Podcast
The Lost Files of Agent Y and Z:
Ice Cave Adventures
About this Podcast
In The Lost Files of Agent Y and Z, you will be transported into a world where Dragons have long disappeared, hunted down by humans. In this dragon-hating society, Yvonne and Zabeus, designated Agent Y and Z as named by the awkward dragon-loving Zabeus, are on a mission to find the last living dragon. Or in Yvonne’s case as the favorite child, her actual reason is to prove that her sibling is a crazy lunatic after-all. Who is correct? Find out on their journey!
Podcaster Bios
Miranda Hernandez
Miranda Hernandez is a senior at MVHS and second year at Freestyle Academy. Since she loves to travel but rarely does so, she is very passionate about art-ing her way out of the ordinary. Her hobbies consist of reading, art, storytelling, learning new things, meeting new people. She believes there is a little bit of pizzazz in the ordinary. Most days she spends indoors creating sketched and occasionally talking walks through nature.
To further her storytelling skills, she’s exploring fantasy more in depth through this podcast (she finds that acting like the spoiled child once in while can be fun). She acts as the voice of Agent Y, Yvonne is the favorite child and a very prejudiced non-dragon believer.
Kelly Lam
Kelly Lam is a senior at Los Altos High and a first year at Freestyle Academy. She is studying animation, and her hobbies include reading, singing, playing video games, and folding origami cranes. They have 3 years of experience playing D&D and also have an interest in fantasy themes and storylines. As a result of her experiences, she heavily enjoys roleplay in group environments with people she’s comfortable with, which is why she thought this idea for a podcast would be fun.
Kelly is usually quite good at acting like she’s clinically insane, which is why she’s playing the role of Agent Z, or Zabeus.
Vamp Zimmerman
Vamp Zimmerman attends Freestyle Academy and Mountain View Highschool. They study film at Freestyle Academy and is the secretary & treasurer for the Gender-Sexuality Alliance at Mountain View High, they like to style and personalise their clothes, make yarn voodoo dolls, as well as tell gruesome stories. In the podcast The Lost Files Of Agents Y and Z, Vamp plays the dragon Zeta, their love for coming up with gruesome & complicated backstories as well as their long standing love of dragons made them a good fit for a dragon thousands of years old. They are currently working on a short film for their Senior Narrative and are planning to go to community college in New York, then transferring to a four year college, and moving to New Jersey.
Introduction
Our goal for our podcast was mainly to just have fun with whatever fantastical ideas we came up with as we brainstormed. We took up different character roles for the concept of interviewing a real life dragon and ran with them in wild directions. We even made character sheets for each of the characters so we could individually develop our different traits and personalities while keeping a couple of secrets that we decided to save for our partially improvised recording session.
We were initially inspired by a fantasy podcast called The Magic Tavern on Spotify, and we were fascinated by the premise of playing as different characters and fleshing out a storyline in podcast form. We wanted to do something that was different from non-fiction, and we each thought embracing the deranged part of life would be fun.
Annotated Bibliography
- Drake’s Comprehensive Compendium of Dragonology
- This book lists different types of dragon, attributes of them -look, abilities, place of origin, etc. We used this to know basic facts about what dragons would be like in this world, such as their biology, behaviors, and more. For example, we decided that we would be interviewing a frost dragon in the middle of the snowy mountains, who may or may not freeze us to death with their breath weapon.
- “Hello from the Magic Tavern.” Spotify, 2021. https://open.spotify.com/show/0FGOz929il130iXEwkInBa.
- We took inspiration from this podcast. It inspired us to add different sound effects and want to create a storyline, moreover, to add a humorous tone. Due to this we made sure to exaggerate whatever actions were made. Its combination of music, tavern clinking sounds, and static radio inspired our podcast. We focused on adding ice and wind sound effects, snow crunching, and sound effects of transformation. We did our best to emulate its structure.
- The sound effects are also good (tavern sounds, intro music, static radio)
- We took inspiration from this podcast. It inspired us to add different sound effects and want to create a storyline, moreover, to add a humorous tone. Due to this we made sure to exaggerate whatever actions were made. Its combination of music, tavern clinking sounds, and static radio inspired our podcast. We focused on adding ice and wind sound effects, snow crunching, and sound effects of transformation. We did our best to emulate its structure.
- Rosenthal, Rob. “How Do You Know a Story Is Worthy of a Podcast…” Transom. Transom, December 22, 2020. https://transom.org/2020/how-do-you-know-a-story-is-worthy-of-a-podcast-series/.
- This was a very engaging podcast, it focused on character building and imagery. For our podcast, we made sure to make sure there was a backstory for each action to better replicate this podcasts’ casual tone. Moreover its use of interviews to add intimacy and urgency. We learned from this podcast how to find a good story to turn into a podcast.
Process
Recording
We decided to meet on a Thursday afternoon to record, and we went absolutely bonkers in the studio. We all had our laptops in front of us to refer to notes if we needed to, but still none of us had prepared any lines, and other than the conversation topic ideas we had it was pretty much fully improv. Though it was a little bit awkward at first, once all of us had gotten into character things continued pretty smoothly, and we just ran with what we said in the moment as we were saying it.
Editing
The editing process was long and arduous. We had to cut down 28 minutes of talking into about 10 or so minutes, which meant going over and cutting out awkward silences, jokes that didn’t land, choosing which segments to keep and which ones felt repetitive or unnecessary, and more. I also re listened to some parts several times over in order to refine the timing, and switched the positions of clips to make the overall narrative flow better. Then we normalized and batch faded all the clips, and also made other edits to the volume levels of certain parts.
And once that was done, we had to search for and add in sound effects, and then place the sound effects in such a way that matched the timing of the podcast, and make further editions to the actual speaking clips such as adjusting the volume or trimming things out further. I also had the last minute idea of adding a bit of background music to prevent some parts from feeling too silent, despite it not making much narrative sense.
Reflection
Overall, me and my group members are quite happy with how our podcast turned out. Our strange initial idea evolved so much as we continued on, and the roleplaying aspect of it had contributed a lot to our successes. Although we also relied heavily on our brainstormed questions we had prepared beforehand, we also came up with a lot of ideas on the spot while recording (though sadly a few of them were cut out for the sake of time and story flow). As expected, editing was a pain, as we had to cut down our half hour long recording to a reasonable length and add so many other elements. However, it was also fun to see how our product evolved and was polished as we trimmed and balanced the audio, refined the comedic timing of jokes, and added sound effects.
I feel like all of us really put our souls into our characters, and it was nice being able to just mess around in the recording studio while acting out arguments and such. Additionally, being funny took some trial and error, and we had to figure out what worked and what didn’t while editing what we got initially. In the end though this was an extremely fun experience, and I’m glad I got to spend time with my friends in creating this chaotic mess of a podcast.
