studying film in Prague) and I are both interested in the process and use of collecting oral histories of various forms. Aside from “Inside Out”, we both work with the AIDS Oral History Project in Providence, recording the stories of those whose lives have been affected by AIDS/HIV.
So we happily agreed to explore the topic of personal historians for our “Nostalgia” show, hoping to learn from professionals in the field but also a bit concerned about how to make the details of such work appeal to a general audience. You all are probably a more forgiving audience, presumably being interested in documentary work yourselves. In any case, we were pleasantly surprised by how fun this piece was to edit and we hope that you will enjoy these bits of history in the making as much as we have.
- Melissa
Rail Riders
Produced by Rachel Terp and Megan Hall
Introduction
“Two rail riders who now live in Providence have seen a lot of America from the inside of a boxcar. Raphael Lyon says that train hopping is a kind of exchange: the ride is free but you give up a whole week sitting in the back of a freight and watching the land pass by. Rail riders have different strategies for getting on and off a moving train. Caroline McCoy, although she prefers not to jump a moving train, has learned that it safe so long as the train is going slow enough for you to run alongside.”
Background
“Rail Riders” was our first collaborative piece for Inside Out. It was produced as part of a half-hour feature-show on Modern Nomads; Americans who take to the road, rails or sea. The piece took on its form therefore, based on the constraints of being part of a larger product. We were given a small slot of time within the show, and were therefore faced with the task of cutting out hours for valuable sound, until we came to our final product. It was a valuable lesson in radio editing. “Rail Riders” was produced with a handheld minidisk recorder, and Pro-tools audio editing equipment on a Macintosh computer.
- Rachel and Megan
Producer Bios
 Producer Elana Berkowitz with Prozac the Clown, who intones the first lines of the piece — “Welcome to the Cirque Macabre” |
Elana Berkowitz – Spookyworld
Elana Berkowitz is a senior at Brown, double majoring in political science and modern culture and media and currently hanging over the scary precipice of having no plans at all for next year. Her first radio appearance, at age five, involved her describing the lavish Christmas windows at Macy’s department store. Things have only gone up from there and she continues to enjoy radio, journalism and talking a lot.
Melissa Brough & Dana Turken- Personal Historians
Melissa Brough stumbled into the world of radio journalism while trying to escape the misery of freshmen orientation at Brown. After a brief stint as a news anchor for the commercial station on campus, she gladly converted to indie student radio to pursue audio documentary work with the brand new show “Inside Out”. Although born and raised in the green mountains of Vermont, Melissa has made her way north to Alaska and south to Mexico to work on various video documentary projects. She is currently double majoring in Development Studies and Modern Culture and Media.
Dana is in Prague and hasn’t sent her bio yet.
Rachel Terp & Megan Hall – Rail Riders
Rachel Terp was born and raised in Chicago, IL. by her parents Lynn Meyers, Dana Terp, and older-sister Sophie Terp. Rachel’s first lesson in audio-editing occurred a few years back, when her worthy comments failed to make Ira Glass’s final cut for an episode of “This American life”, that focused on her overnight camp, Lake of the Woods. Now working as an audio journalist, she happily wields the editing equipment, and is much happier in the position of the editor, instead of the edited.
Megan Hall was born in San Francisco but she was not raised there. The place she calls home is Portland, Oregon where she lived in the same house for 15 years. She began her radio career as the star of her middle school’s on air production of “The Little Walnut Twig” Now she just interviews people and makes their comments sound good.
Paul McCarthy – Executive Producer
Paul McCarthy loves radio. When students at Brown who were talking
about putting together an ‘audiozine’ failed to follow through, he
realized there was serious untapped potential for radio in
Providence, RI. He applied for a University-sponsored grant for a
new radio series, called “Inside Out” – and was rejected. But with
the assistance of other funders, he has coordinated the training of
all the Inside Out staff and the production of almost 10 hours of
documentary radio since September, 2000. This was his first
experience producing radio.
I hear, Joe, it’s also a technique used effectively in interrogations. In "Darkness at Noon" torture was only one of the techniques the state police used to get prisoners to confess. They’d also give the prisoners something to feel guilty and conscience-striken about (and who doesn’t feel a little of that at one time or other?), leave them to stew in silence about it, and get them to admit to crimes they didn’t even commit!
Fascinating discussion … very good to hear for another young producer.
Of all interviewing skills, it’s been the maintenance and use of silence that has been the most difficultfficult for me to master. My natural impulse is to jump in very quickly with the next question whenever a gap opens up. I think this is largely because I worry that the interview will drift away if I’m not constantly guiding it. I’ve also run into sort of the opposite oElandt Eland was talking about — some of my subjects have tended to be very chatty … I’ve found myself interjecting too manyohquot;oh" bustot;bust" … little verbal roadblocks to slow them down, but very destructive to flow, and hell at editing time.
