behind the HOORF: a season two recess

We did it again! Sixteen more episodes, new and returning guests. It’s time for a summer recess. Hoorf! editor and co-producer Ricki Cummings caps off Season 2 with The State of Hoorf: a behind the scenes audio essay offering a peek at all the moving parts that come together in each episode. This episode has a bit of everything, from how we select guests to the type of equipment we use, it should be gratifying for those of you who have come to enjoy discussing disability, pain, politics, love, and revolution.

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Transcript

Elle Billing: 0:00

Hi, my name is Elle Billing. I am a chronically ill queer femme, and I'm tired. I'm here this episode and every episode to dig at the roots of our collective fatigue, explore ways to direct our care and compassionate and sustainable ways, and harness creative expression to heal ourselves and

our world. Welcome to Hoorf: 0:16

Radical care in a late capitalist heckscape.

Ricki Cummings: 0:48

Hi, this week is the final episode of season two of Hoorf. So we're doing a little bookend like we did last

season. This time with me: 0:54

co producer and editor Ricki Cummings. As the title says this episode is Behind the Hoorf. But since most folks aren't necessarily as familiar with me at this point, as you all are with Elle, We'll do a little Behind the Ricki first. As I write this, I'm a 42 year old trans femme from the same basic farmland area as Elle. We grew up between 45 minutes and an hour apart across wheat, corn, soybean, and sugar beet fields in two wildly different US states, but the same basic culture. The first half of my childhood was in Fargo, North Dakota, and most of my quote unquote real growing up was in Glyndon, Minnesota, a town of, at the time, about 900 people. I grew up nerdy as a theater and choir and forensics kid. Yep, I did competitive speaking, managed to do pretty well in that regard. And unfortunately, I ended up growing up into what writer and educator Katie Osborne, aka Katieosaurus, calls a burnt out gifted and talented submissive brat with a praise kink, I mean, minus the brat part. But maybe that's too much information for you at this point in our relationship. Regardless, I ended up doing all the smart kid stuff, but still tended to do really poorly in school because of homework. In high school, this was mostly manageable because I still had deadlines and an incredibly complex home life that required me to accomplish certain tasks in order to avoid punishment to varying degrees. But college? that was something else, between worsening then-undiagnosed depression, struggling with my first real bisexual crush, and still-unregulated and undiagnosed ADHD. I ended up failing out of school twice after long periods of academic probation. Despite this, several years, three states, and a child later, I did finally end up getting my undergrad degree-- 15 years after starting college, with a bachelor, a minor, and an Associate's, all in absolutely unrelated fields. In that first stint in undergrad, I met the mutual acquaintance who would lead to Elle and I meeting, which is ultimately complicated in itself. A few years after that undergrad experience, I moved to Chicago and got a master's in my minor area of study, creative writing with a poetry emphasis. I often tell people that it's the only thing that I enjoy that I am also good at and that might occasionally make me money. And honestly, for a poet, I read very little poetry. This phenomenon will come up later. In addition to the aforementioned depression and ADHD, I've had chronic migraines since I was in lower elementary school. To say that regular employment is difficult for me is an understatement, since between all of the above, executive function and reliable times of ability are hard. This is mostly why I write and work on a podcast that releases episodes every two weeks and takes a lengthy summer hiatus on purpose, which seems like a good way to get into talking about the podcast itself. When we were initially tossing around the idea of the podcast, Elle and I both knew that our disabilities were going to be a major contributing factor to the production pipeline. Most people don't know how much time and effort goes into something like this, especially as a two person operation. I personally wanted to follow a model of television production rather than one of podcast production. Part of that is because most broadcast TV shows are in production for an intense period of time and then take a significant break between seasons. While most of the podcasts I'm aware of are in continuous production, more like YouTube channels or ongoing radio series with the latter. The work never stops. It's always simultaneously in production and in release, but the former so-called Legacy TV, there is an overlap for part of the season. The organizational work of the season starts before a single episode airs actual shooting and post production things like audio and graphics and editing are done every few episodes before anything airs and then as the season is airing, it is also producing episodes. That way there's some leeway in airing the show if some part of the pipeline breaks down or if there's an unforeseen emergency with the cast or crew, then the casual viewer of the show would never know because there's a backlog of episodes available. As long as certain delivery dates are met, everything else is flexible. We don't have to have a massive workload every week forever. And so far, it's been working for us. Outside of two weeks, we've hit every release state over 30 plus episodes, and those two weeks were extenuating

