Multi-Media Project

For my multi-media project, I used TikTok and my podcast to cover baseball.  We had to use at least two different forms of media to cover a topic or tell a story, so I felt that revitalizing my podcast, One Chief and a Guy, was an obvious pick for one of the forms of media.  Also, I have experience with posting on TikTok and just using the app, so I figured doing something with TikTok would be a good choice as well.  I chose baseball as my topic because it is pretty much what I'm most passionate about in life, and I have extensive knowledge in that subject, so coming up with content wouldn't be too much of a difficulty for me.  Also, my co-host of One Chief and a Guy is also a teammate of mine on the North Central baseball team, so baseball would be something he could talk about on the podcast as well.

My teammate and I were excited that we had an excuse to record some podcast episodes so we recorded an episode at the first opportunity available.  We reserved our recording times to the weekends because we figured those would be the times we are both available to record.  Our first podcast episode followed the same structure of our prior episodes.  We usually have two main segments in our episodes: we begin with a Mount Rushmore where we list our top 4 picks of a category, and then we follow that with question time from Chief (my teammate).  This time around, however, we only did the Mount Rushmore, in which we picked our top four forgotten MLB players.

Cover art for One Chief and a Guy

We use Anchor to record and publish our podcasts.  Our episodes may come across as unprofessional and low-budget, but that is entirely the point.  These podcasts are just times for us to discuss random things and hopefully provide some comedy for our friends that listen.  We don't expect to reach thousands of listeners, so we leave our episodes mostly un-edited and unorganized.  I usually fit an intro into every episode where I say "you're listening to One Chief and a Guy.  I'm Guy, with me, as always, is Chief..."  Also, I use intro and outro music from Spotify on each of our episodes.  Sometimes, the outro music is relevant to the episode (I mention "Your Love" by The Outfield in the first episode of this season and then use it as the outro song of the episode).  Our podcasts are published to Spotify, but they can also be found on Anchor as well.  I prefer the Anchor versions because the intro and outro songs are cropped to 15 seconds, whereas Spotify plays the entire songs.  Those versions are unfortunately only available to me as the main recorder.

Following the recording of our first podcast episode, I realized the upcoming week was my only time to complete the TikTok portion of my project.  I decided on doing a TikTok "series" that depicts a week in the life of a division 3 baseball player.  I chose this because I often see people doing series of videos that cover a topic.  These series contain multiple videos that follow each other chronologically and kind of tell a story/supply information about a certain topic.  My series covered a full Monday-Friday week of my life at North Central.  In this series, I illustrate the time commitment and responsibilities of a division 3 baseball player who also has a STEM major.  I have seen, on a couple of occasions, TikToks that show a day in the life of a division 1 athlete.  While these are fun to see, I have yet to see anything along those lines for an athlete of another collegiate level.  So, I used this opportunity to give a little insight into my life at the D3 level.  Below are screenshots from each segment of the series.

Left to right: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday     

The TikTok portion of the assignment was the most difficult for various reasons. It was a lot of filming to remember each day.  Monday and Wednesday were the most tedious days in which every little thing I did I felt the need to record a small segment for the TikTok.  On top of that, I spent over half an hour each day adding my voice to the videos.  Adding text to the TikToks is even more tedious and time consuming.  So, editing these videos wasn't fun and it was even less fun when I realized it was probably going to be for nothing (with respect to views and likes).  And that was another issue.  I welcomed interaction with my videos on several occasions and my videos still never garnered much attention. I savored the seldom interaction I received.  To increase my interaction with the series, I posted video responses to the questions asked in my comment sections.  I ignored comments I deemed irrelevant.  Not receiving much relevant feedback and interaction made it difficult to continue.  The last two videos were the least viewed and liked videos of the series, so I think that was a good enough hint that I needed to end this series.

Video responses to TikTok comments

After the week of posting TikToks, I returned to the podcast portion of the project.  I had major downtime on Saturday night so I wanted to use that time appropriately.  Unfortunately for me and the listeners, my teammate was unavailable to record, so I had to record an episode by myself.   This ended up being the longest episode yet for One Chief and a Guy as it was probably the most heartfelt for me and contained a lot for me to talk about.  I took the opportunity of going solo for this episode to talk about my recovery process from shoulder surgery last fall (this pertains to me having a baseball-related injury and what I did during recovery... it covers a good amount of baseball for the project topic).

My teammate was once again unavailable to record the next episode.  This ended up being the shortest episode of One Chief and a Guy because there was only so much I could talk about by myself.  I did a Mount Rushmore covering my favorite pitches in the MLB, and actually ended up doing seven picks rather than four just because I had the time and liberty to do so. 

One more podcast was recorded before the project was complete.  I planned on doing the episode with Chief.  I had been in communication with him for a few days prior to the recording day to make sure he was available.  However, for the sake of the project, we both decided it was best if I took this one by myself again.  Therefore, I did a Mount Rushmore covering my favorite moments of my baseball career so far.

Overall, discussing baseball on these different media platforms was a fun experience but it was certainly a lot of work.  It was fun to be able to show off my life as a collegiate baseball player as well as just sit down and talk baseball on the podcast episodes.  The tedious work aspect would push me away from doing something of this nature again, but it doesn't discourage me from posting to social media altogether.  But, then again, baseball isn't for everyone so it isn't surprising that the TikTok series flopped and that the podcast didn't garner much attention as well.