So needless to say, this discussion is very useful. So is Jay Allison’s article (located elsewhere oweb siteweb site) which addresses basic interviewing procedure … including silent ways of giving feedinterviewers.viewers. I am still working on my silentknee slap.nee slap.
KhanTony Khan posted,
**silence doesn’t really exist, does it?
**If it did, you couldn’t hear it.
Absolutely true in my experience. Silence cancontent-flu.tent-flu. Particularly when it follows or precedes emotionally dense moments in the interview, it allows me time as a listener to fill in the blanks — to come up in my own head with what must be going on inside the speaker’s mind.
Just my 2 cents,
http://www.journale.com
What a beautiful site that is. It took some patience getting it to load, but my children and I are enjoying the "Interviews 50 cents"
I’d like to hear Alex Chadwick explain more about how that is TV "like transom in most ways."
Some of what I like about the video/audio combination is also what I dislike. The beautiful photography (low low orange sunlight on the general store porch) and expert recording mixing (seamless everything) goes down so easily. The experience here seems rougher and more honest in a way.
I’ve been negligent getting permissions. Perhaps the young producers here also find that a drag and would be interested to know, re: the Chadwick example:
When are permission papers passed, if at all? Do Alex’s producers bother? Beyond its use as an ice breaker, does passing money make it a contract without paper? It seems it could break the easy-going building of trust if Alex (or Tony or any of us) were to pull out paper and pen in combination with the 50 cent joke.
Nannette, I’d like 5 cents (not to mention 50!) for every working relationship I’ve been a party to done without a contract. I’m not saying that’s the right way to go, but it’s the reality. And it’s an odd one. The same kind of odd reality as the fact that, after nearly twenty years, so-called "personal computers" are still impossible for average "persons" to master without the daily help of some friendly, neighborhood wonk. We know it’s absurd, but we accept it. It’s as if there’s this big logical and proceedural black hole in the middle of our path we choose to overlook. Somehow, things get done and there’s never a problem until, once in a blue moon, there’s enough money at stake that someone raises a fuss. In thirty years in public broadcasting, I’ve signed two contracts. One of them took so long to negotiate, by the time the ink was dry the number of shows that could be done had to be cut in half. In the other case, the contract was never referred to when there were things to re-negotiate — the attorneys involved had gone someplace else and it would have been too expensive and time consuming to track them down. I also hate to think of how much music is used in all kinds of programming (public and commercial, at least on the local level) that is never cleared! Am I happy about this? No. Do I see the situation changing? Not fast, and probably not fundamentally unless human beings start making significant changes in the way they do business and live their lives before a crisis forces them to. (How many people leave a lousy but tolerable job before they find a better one or get fired? How many politicians or governments voluntarily relinquish power in the interests of fairness?)
Does this mean you shouldn’t get releases from people? Absolutely not. But will you?
About using other people’s music…"Rail Rider’s" had several old- time songs laid down over the course of a few minutes. We used them because the music helped to set the mood for the piece, and the lyrics often complimented the speakers’ stories and points. I was wondering however, what is generally the policy in radio, for using copywrited music? Can you do so legally for a few seconds? is it generally best to use harder to identify ambiance or instramentals as background for a piece?
Upon Barrett Golding’s suggestion (08:53am May 9, 2001 EST (#22 of 54))I listened to Ben Adair’s "Shortstop’s box car confessions" at http://www.well.com/~badair/. I enjoyed the peice emmencely and thought that Ben definitely did a fine job pushing to paint a more comprehensive picture of his chosen hobo’s experience with the rails. I see I have a lot to learn. But back to my first point…Ben chose instramental music to move his piece along, I know TAL often chooses to do the same. If possible, I’d love to here poeple’s own approaches to music in radio pieces.
-Rachel
Hi Rachel, thanks for the nice words about my piece! (And thanks to Barrett too.)
I feel like we talked a little about music — at least I did — in the Paul Tough discussion. Jay’s isolated the comments about Paul Maliszewski’s Open Letters piece which I adapted for my show (the savvy traveler).
With Shortstop, I chose the music I did because I wanted to get the feel for the monotonous sounds — the sort of trancelike "clickety clack, clickety clack" — you probably hear on a box car. However, I didn’t want to revert to cheesy sound effects, or go out and record something that wouldn’t make sense; I didn’t have tape from any of Shortstop’s trips, and I didn’t want people to be thinking that I did.
With music, in general, I try to choose pieces that will enhance the mood for what the people are saying and not just fade into the background. It’s more about scoring a piece than just throwing a beat behind it to keep things moving.
Not to digress or anything.