circumstances: 5:28

My dad died toward the end of last season and this season, we took a break in a creator's blackout in solidarity with Palestine, which happened to coincide with both Elle and I being sick. Other than those two things we've managed to get through our own disabilities, scheduling conflicts with deaths or cancellations, scrapping entire episodes after production began, holidays, family emergencies of various types, systems changes, method changes, and guest requests. We are not the most prolific, but we're still here. And we're mostly intact as a two person team. To be clear, others have helped us here. We used to have a person doing transcriptions, but it was unfortunately too much for their plate. And Elle now does that herself with some automated assistance. We used to have someone doing all the accessibility captioning on our social media images. But Elle does that too. To be honest, Elle does the lion's share of planning, scheduling and other administration work in addition to hosting, I'm in charge of the audio and the technical side of things. For the most part, even for a small production, we have a lot of data to keep on top of plus, we're doing the jobs that big professional podcasts have split up among a dozen or more people. So two weeks it is and a summer break. We're still somehow in the top half of podcast downloads. And we've even hit some nice rankings in the Arts category specifically, and the vast majority of podcasts never even make it to 10 episodes. Still being here and still making stuff is a big thing for us. So what does our production process look like? I'm glad you asked. Our pre production for each season starts basically as soon as the season itself ends, we look at what we've done so far, and we look at what we can improve both on the front end, the podcast, and the back end; all of the systems and processes we have in place. For example, this year, we switched how we track episode production and numbering. Last year, we scheduled everything ahead of time and it caused a lot of headaches in episode numbering, behind the scenes organization, and release dates. This year, we just decided to schedule the first few episodes and then let the rest of this season play out as people confirmed or canceled interviews. And we did away with internally numbering episodes at all, referring to episodes by guest name, and you know what? our stress levels went way down! Progress. Once we figure out how we're approaching the season, we prepare a guest list. This ranges from slam dunks like friends we've known forever, or other peers, to pie in the sky guests like YouTubers and actors and all that crap. Then we send out inquiries to people we'd like to have on and then wait. And effectively our schedule becomes a first come first serve list. Sometimes we'll have a guest who wants to schedule a specific time to coincide with project or launching or a schedule something specific for like St Winkus Day. But most of the time a season is flexible. This list is constantly being updated. Of course, any inquiries often go out while the season is already underway. But the season break is when we look at it with the most scrutiny either of us can and will suggest guests. While most of our guests are Elle's choice, and she does retain final say by virtue of being the one doing interviews, several guests have been my picks and several episodes have been my idea. Once a guest agrees to be on our schedules and interview time with them according to their scheduling needs. For a recording platform, we generally use zencaster because its file output capabilities and relative ease of use is handy for us. And then Elle will conduct the interview from the farm in North Dakota and with the guest wherever they are. Elle prepares the interview based on some intake forms and general research. But the interviews themselves are free discussion with the only real consideration being time constraints, we try to shoot for a final episode length of about 45 minutes. But that can vary according to content and whatnot. For example, this season's opening interview with Brandon Connolly was nearly two hours long originally, so we decided to cut it in two and each episode ended up being roughly half an hour after editing. After the interview, Elle uploads the audio files of her and her guest to a shared online drive where I can download them to my computer in Chicago and begin editing which I'll go into in a bit. Once I'm done editing and assembling the audio and any additional interstitial music, I upload the final mix file, and then Elle does the transcript. This is the only automated part of the process where we actually use the AI transcription. But Elle still has to go through the whole episode in real time to make sure it was correct and make sense. And then she uploads the audio and transcript to our hosting and then goes live on every second and fourth Monday. While I'm doing editing and audio, elle is busy making the promo materials for each episode, all the social media cards, scheduling all the announcement stuff, all that. once an episode is live, everything hits Instagram, Facebook and whatever media we happen to be using, then we have maybe a day of downtime until the whole process starts over. This is basically what we do from early September through May or June. Early on, we made a couple of editorial decisions beyond just scheduling. First, we wanted to stay true to the mission of the podcast, which is basically the subtitle of the show, radical care and a late capitalist heckscape. in service of this, we try to keep some sort of levity and everything. Joy is a radical act, and as is commonly repeated among circles of Black activists, indigenous people, people of color, and the LGBTQ-plus communities, existence is resistance. A slight aside, this season was hard for me as someone who struggled with alcohol addiction both personally and in my family. Some of this season was depressingly relatable. And while all of it was necessary, goodness, I am ready for a break. End of aside. Also in service of the late capitalist heckscape part, we wanted to be sure to include members of marginalized communities as much as we can to amplify those diverse voices who make our lives brighter. I think we accomplished that, and I think we can strive to do more next season. Second, I made the unilateral decision as audio editor to keep the audio is true to the original recording as I could. I initially wanted to simply present