HOW I STARTED A PODCAST
Part 3 - The lightbulb turns on
In the months that I was conducting my research and then started doing interviews, I kept checking the Apple podcast app to make sure that no one had yet claimed “The Creationists” as a podcast title. Obviously, they hadn’t.
The next step was to try to design an eye-catching graphic. Pretty early on, I had decided that I wanted an image of a lightbulb with an exclamation point inside of it to illustrate the “a-ha” moment of a new idea. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted it to look like so I Googled “images of lightbulbs with exclamation points inside.” Search engine results rarely fail me so I wasn’t surprised to find several dozen examples of what I was looking for.
One image quickly separated itself from all of the others as the graphic that was going to tell my story. All I needed to do was buy the licence for the image and download it and I’d be on my way. There was one problem though. The company that claimed to own the image was Japanese and when I tried to buy the licence I kept being directed to a site that no longer existed. I tried several times but to no avail. I had to try another route.
My first inclination was to find an illustrator who could create the image I wanted but I needed to be careful to not infringe on whatever copyright might be held for the image that I had Googled. I needed a way to describe to an illustrator what I was looking for. It turned out that the answer was on my phone. My sister had been creating artwork on her iPhone’s Notes app for several months so I opened up mine and tried it myself. Using the virtual pens and markers in Notes I used my index finger to draw a yellow lightbulb with a black exclamation point and orange rays around the bulb. My drawing wasn’t great but it gave me something to use as an example for illustrators as well as an idea as to how to tease the upcoming podcast.
I looked online for inexpensive illustrators and four the site Fiverr. They had hundreds of illustrators to choose from. You could search styles as well as price points. I chose someone whose style looked close enough to what I wanted and reached out to them sharing my primitive example and trying to explain what I hoped they could deliver.
In the meantime, I started creating alternative images of the lightbulb that I would use to tease The Creationists on my socials. I drew a “cloud” version on my iPhone notes. I drew a lightbulb on the condensation that built up on our bedroom window one morning. I created a peanut butter and jam lightbulb sandwich. And, finally, when I cut a lightbulb and exclamation point out of construction paper I had a fresh moment of inspiration.
My static drawings of the lightbulb had done their jobs in as much as my friends on the socials were getting curious as to what was going on. But, when I had the cut outs in front of me, I realized that I could make them move with stop-frame animation. I love doing projects like this and I was excited to get started.
It was simple, really. I set up my iPhone on a tripod and carefully placed the lightbulb cutout on my desk. I shots stills frame by frame as I moved pieces out of place and, eventually out of the lens’ view. Next, I transferred all of the photos to my desktop and imported them into iMovie. And then - I realized that I had shot all of the photos upside down and needed to re-format them one by one. Oh well, lesson learned. (Side note: no one ever learned anything by being right all of the time). I chose January 1, 2020 as the day to post the animation to reveal that The Creationists was a podcast set to launch in February.
At this point, though, I still didn’t have a finished graphic for my podcast...