Audio -->Visual

To connect to my post from last week:
While perusing This American Life's podcast archive for inspiration for my own podcast, I came across this. Around the 30-minute mark of episode 328, Ira Glass speaks about the relationship between radio and television, specifically his love for The O.C. (which I included in my last post). Glass concludes that while TV shows appear more commercial and less inventive than radio, some viewers end up making these shows very personal to the point where they establish relationships with the TV characters. Exhibit A: While watching The O.C. one night with his wife, Glass was ecstatic to hear Seth Cohen make a pop-culture reference to This American Life and Glass himself.

The connection between radio and TV is significant to Glass because This American Life has its own show on Showtime Network. Here, This American Life explains how they turned a popular radio show into television, what kind of audience they were hoping to attract and how they struggled to make stories of real people stand out from the barrage of "reality" shows on MTV and VH1.

During the time when Glass and his colleagues were pitching the show to a couple of different networks (in 1999), he kept a blog on Slate.com. On this blog, he notes how strange it feels to be turning radio into another genre of media. Although neither radio nor television were "new media" genres at the time, it felt very "new media" to be translating non-image based audio into a colorful, image-based series that relied on actors and scene changes. Glass relates this challenge in an excerpt about a conversation with a network executive:

"An exec who listens regularly to This American Life talked about the fact that one thing that's exciting about the radio show is that one doesn't see the people in the stories. One is left to imagine moments which are described. Could we retain that feeling in a television version of the show? I replied that I thought we could if the pictures for some of the stories were more impressionistic, more suggestive. If they were more like a rock video, more pretty, less like 60 Minutes."

Ultimately, this ambiguous, "arty" idea scared the executives and they passed on the show. But what is interesting is the struggle Glass faced in using images to illustrate audio-based stories, much as I am struggling to figure out how to emphasize my podcast with images and sound. How do images correspond to text and how do you make them universal enough that listeners/viewers of the podcast can relate to the story? When is it appropriate to show the viewer exactly what you mean and when can you let their imagination run wild? Essentially, Glass decided to make each episode appear as a movie; a continuous flow of photos and interviews with the subjects and storytellers, with Glass himself narrating certain parts of the story. Here is the trailer for season one.

In researching this radio show and its move to television, I've found the process quite similar to producing an enhanced podcast. We too must produce an entertaining "episode" that has both audio and visual qualities. Striking a balance between the two has proven to be difficult, but I am looking to This American Life and other podcasts for inspiration. When I listen to these, what images do I picture? Could I make that image in my head concrete? I think a podcast about technology--specifically email--is difficult because a slide show of tech images won't make for an interesting visual argument. Like Glass and his crew, I will just have to keep experimenting with finding a balance that speaks to my viewers.

Images:
1. Screenshot from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqYVxNLdn-A&feature=PlayList&p=13D17F7B770E7B26&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=53
2. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/About_TV.aspx