a warts and all approach to each episode with no edits for pauses, burps, stutters ,vocalized thinking--which is like us and ohms and stuff like that--mic bumps, all that stuff, and letting the conversation simply be presented as is. I very quickly realized that this would be a hindrance to actual meaning. as a one-directional audio format, it's very easy for a listener to get distracted, not to mention that hitting a specific timeframe with that process is really, really hard to do naturally. So now meaning comes first; clarity, second; and verisimilitude third. Sirens going by, dogs barking (Thanks, Winkie), in rapid fire bits of conversation--those stay in if they're not truly distracting. What's important to you all out there to recognize is the folks on this end are real people existing in real places in time. Third, and possibly most importantly, we only feature guests we personally vibe with and whose work and messages we agree with. We're at a very lucky point now that people come to us and pitch their own appearances to us. But we accept very, very few of them. Because a lot of the time, not only are they entirely strangers to us, but their work or product, or whatever, is simply not in line with our values, and they think they can use our podcast for free advertising for their snake oil. We're not doing this for clout or any of that. We just want to share people with the people listening, because we think their stories are important. All of our stories are important. And that's what makes us human. People trying to make a buck off you are not what we're after. With those general guidelines out of the way, here's how I have approached my end of the production process. The following might be boring technical stuff, and I don't know who may or may not be listening, so I'll try to be both as complete and as interesting as possible. First, we record Elle and the guest on separate audio tracks. This is one of the reasons we use zencaster. It allows for the output of both participants independently. Elle uses a podcast industry standard Shure MV7 microphones so I don't usually have to do much work with the audio. But our guests use a wide range of microphones from headsets to professional studio mics. And that's usually where my real work comes in. On top of the variety of microphones, a lot of guests record in less than ideal audio conditions: rooms with bare walls, wearing noisy clothing, having kinda crap internet, all those things. Matter of fact, I'm recording in my bedroom closet right now on a kind of crappy USB mic. So while I do advocate for better recording for guests, it's not always possible. and after I get everything loaded into my editing program, I start the mixing process. Last season I created a template that has most of what I'm about to talk about loaded up so I don't have to fart around with creating and naming things. I usually apply a noise gate right off the bat. This only allows audio signal over a certain volume level to pass which helps clean up a lot of extraneous background noise and only lets the speech of the person through. After that comes an equalizer but only if it seems necessary. This is the most subjective part but it's usually where I account for microphone deficiencies. Every microphone sounds different because it picks up different frequencies and different patterns. And not all of them are good vocal mics, actually. And not all of them sound like the person involved. So I have to accommodate for that and any other weird frequencies like fan noise or something like that. Sometimes I have to apply some processing to remove room reverberation, digital clicks, or other distracting technical glitches, then it's into a compressor, which helps level out volume. Speech is very dynamic. Elle has a very loud laugh. some people naturally speak quietly. So that has to all be wrangled down into a narrower volume bands. So the listener, you, doesn't have to constantly turn the volume up and down on your phone, or computer or whatever. On top of being very good at keeping loud things quiet. I also use compression to bring up the overall level of the recordings making quiet things loud. After that I added any interstitial music I've had to create for the episode. Sometimes there just isn't a transition that works smoothly or some large section needs to be cut, or I need to make up some time for the overall length of the episode. And for those sections, I create some little piece of music or audio to both delineate and bridge the section. As an added detail, I tried to stick to a constraint each season. Last season, everything was in the key of B major. This season, it's everything is created with modular synthesis. After that I assembled the whole episode. The intro and outro bits are holdovers for every episode. So that just gets copied into the whole project. Elle records a separate bio and intro for each guest. And so I import and edit that. after I have everything the way I like it, and I think it sounds right, I do one last comparison listen. One secret audio engineers have is that they're constantly comparing their work to those of other engineers. And unfortunately, audio is a largely subjective experience. So you can't just set the volume at 30 and assume it will sound right. So I compare the volume to one of the few podcasts I listened to, usually Welcome to Night Vale. I can count the number of podcasts I personally listened to on one hand, is similar to how much poetry I read as a poet. When I feel like I have the right sound, I export the track out of Studio One and then load the resulting stereo track into a free audio editor called audacity in order to convert the file into an mp3 for upload to our host. something most people don't realize is the podcasts are extremely low in audio quality. They are monophonic, meaning there's no separate left and right. And they have a very low resolution. They're about four times smaller than a typical high quality mp3. There's two reasons for this. One is that speech is relatively low when it's Sonic complexity. Old landline phones, for example, only include a very small slice of the actual range of human voice. The other reason is that lower resolutions mean lower file sizes. Last week's episode with Darci has a final mp3 size of about 30 megabytes for 45 minutes of audio, the full stereo mix was 450 megabytes, literally 15 times larger, and almost half a gigabyte. That's a lot of stress to put on data networks and a lot of space to