We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kyler Redding a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kyler, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
I keep my creativity alive through recording and editing my podcast, The Feature Film Podcast. Each episode is either movie news or a movie review.
Before I started the podcast, I had many friends that would listen to me ramble and reply with, “Oh, that’s cool”. I wanted to talk about movies with people who would get excited about them in the same way that I got excited about them.
So, I started recording my thoughts about movies. Typically, the movies were ones that had been out for a while and I believed they needed to be revisited. Watching older movies for the first time, or revisiting old favorites was incredibly fun.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I host The Feature Film Podcast with my co-hosts, Alex and Michael. We are a group of three cinephiles that get together a couple times a month to talk about movies that have been out for a while, but we feel need to be talked about again. We like to talk about movies that make us feel nostalgic, or movies we’ve never seen before, or movies that were influential to the industry in some way. Oh, and we laugh a LOT while doing it.
I think the podcast is special because it is truly different in the fact that we don’t exclusively talk about new movies. We choose to look back at movies that are venerated as classics or award winning or just plain fun. We get to shine a spotlight on them, showing off all their glory (or lack thereof).
We typically post twice a month on all the major platforms, and we hope to start live-streaming the podcast on YouTube soon!
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I think the first quality is curiosity. You need to be curious, otherwise you will never have any new information to tell your audience.
I think this very specifically applies to movie podcasts. The reason special effects earned the nickname “movie magic” is because no one in the audience knew how it was done. But you, as the host of your podcast, get to reveal this “movie magic” to your audience. But before you can reveal it to your audience, you the host must be curious enough to look up the information and find it out for yourself.
Secondly, gain knowledge of how to edit audio. It doesn’t matter what software you use, so long as it works for you. There are still basic skills that transfer to all software, so find out how to record and edit audio. Find out how to see if your audio levels are good, find out what the difference between the gain and the volume is. YouTube is an incredibly helpful tool concerning this.
Lastly, figure out the topic you want to talk about. Maybe you want to have a podcast about everything, like Joe Rogan. Maybe you want a podcast that does deep dives on obscure historical stories. Maybe you want to talk about books. Just narrow down what you want to talk about, and then focus on just talking about that. Don’t have a podcast that is about Rubik’s cubes and paper shredders, unless you’re talking about unique inventions. Have a podcast in which the topic can always cover whatever you wish to talk about.
What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
The biggest obstacle is time. How do you continue a hobby when life’s responsibilities are so much more important? Thankfully, when you’ve had enough practice and experience with the equipment, you don’t have as many problems to fix after you stop recording. But nevertheless, an hour long podcast is still hard to edit when you have to cut out the dead spaces, along with all the “um’s, er’s and hmm’s”.
Currently, I am just finding the little pieces of time I can use to edit a little bit here and there. It seems to work, and it allows me to have a little fun in-between all of life’s other responsibilities.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @featurefilmpod
- Youtube: The Feature Film Podcast
