HOW TO
Create a podcast
One iPad Pro, six apps and a good idea. That’s all you need to make a can’t-miss podcast. Don’t believe us? Let us introduce you to Adam Bunker. He’s done just that.
With little prior experience in the apps he was using, Bunker – a writer by trade – went from penning Un/Resolved, a radio play-style Podcast, to recording, mixing and releasing it. And he did it all from his iPad Pro. Even if that wasn’t his original plan.
“I listened to Serial when that came out in 2014 and thought ‘Why don’t I write my own story?’. That idea spread out into this concept of six episodes of a podcast and then six episodes of an audiobook where one completes the other,” he tells us.
“I only started writing it on my iPad because I wanted it to be separate from my work computer.”
Bunker jotted his ideas down in OneNote before using a separate tool to turn these thoughts into a fleshed-out script.
“Scrivener is as simple as you want it to be, but also as deep as you could ever need,” he explains. “It’s really good for screenwriting and radio plays where you need a formatted script.”
“If you just hit enter it will ask if you want a character, screen direction or whatever. If you tap a character and hit enter again you’re asked which character. It really speeds up going through a script and it also does automatic backups.”
Having perfected the script, the next step was to record it.
“I used Hokusai for recording,” Bunker explains. “It’s simple to use but has lots of features – like noise reduction. You can take a sample of background noise, get the app to listen to it and remove that sound from the whole recording.”
It’s a feature that would come in more helpful than Bunker could have realised.
“I made a little sound booth at home, but I live under the flightpath for London City airport,” he explains. “I would have people come around to my house to do some recording but we’d have to stop every 30 seconds for planes to go over.”
"I then tried to record at my friend’s house but we had to stop every minute because of tube trains going underneath. It was a comedy of errors trying to get the audio recordings to not be awful.”
“By the time I'd done my first recordings I had fallen in love with the idea of my iPad being this crazy productivity house in this little body,” he continues. “I thought ‘Right, I’m going to do everything for this project from now on my iPad, part as a challenge and also as a nice story to tell people.”
With the recordings done, Bunker went on a two-month honeymoon and took his iPad Pro along for the journey.
“I had little bits of time to kill while on holiday and discovered just how capable GarageBand really is. I ended up using it to mix a rough cut on a bullet train in Japan.” he explains.
“I even made the theme tune in GarageBand using a combination of slowed down Apple Loops and some strings that I put over the top.”
It’s not just Un/Resolved’s crucial audio components that were crafted on iPad.
“I needed a logo and had this idea, so my wife and I made this crazy murder board in our house one night,” says Bunker. “I took photos with my iPad, imported them to Affinity Photo and made the logo surprisingly fast.”
“Once I had the murder board, I also knew I wanted to use it in a video trailer incorporating the audio. I made the trailer in a couple of days using LumaFusion,” adds Bunker.
“Prior to starting I didn’t think I would be doing this whole project on one device but I’ve been pleasantly surprised at every turn.”