It's week two of the Edinburgh Fringe. So this is episode nine of the West Park park bench podcast. Edinburgh Fringe episode three. Confused I always get confused with namings of series. I try and make them very logical. And I try and practice in my head before I start. But inevitably, it just goes out of my mind. This toxic fog this Word.
Greetings, social media, and Metaverse, Wombles park bench Tuesdays. I really do like this sitting here, had a swim, sitting back and I'm trying to make times in my week where I regularly make media. And since I've been making these regular podcasts, I've been able to say to people, I'm doing a regular podcast, doing the live streams during Edinburgh. Go and check those out. There'll be stuff in the show notes.
People have been saying to me, so who's your audience? So if you're listening to this, you my friend, are my audience, but I explained to people that you've got to make media and have a regular output to be able to target an audience. And to say that your audience is just anybody isn't helpful, and it's not true. You've got to make some media and if there's an ambient audience there, then cool but if you're doing stuff, which means that you're not tagging and you're not using keywords, which I rarely do, because the stuff that I'm doing is not necessarily specific to a topic, it's about me is about practice rather than presence. And I'm doing these in a regular slot.
I would really like to have guests. So, West Park Park Bench Podcast recorded in West Park on Tuesdays at around about 10 to 12. If you are in the audience, and you are Long Eaton based and you know where the West Park is, let me know because I would love you to come and join me on my bench but apart from that, it's being able to reflect on content without being promotional. Because no one wants to listen to 15 minutes of adverts. But then again, do people want to listen to 20 minutes of just some random social media creative producer rambling about not wanting to promote stuff.
So the Edinburgh Fringe is running throughout August. I really want to take something to the fringe next year and the live streams that I've been doing is more of a consciousness of just writing into my schedule, having to do my show notes and having to do my consciousness of what's going on so that when I talk in my podcast, it's actually relevant. So the first livestream that I did was just me of itinerary planning, and I think it's really important to know what you do when you get there. I've spoken to people while I spoke to Joe Strickland artistic director of chronic insanity. He's up at the fringe. I had a really good chat to him about what he's what his process was to actually get to the fringe and that was so informative and actually informed me of what my journey is going to be between now and 2024.
Because 2023 Yes, I am definitely going to be up there. But it's not going to be with a full on show. That needs to be something for the reason I'm taking stuff to the fringe is going to be 2024 I then spoken to Fi Woof who is working with me, funded as part of my support practice from my arts council because she was very good at understanding what I needed as a dyslexic to be able to support my practice and she's been with me throughout the entirety of my developing creative practice. But as we're coming to the end of that, how do we go forward as practitioners and fee is going to be collaborating with me to take some sort of media presence and some kind of dialogue, continuing these conversations up in the fringe? On the programme?
I was a guest on Elise Harris's Where are we now? podcast that is part of the Edinburgh Free Fringe and one of my shows this week is going to be the free fringe and that is something that I really didn't know existed. I knew there was lots of fractured products that are up there. And the different festivals that run in Edinburgh throughout the year, there's a whole year of Edinburgh Festival programmed content, and it's this time of year that's kind of the resetting of the loop where you've got the International Festival. You've got the Edinburgh Festival. There's the book festival, there's the film festival. There's a Storytelling Festival that comes out of the end of here and you've got the children's festival I think is the beginning of the year, and it all loops back round until you're back at the Edinburgh Fringe again.
So, jumping on that roller coaster or roundabout depending on which analogy you want to go with. is really important. And I think taking yourself up there to see some work. You don't want to go up to see one show you can go to your local theatre to see one show. If you're going to go up there in my mind, it makes sense that you're going to see lots of stuff in a short period of time, but that actually takes planning. So the entire itinerary planning thread of my live streams has been me trying to share my thought processes of how I saw 90 shows in three four days. So where does that leave me in terms of trying to get guests because that's the thing I would like to talk to more guests. So I'm going to try and put out a newsletter to tell people that I already have in my network that I'm making this content when this is episode nine I'm going to be continuing podcasting in this series. Just I'm just going to keep going I would love to reach 20 I think that's my next ambition is to reach 20 in the West Park park bench podcasts starting from the beginning of September I 2022 I'm going to be trying to do the event presents that I always try and do them all individually whereas this is just going to be part of one programme. And I would like that this programme would become less about me and more about people who want to shedule projects.
