The Admiral’s Log
Notes on podcasting from the Seaplane team.
How Much Editing Does a Raw Interview Need Before It Becomes a Real Story?
There's no universal ratio here, whatever rule of thumb you've heard about hours of editing per minute of finished audio. The real answer depends on what job the piece is actually doing. A tightly structured documentary segment often needs heavy shaping to hold together. A conversational, hangout-style interview show usually wants a much lighter touch, because part of what people are there for is the unfiltered, unpolished feeling of two people actually talking. The amount of editing should follow the format's job, not a fixed formula applied the same way to everything.
Adapting Oral History Interviews Into an Episodic Structure
Oral history and a narrative audio show exist to do two genuinely different jobs, even when they're built from the exact same recording. Oral history exists to preserve the whole story: the full, sometimes nonlinear, sometimes messy shape of someone's actual memory, kept intact as a historical document meant to last. A narrative show exists to shape material into an arc a listener will actually follow from beginning to end. Those two goals can pull in opposite directions: preservation wants completeness, storytelling wants selection and shape, and adapting oral history material into an episode means serving the second goal without quietly betraying the first.
Building Narrative Tension in Nonfiction Audio
Narrative tension in a nonfiction piece is about timing more than it is big juicy details. Often the details you’re working with are complex and smaller than some kind of big reveal. You can't manufacture an obstacle that wasn't there, or write in a twist that didn't happen, but what you can do is find the honest, real tension that's already buried in the material, and structure the story so a listener feels it the way you felt it discovering it yourself.