“Producing is an act of discovery"🧵
Helping folks make audio about their own lives (part 2)
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Yesterday’s newsletter featured an interview with Alvina Chibhamu, on producing a podcast about her experiences of seeking asylum for We are VOICES. Be sure to read that first if you haven’t already.
For part two, I speak to senior producers Jude Shapiro and Bridey Addison-Child, about teaching audio-making, finding big themes in little anecdotes, and how to work more collaboratively with the people whose stories we’re telling.
You ran remote workshops to teach the ambassadors [refugees and asylum seekers] how to produce audio. How were the workshops structured?
Bridey: The main thing I was interested in was giving people a sense of creative freedom over their stories. So not just that they came and were like, “this is who I am in the context of being an asylum seeker”.
But [instead] they’re there as creatives, [so I was asking]: “How would you want to express yourselves? And what examples are there in the audio world that you can draw from?”
We listened to lots of different stuff, for example Everything is Alive (which I think is something that could only exist in audio), and Arlie Adlington’s piece about gender-neutral toilets. It was [about saying], “you might have an idea of what a podcast is, but there are all these options.”
Later on we did interviewing techniques, and how to prep for an interview. That session bore so much fruit. Watching people use the skills they’d learned was really gratifying.
Jude: For context, the group is part of the VOICES Network, which is linked to the Red Cross. They’re a group of ambassadors who have already had experience doing media work, but they’ve never really been part of a project where they had complete control.
In this group people have had bad experiences with the media. They just felt like they were giving their story to people. It took quite a few weeks for us to keep saying to people, “no, you're deciding what happens here.”
We were doing it all remotely. We had to create a classroom feel with people from different countries, of different experiences, with unbelievable things going on in their daily lives or in their past.
Bridey: One of the major challenges we faced was [working in a group with] a real diversity of skills. Some people were really great at interviewing, others great at coming up with these massively poetic metaphors from their daily lives. Some people really took to the audio diaries, some people hated those.
Jude: We said, record a minute of audio from something that happens in your day and send it to the group. The main thing was confidence; people just didn’t know what to record. So me and Bridey started doing them ourselves. We sent ones where we were like crying or having a freak-out in the middle of the night and just sharing that vulnerability. It was like: this is how far you can go.
One of the things we were trying to teach, which I think every producer probably has to teach, is how to make big themes really small. We gave people the challenge: what’s the smallest thing in your day that you can use to talk about something big that's happening in your life? We had graphs of big themes getting smaller, smaller, smaller -- like how small can you go [to represent] the biggest thing in the world?
What’s an example of that?
Episode one includes Diamond, who wanted to talk about loneliness. While we were at the audio diary stage, she was gifted some lovebirds by a friend. She was already recording notes about loneliness, so then the birds became a focus for all her feelings about loneliness and freedom.
What is the hardest thing about teaching audio making?
Bridey: For this project in particular, the biggest challenge was teaching technical skills remotely.
If you want to co-produce and collaborate, it’s this sense of: no one is the subject of their own life, they’re the protagonist. And so [getting across] a sense of: “what you have to say is important, what is happening in your life is important.” You can create audio out of anything; you can tell a story in audio out of a tiny moment in your day.
They would say to me repeatedly, “I have nothing interesting to say”, or “I feel powerless in my day to day life”. And then they would tell a story that I was like… “we should put this on the radio!”
I think like any producer, it’s [about gaining] confidence that you should make a thing. That there is room in the world of creativity and capitalism to make a thing that someone would listen to and be interested in. That if you’re experimental and playful and interested in doing it for yourself, then it’s worth doing.
Jude: Our teaching experience was also how to teach remotely. We were in full cheerleader mode all the time. That was really fun. Towards the end, when everyone got together, they were so pumped.
The role of producer is notoriously hard to define and varies from shop to shop. How did you approach what everyone’s role was?
Bridey: The interviewing, episode planning, themes, and scripting were done by the ambassadors. Then I did post-production in consultation with them; I would give them options for music, for example, and we would discuss what the episodes should sound like.
At one point -- quite a while into the project -- one of the ambassadors texted me and she was like, “Bridey, what even is a producer?” And I was like, now you’re a producer! Like, now you’re getting it, nobody knows!
How did working with the ambassadors affect your own ideas about how to make audio?
Jude: Every plan we had for a workshop completely flew out the window within five minutes, and always, always for the better. Once I realised we had to go with the flow instead of sticking to certain objectives, then all of the ideas that came through were just infinitely better than anything that we could have pushed people towards.