take up on your computer or phone. Anyway, once I finished that last export, I listened to it on a couple of different systems just to make sure nothing sounds wonky. Usually I use my normal mixing monitors, and then my computer speakers and sometimes my phone or in the car, then I upload it for Elle to do her distribution stuff with. All this takes me anywhere from half a day to more than a week, depending on the complexity of the episode, whether I need to come up with music, and so on. It takes a bit but it's worth it honest work and all that Midwestern stuff. And then it's on to the next one. in between all that, I'm helping with organization and guests stuff. So that's the production stuff covered. One thing we'd like to do at this point is talking about next season, some changes we might make, and so on. First, yes, we're already working on next season, we have some guests that we didn't get a chance to interview this season, either due to time or various scheduling issues or simply not having things work out. So we have a few folks already on the list for October and beyond. So yeah, there will be a next season; that's already a given. This is as much to inform you the listener as it is me informing Elle, since I wasn't sure how long I could really do this. And now I'm too deep to get out. Second, we may be changing some parts of the infrastructure on the backend. We take our tools and professional partners seriously and in the face of what Cory Doctorow calls the enshittification of the internet, it's becoming harder and harder to find services that align with our anti capitalist ideals. This is part of the reason we don't run advertisements of any kind. We don't want to sell you things that we don't like and you don't want. So we'll be having discussions in the offseason about what to do with recording, distribution and production. Third, I personally wanted diversify our content a little, which is a point Elle and I have discussed before but have never really moved forward on. I like to model that YouTube channel Regular Car Reviews uses an aside here as a warning, if you like cars even a little bit, you should be watching RCR. But Dear God, be aware that if you click on the link in the description, and then it's a vat of literary theory next to the most horrific extreme shitposting you can imagine. And then some. Imagine if Hunter S Thompson was gay and grew up on a steady diet of Fight Club, but like it was good. They have their normally formatted content, which is just straight up car reviews, usually a normal ass car like a Toyota Camry or an AMC Gremlin or something. But they also have other deeper dives into things like the history of a specific manufacturer like Saab, or a specific story, like the time the FBI stole a stolen Ferrari F 50 out of evidence, and then crashed it. It's not their normal content, but it's relevant to the channel and more of a video essay than an 18 minute car review. So is that something we should do? Would an occasional break from the normal conversation format into more scripted, yet relevant to the podcast stuff, whatever it is, Be interesting to you? We don't have comments or anything but feel free to reach out to either of us through the podcast email, or our social media channels or whatever. Everything is so hyper focused in the world of content creation, that it's tough to know what people actually want, that is new or different. So help us out, which is sort of point four here. And that's me hoping that we can get more of a dialogue here with our listeners. The nature of podcasting is very one sided, we make an episode and you listen to it. We know we have a number of very dedicated followers, and we get to talk to those people often through other methods, but our community is spread out. Hopefully, we can create something that is more than simply a passive experience for folks, more of a conversation than a broadcast, though I and we don't necessarily know what that looks like. comments and suggestions are also welcome on that front. Finally, I really want to talk about the reality of creation. And as such, I won't sugarcoat this. The best ways you can help us out, if you like our weird little gig, is to tell your friends by sharing episodes with them and helping with your dollars through a donation or subscription at buy me a coffee.com The truth is that hosting and services cost us several hundred dollars a year. And neither Elle nor I make any money doing this show despite it being a full time job most weeks. The fact of it is that we largely get by on the privileges of family and that becomes a community strain. We really want to keep making these episodes and the long term viability of the podcast becomes harder if we're not able to keep the systems running. So if you want to help out in a very viewers like us sort of way, toss us some bucks, either a one time thing or recurring. Whatever works for you. We will love you forever regardless. And with that, I'm going to wrap up Hoorf Summer Recess (Ricki's version). Thank you so, so much for listening to us over these past two years and for helping get the word out about our show our guests and the work that everyone does. It means so much to us to have found people that Hoorf resonates with. see you or hear you or talk to you in October. Till then, protect your neck

Elle Billing: 23:33

thank you for joining us on this episode of Hoorf. To view the complete show notes and all the links mentioned in today's episode, or to get a full transcript of the episode. Visit Hoorf podcast.com that's H O O R F podcast.com. Before you go make sure you subscribe to the podcast so you can receive new episodes right when they're released. And if you're enjoying our podcast, I'd love to have you leave us a review in Apple podcasts. Reviews are one of the major ways that Apple ranks their podcasts. So even though it only takes you a few seconds, it really does make a difference for us. Become a patron for $3 a month you can support the creation of this podcast, pay my editor and join a community of fellow caregivers out here just doing our best. Thank you again for joining me Elle billing in this episode of Hoorf. Until next time, be excellent to each other. Hoorf is hosted by Elle Billing@elleandwink. audio editing by Ricki Cummings @rickiep00h music composed by Ricki Cummings. Hoorf is a production of Elle & Wink Art Studio all rights reserved. Hoorf podcast can be found on social media channels@hoorfpodcast at H O O R F podcast