Bye,
Ben
Not so fast, Ben. Stick around a bit, if you would, and talk about the way you scored a piece I produced on Savvy about a family’s trip to India.
Ten years ago, the Grashows of Brooklyn, N.Y. took their two kids out of school and, pretty much on a whim, spent seven months in Banagalore. I interviewed all four of them seperately, "a la Rashomon," to get their memories and impressions of the trip and what it meant to them today. I asked Ben to score the edit for me. My only suggestion was to make all the music Indian. What Ben did, I think, was a perfect example of what "scoring" can mean. Not just to enhance mood, but to suggest a wealth of other things as well, including a kind of wordless commentary on the clash of the modern and the traditional in culture and a reminder that India’s billions are also individuals.
Tony Kahn
Okay okay,
Sorry for the delay in this, but I was swamped last week with numerous radio chores.
Anyone can listen to the Grashow piece here:
http://savvy.mpr.org/show/features/2001/20010216/india.shtml
First I want to say that in listening to the piece again, a number of months after working on it, I don’t like the music very much. Actually, that’s not true. I like the music selections, but I didn’t take enough care in working with the music to really make it great. Were I to work on the piece again, I’d make many edits in the individual pieces so as to really set it off and punctuate what the people are saying (using posts, breaks and so forth).
That said, what I wanted to do here was in part mimic what the Grashows were feeling as they picked up and moved — really on a whim — from Brooklyn to Bangalore. So the first piece is this really frenetic drum and bass take on traditional Indian raags. The beat is all crazy and listening to it, I think you, the listener, get a little distracted, a little confused by the piece. All the while the Grashows are talking about why they moved and what they wanted and how confused *they* were by what was happening to them ("Why!? Why did we move to INDIA?!")
With only one exception, I used all India-Western fusions: dj Cheb i Sabbah gives us some nice hip hop inspired stuff. Michael Brooks and Nusrat Fatah Ali Kahn have some western influenced qwalli music. The only piece of truly traditional sounding Indian stuff is actually from an English group, but that was more because I didn’t have any traditional-from-an-Indian-group music around. The point of all this, clearly was because the Grashows were from the West, and they were adapting to their environment while at the same time, their environment and the people around them got used to their presence. So as the story continues, the music settles down and becomes more serene, sort of mimicing the story line. It also settles more into the background.
Okay, this post is too long. I hope it answers your question Tony.
Ben, you write
I hope it answers your question Tony.
It does. Thanks. Fascinaitng, isn’t it, how little we actually discuss what we’re doing when we collaborate on something. You can go years working with a colleague and never talk about your methods. You and I never discussed an approach to the Grashow piece except in the most general terms. (i.e., "go with Indian music") I figured my edit would make the case for what it needed in your own terms and it did. Then I listened to what you’d done and made some suggesitons based on that. We never discussed methods or theory; it was all focused on a product, on something we both had done. That’s the way it goes under the pressure of producing daily (or weekly) shows. In fact, talking things out the way we do here would only slow the process down and maybe make us too hesitant to make choices. Ironically, I happen to be sitting here in LA about ten feet away from you right now, Ben, and it’s only because of the internet we’re even having this conversation.
Not to belabor the point, but experience is the best teacher. Someone asks me how to learn to make radio, I say "make radio." It’s too complicated to explain, just do it and you’ll learn. The best time to read the theory and method of a particular skill is after you’ve mastered some of it. THEN it can help you fine-tune what you’re already doing, it makes sense on a deeper, gut level.
It’s too complicated to explain, just do it and you’ll learn.
This is so true. I’m still relatively new to radio. I wanted and wanted and wanted to do it for so long, but for some reason, I never did. And then one day I said, you know what? I’m just going to do it. I called up my local pacifica station and just went in and a few days later, I was making radio. And now here I am working! Who would have thought?
(I still sometimes feel like I’m pulling the wool over someone’s eyes and one day I’ll be discovered …)
>(I still sometimes feel like I’m pulling the wool over someone’s eyes and one day I’ll be discovered …)
I’ve felt that way with almost every job I’ve ever had, Benjamin. My favorite part of David Rakoff’s book is:
The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That’s a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play.
I appreciate the responses to my questions about sound – and the digression that followed. I realize that I brought up the questions late in the game, but what cant you do? Benjamin, is always enlightening to hear others explain their approch to work, and scoring no less. Thanks.
Rachel Terp
Have you thought about putting some of your hard work and good writing into sister print pieces? Spooky World, for example, could probably provide photos if you’ve already moved away. Perhaps it’s not too late to approach magazines for Halloween publication? And there are historically oriented publications for the personal historian piece…Over at Radio College there’s an article by Reese Erlich about getting the most out of each project that way.
the article was by Robin White; he used information from Reese Erlich in the article at radiocollege.org