Tea Tips - The production of a weekly video podcast - Part 1

During the filming of our web travel series "Getting Around", we met Mark "Dr. Tea" Ukra at Dr. Tea's Tea Garden and Herbal Emporium in West Hollywood. After we posted that episode on TripFilms, it occured to us that Dr. Tea would make the perfect host for a tea-centric video podcast. He had the energy, charisma and knowledge to make a fun and informative podcast. Now, although Mariessa and I had already been producing a web series, this is my first forray into the world of podcasting. Our travel series was produced exclusively for TripFilms.com, so we couldn't distribute it through iTunes or other podcast aggregators.

Over the past few years, I've been a regular viewer of podcasts such as "Diggnation", "Ask A Ninja" and "Tiki Bar TV", and there are a few tips I've learned about creating a successful podcast:

1 - Keep it simple
2 - Keep a regular schedule

If you try to make a podcast that is too complicated, and requires a lot of work to shoot and edit, and you're not getting paid upfront, then it's very easy to get discouraged and overworked. And more often than not, big complex productions that involve a lot of people volunteering their time, fall apart as soon as other paid work opportunities come up. So we wanted to make sure it was something we could shoot in under 2 hours, and edit the same day.

Secondly, it's important to stick to a schedule, weekly, daily, it doesn't matter, just try to make it regular. Viewers that can expect a new episode at a certain time, are much more likely too stay interested in the show. I remember "Ask A Ninja" was pretty regular, and then they didn't release any new episodes for over a month, I know a lot of people stopped watching after that. So we picked a weekly schedule of publishing a new episode every Monday. Sometimes it helps to shoot 2 episodes at once, which gives you some extra time next week to publish the second one.

to be continued...

-Posted by Jedrzej Jonasz