Out of all my classes that I have taken during this certificate journey, my Digital Storytelling class with Dr. Lindsay Harding is the one that demanded all the skills I learned and then some. The class was designed to expose students to a range of storytelling possibilities in Digital Media and to help each student become cognizant and adaptable to the needs of every form.
For the final project in this class, I chose to create a narrative horror podcast with an accompanying website. I wrote this project with a young adult audience in mind, and it was my intent to reflect the existential fears that I had gone through during my college experience. To avoid making it just a dreary experience, I went for an absurdist, darkly comedic tone. I created five episodes about 5 minutes each.
This was a very challenging assignment. I had about a month to create it and the website. It was during the Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020, so I was still processing the isolation I felt. That lent itself to the idea of somebody who was trapped alone in a supernatural situation. I enjoyed Lovecraftian horror, and I recognized that radio/podcasting allowed for me to toy with the audience’s visual imagination. As such, when I wrote the scripts for this podcast, I had to strike a balance between satisfying the audience’s need for clarity and thorough description, and disturbing absence of description. It took a few revisions before I reached a balance that I was satisfied with.
This show, however, was more than just scripts. Over the course of this class and the classes I had taken previously, I learned that multiple elements could be pulled into the narrative. The text on the website is all spoken through the lens of a mysterious, third-party narrator, and the images hint at plot details. Of course, the actual audio also uses sound cues and (admittedly not stellar) acting to convey what text alone could not.
As a completed work, “My House in the Middle of the Void” definitely has its issues. The sound could have been mixed better, the descriptions had room to be more vivid, and would have liked to use a stronger actor for the lead. I am nonetheless very proud of how it turned out, and I am even more proud to say that it won a Digital Media award at my university. Through this experience, I not only earned experience in creating a podcast, but I also learned to think beyond a single medium and instead involve weave multiple elements together to create a cohesive narrative. I hope to make more projects like this in the future, and to create something even more ambitious than this project.