So by having a continued and ritual presence that people can pick up, jump on to the roller coaster or the roll the roundabout, whichever analogy you wish to do and just kind of say yeah, I want to do stuff for a few weeks and you can pick where you want to dip in and out of that. shedule so starting from September, I'm going to be doing lunchtime live streams and then the next week is going to be OpenLink.
So OpenLink has been a series events that I have run to be able to connect physically with people in my local area. It tends to be me finding a venue with permission of the venue holder, sitting in a window for two hours and seeing if people turn up. If I do this with a regular I might be able to get it promoted and therefore people will just know it's happening. The reason why I don't have many people coming is because I put the schedules in place but then I don't really have the mechanism in which to promote them. So this kind of practice and presence is about just having something regular that will kind of drip feed into the social media consciousness that I have a following week of that will be a Let's meet. Let's talk VR in VR, which is exactly what it says rather than talking to people at a physical event about how awesome VR is I want to connect with people who are already inhabiting the metaverse and whichever that is what you think of it, what it's called what, just meeting audience in those spaces. There's some great stuff.
So each of these podcasts should reflect on what the previous week's events where you see it's all coming together. And within those there's a five week cyclical shedule and there's two weeks, which are just going to be me doing shownotes writing blogs, seeing if I can sort of promote stuff reflecting on the stuff that I did, because in all of my planning stuff. I always have a very simple model and that's plan, prepare, deliver, reflect and report.
And all of those are really key to flow through. But since I've been doing more producing, there's been an addition in there. So I've got plan, prepare, produce, as part of the delivery, reflect and report. So things are just coming together in a more coherent conversation within my own head. I will sassed as part of a will who is your audience and to some extent, no one is the audience of this content. I'm really flattered if people sit through Have you sat through this far then I love you. And let me know you know, why are you my audience? And what do you want me to do? Because I don't want to churn out content that tries to attract audience. I want to make content that's relevant and useful for my portfolio as a maker. Because really, I'm not wanting to make work to promote me. I'm wanting to be the producer and the technician that makes work to promote other people. So hence I have to have work that I've made and having gone back into this routine again
My live skills have have gotten a bit rusty and I know for the Joe Strickland live stream. I just fudged the beginning sequence of putting slides up so that I didn't have to edit and actually I can't edit because they were live. So what I'm gonna have to do is just chop out the beginning of that and find an endpoint where I can remove that stuff and put a thumbnail as the intro because it is problematic if you're going to look at my stuff and the first thing you see is me fudging up the intro you're not going to want to work with me are you? So I've got to sort that out. But I also use very simple platforms that I can I can be present in the conversation. So I love stream yard because it facilitates a bare minimum. There is a service I'm really interested to play with which is poly pop, but unfortunately it's only PC based. And although I do have a working laptop, it is a laptop for me to keep up my Windows skills rather than me using it and it's a bit of a clunky machine. And I do like my technology to to feel nice. I'm working with it a lot. You know, so I want it to be I want it to feel nice. I want the interfaces to be nice and I always find Windows stuff a little bit clunky and you know a little bit you know it's still emerging out of a clipart phase unless you go bespoke and I just can't afford to go bespoke.
So yeah, episode nine West Park Park Bench Podcast recorded in Long Eaton if you're curious, recording on an iPhone 8, I've got a wind sock on the top of it. I use Otter to record this audio because it then automatically gives me a transcription which I can attach to my show notes, which is then published using Anchor, and then from Anchor, there are a few platforms that it goes out to as a distribution platform and I've got to pay a lot more attention to that.
So thank you so much. If you listened this far, I really just didn't I really enjoy making these. I love having to swim if if someone wanted to have someone to swim with do let me know @ pcmcreative on Twitter.
If you do want email me production office at pcmprojects.co.uk