During a brainstorming session, Rima said she wanted to interview destiny. And I was like, “who’s Destiny?” She was like, “no, I want to interview my destiny. And personify it and ask it what’s going to happen to me.”
Bridey: The whole point of co-producing and collaborating in this way is to provide depth to the stuff you’re making together and to not do extractive interviewing, and not manipulate someone.
Because fundamentally, I think you can enter an interview and be manipulative. That’s what you’re trying to do as a producer. Sometimes it’s like, how can I extract this story? That’s not how I want to operate. But I think that’s a way we sometimes get taught.
Having the privilege of working with people over that length of time, properly getting to know them, giving over power to them and hearing about everything in their lives… it has really embedded in me this idea of let’s reject this way of packaging up people’s lives into convenient trauma stories.
It was so important to bring light and joy and humour. And [show] that they’re people who laugh and have relationships and have likes and dislikes. Their lives are not these things for you to just conveniently listen to on your commute because it feels like you’re raising awareness. It’s all really complicated.
How do you want to take these ideas forward into other projects?
Jude: It’s tricky …. because [it’s about] having the time to develop relationships with people. And that costs either money, or you just have to decide to do it. It was the friendships that were built that meant all those conversations could happen, and that’s never factored into a budget or working days or production time. It has to be a decision you make.
It was obvious to do the workshops with a group of people who had never done audio, but I can imagine that would be really useful to do on any project. To have that shared listening, having similar points of reference.
Bridey: As a group we spent time [considering]: what do we want the overall feeling of this project to be? What do we want listeners to take away? How do we want to be represented? That’s something I would definitely do again.
I just feel like I never want to make anything ever again that is about (I mean, I realistically will, because you’ve got to pay rent) going into a room with somebody, sitting down and saying, “Ok, we’ve got two hours, this is my opportunity to extract material from you that I’m then gonna mix into this nice thing.”
We’re at this interesting point in audio where people are perceiving it more as an artform. And in most artforms, when you work with someone, you don’t consider them a subject. If you’re using their words and perspectives, they’re your collaborators. Even if you aren’t doing six months of workshops [like we did], you’re still co-producing with someone who’s decided to work with you.
Jude: I think there are things you can do on a small scale. If you’ve only got two hours with someone, you could send them examples of stories that have inspired you [or what you imagine the story sounding like]. Before doing this, I could have imagined hiding [that part of the process] from [an interviewee] because it might mess up the interview or would be revealing too much. But now I wouldn’t hide that. It’s not just that it wouldn’t ruin the story -- it would actually make it better.
Bridey: I also write and I love poetry. People talk a lot in poetry about writing as an act of discovery. You don’t sit down and think, “hey, I’m going to write a poem about my dad and it’s going to have this, this and this in it.” Most people free-write first and [then develop ideas].
As a producer I’m really keen to be producing as an act of discovery. Thinking ok, there’s something here, let’s just go and see what it’s about. Being open to discovering new things all the time, not having a set idea what an interview or project is going to be.
What advice do you have for producers who would like to work in this way? What’s a good entry point for approaching charities or organisations?
Jude: I’m employed at the Red Cross; I already knew the VOICES Network a bit. So I think an important part of the process is explaining to an organisation that you’re going to spend time with a group of people [to build relationships] before you head into production. Make that clear from the beginning.
Another element that was really important in this way of working was having a space where people could talk about how they felt. A Red Cross staff member from the psychosocial team gave confidential sessions to discuss: what does it feel like to share your story? What are you worried about?
Bridey: There are plenty of organisations out there that work with people who come from different parts of society and who have lived experience of various things. Approach them and see if they have money.
Once you’re at that stage, the first thing is to put money and time in the budget to build trust. That’s not some fluffy thing, that’s central to how the project will work.
And secondly, it’s about being aware of the power you hold. As a producer I’ve spent a long time learning to do what I do, I have a specific set of skills you couldn’t teach somebody in three months of remote workshops. So [considering], ‘I’m the person who’s holding power in this way; how do I give as much of that power as possible to the people I’m working with, while also retaining the advantages of what I’ve learned?’
Sometimes I needed to guide them towards a certain thing or help them see where their strengths were. So it’s being aware of that power and then trying to lift other people up with it.
Oh and also, don’t make a schedule! Producers shouldn’t co-produce unless they’re willing for it to be chaos. But good chaos… fruitful chaos!
How do you feel now the show out there?
Bridey: I just feel happy and privileged to get to be a person who works in the world doing this. My dream is in a few years’ time, a few of the ambassadors are working as producers. I see that for some of them.
I want to see more people working like this. I’m excited to see how the space continues to change and how people are ambitious with creative decisions and shake off some of the older ways of doing things.