Audio, 2018 // 10 minutes

Project Description

The culmination of a sound design class I took during my sophomore year, this 10-minute long podcast tells the story of Laura, a girl who got involved with a cult called Faith Gateway Church during her first college semester. It is a true story (with names of characters and the church itself changed to protect privacy), and the podcast consists of snippets from an interview I conducted with Laura, my own voiceover recordings, and background music that I composed in Logic Pro X.

This project marked my first attempt at creating a podcast. I was originally intrigued in Faith Gateway after I came across a news article about the organization, which documented the stories of several ex-members who were coming forward to warn others against getting involved with the church. Shortly after this, I found out that a friend of a friend was transitioning away from the church, and I asked her if she would do an interview with me. At the time of production, “Laura” was in a bit of a sensitive position in relation to the church, which is why I ended up changing the names of everyone involved in my project. This presented an interesting design challenge for me, as I still wanted to tell Laura’s story without compromising her, but I didn’t want to modify it too much for fear of losing the authenticity of the story itself. I ultimately decided to change the names of Laura and the church, and manipulated the audio of the interview recording to make her voice less recognizable.

The Process

After conducting and transcribing the interview with Laura, I set to work organizing the content and mapping out how I would tell the story. I love listening to podcasts like Ira Glass’s This American Life because they have a great mix of interview recordings and narration, so it was important to me to try and have a similar blend of voices in my project. After I arranged and edited all of the recordings, I got to work in Logic Pro, composing a few simple musical motifs and transitions to make the podcast sound more polished. After mixing and mastering, my podcast was ready to go!

Through this project, I learned how to conduct and semi-professionally record interviews (which would be useful in later projects like Separation Anxiety) while also testing my music production skills. It was tough at times to sort through all the content, but I really enjoyed the process and would definitely be interested in making more podcasts in the future.