This podcast put together a storyline really cohesively, and as an avid fan of podcasts, I thought that this exercise was really interesting. In order to write about the podcast, I had to make sure that I wasn’t just passively listening to the podcast, and instead, taking the time to notice aspects of the podcast that I wouldn’t have noticed before, such as the transitions in between scenes, and the subtle background noise that would help the listener to visualize where the characters in the story are.
What I really enjoyed about this podcast is the way that they set up the storyline. Instead of using a narrator to unfold the story, they used a series of conversations and phone calls between the main character. The podcast really goes above and beyond to convey to the listener what exactly is going on, by keeping the dialogue between characters as natural as possible, allowing the listener to immerse themselves into the podcast. Because podcasts are missing a visual element, it’s really important to create an atmosphere that will allow the listener to fully transition from their own surroundings into the content that the podcast is attempting to convey. For example, at the very start of the podcast, you could tell that the main character, Heidi is setting up a recording device by the way that the volume was inconsistent, and the way that it kept falling over. This inconsequential detail moved the storyline by showing the relationship between Heidi and the other individual that she was talking to. A recording device is only being set up in specific settings that are involved in the legal system, where the conversation can be used later as evidence. Furthermore when Heidi was talking to Colin, her collegue, you can assume the kind of person he is just by the way that he reacted to stepping on a little girl’s backpack in the middle of the airport, the way that he wasn’t listening to what Heidi was saying, and the tone of voice that he uses with her. It’s important to go out of the way to set up scenarios where he is impatient with her, where he does yell about the backpack that he steps on, because it shows the dynamic between Colin and Heidi and can almost immediately come off as a character that the listeners may not really like, which is important in the storyline.
I think that because podcasts are missing the visual element in the storyline, it’s really important to recreate that element using deliberate strategies to help immerse the listener into the podcast and the story. I feel like this podcast did a really great job at immersing the listener into the storyline without using narrative elements. It’s intelligent and it requires the listener to be intelligent to put together the information that the dialogues and the phone calls provide to the listener, which makes podcasts as a medium so much more intriguing than other mediums.