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About The Podcast
This podcast in particular, Off The Rails (But Not Really, Don’t Worry We’ve Got Upstop Wheels), surrounds the ranking of a coaster, and how many different aspects there are to analyze when putting it through a basic overall ranking. Said aspects include theming, comfort, intensity, and pacing, to name a few.
Podcaster Bio
My name is Spencer Cook, and I’m doing my best to get by in spite of years of suffering from an addiction to roller coasters. I attend Mountain View High School, and aside from talking about roller coasters I do have other hobbies, such as riding roller coasters or memorizing coaster manufacturers. One of my greatest accomplishments is the 159 coaster credits I’ve amounted over my lifetime. In the future, I hope to ride a coaster somewhere in the world. Any coaster at all. Please.
Introduction
So, the podcast was a short assignment we had in English while the Narrative 2 project was busy destroying our brains. It also tied into Digital Media, but it was primarily an English project. And it was as simple as it sounds— write and produce a podcast. I’ll be honest about it— I was very short on time and I sped through the entirety of this assignment past the deadline. I wish I’d spent more time on it, but I had to prioritize other assignments and things in my life.
We used this assignment to learn about how podcasters tell stories in a new and creative way. It’s a medium that’s very easily accessible, as people can listen to it without a visual and can do other tasks in life while they listen. So we did it because it’s a unique storytelling method. Well, I guess that’s kind of why we did it. Mostly we just did it because it’s fun.
Process
I wrote a bit of the podcast in class. I got help from Mr. Greco on fine-tuning the idea, but I simply could not focus in class due to the lifestyle I was living at the end of Narrative 2. And to be perfectly honest, I wrote about half the script and I improvised the rest.
Here are some photos of the pre-production phases, as I narrowed in on an idea and began writing. As you can see, I did actually try at some points. When it came to the actual recording part, I was a day or two behind, and I recorded it half-scripted and half-improvised-but-with-an-idea-in-mind. I sat in my car, overheating, and recorded it with a boom mic for some reason. It sounds terrible. Like all great audiophiles, I edited the final file in Adobe Premiere Pro. I know, I know, blasphemy.
The thumbnail I used was a photo of Maverick at Cedar Point that I took in June 2017. I added some weird effect in Paint.net that is very reminiscent of my long gone days of creating thumbnails for Geometry Dash videos in 2016. The name is a bad joke— upstop wheels are the wheels below the rails so that when a coaster would be flung off the track by momentum, the wheels keep it on the rails. You can often see on the rails of coasters where this happens, as the marks from the wheels on the top of the track disappear momentarily, as they are lifted above the rails.
Here is the partial script I was working off of when recording in the car. You can even see the very moment my brain fell apart.
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Open in new tab Reflection
I also considered talking about other subjects (the weather, trains, weird philosophical stuff, semantics), but ended up doing roller coasters. As I said, I wish I’d spent more time on this project than I did, but I don’t regret putting my time into the other things I had to do. Those few weeks were a living nightmare, and I did what I had to do. While I’m not particularly proud of how this podcast actually turned out, I really did enjoy learning more about the different types of podcasts and analyzing them. I did, in fact, learn something. And that’s all that matters in the end, isn’t it?