Yesterday saw the delivery of the first audio and video podcasting course for ArtLinks, presented by myself (Ken), along with Alan Slattery and John Morton of Mycrofilms. While Event Media have delivered courses for ArtLinks over the past two years or so, this was the first time (and hopefully not the last) that we’ve combined with Mycrofilms to deliver course content for the arts.

The day itself saw a gathering of techie, non-techie, practicing and non-practicing artists gather to find out about all aspects of podcast, from preparing content, to file formats, examples of software, basic audio and video editing, camera theory, online distribution and lots more. Over the course of six hours it can be hard to cram *everything* you need to know about podcasting in, particularly given the varied audience, but we had a great day out of it, produced a very short podcast by the end of the day and left people with plenty of food for thought on how they could be using podcasts to promote or enhance their activity online.

The slides above are some notes that were used during the day but the real benefit is reaped by those who joined us at No 76 (Kilkenny County Council Arts Office) for demos of various microphones, cameras, online resources and of course the conversations that were sparked as a result throughout the day.

Our thanks to Mary & co. at the Arts Office, Cathy at ArtLinks for organising the day and giving us another opportunity to link up with artists in the South East and to all those who attended the course.

As a result, we’ve decided to press ahead and publish a new blog resource for podcasting which will contain tips and tricks from ourselves, additional notes from our course material and plenty of information to get to you started in the world of podcasting. LovePodcasting.com will be going live by Friday of this week and we’ll be notifying everyone who was on the course when the resources become available.

Based on the feedback returned on from the first running of the course, we hope to shape the podcasting day into a regular feature. Keep an eye on the Event Media blog for more when that happens.

January arrived, then it completely flew by and now we find ourselves almost wrapping up the first week in February. Of course, we’ve been busy in the time since and one of the developments to come out of the last month is a new podcasting course tackling both audio and video delivery for the internet.

Under the Artlinks banner, Event Media and Mycrofilms combine forces once again, this time to deliver a full-day course and workshop on audio and video podcasting for the arts on Monday March 1st. Here’s the full details from Artlinks…

ArtLinks has designed a brand new course as an introduction to the ideas and techniques for capturing and presenting more aspects of your creative work online. With cheaper video and audio recording options and the audio-visual possibilitie…s now provided by broadband, creative people and arts institutions are beginning to investigate these new media as more effective means of engaging their audiences. Increasingly the web is being examined by creative people and organisations as a new place not only to present artistic work but to share their creative skills and processes, their artists talks and interviews.

You may be a poet thinking about your work being read on-line, a crafts person wishing to share a new technique to build your online audience, or thinking about a novel way to document and present your artistic process. Arts organisations may also be interested in how to retain some of the value of artist s talk to capture and present them online.

Event Media and Mycrofilms combine for ArtLinks on the delivery of a new audio and video podcasting course. In this day long course, attendees will be introduced to audio and video podcasting and working with audio and video both online and offline. The tutors – Ken McGuire, John Morton and Alan Slattery – look at the background to podcasting, planning your podcast, hardware and software, recording audio, filming, basic lighting, editing audio and video for the web and finally uploading, promoting and distributing your podcast online.

Ken McGuire s Playlist Mix won Best Podcaster at the 2008 Irish Web Awards. He continues to produce regular music and spoken word podcasts and developed the 2009 Kilkenny Arts Festival podcast series. John Morton and Alan Slattery have been producing video podcasts with Mycrofilms for their highly acclaimed web comedy Vultures, since 2007.

Event Media have been tutoring ArtLinks courses since 2008 and we’re delighted to work with Cathy and the members again on this course. Places are limited and if they’re not already snapped up they will be soon. 15 places are available on the course at a heavily subsidised price of €30 for members and €45 for non-members with a light lunch also included on the day.

Registration is available online via ArtLinks.ie.

The use of social media tools for complementing this year’s festival coverage has been greatly received thus far and we’re hoping it will continue through next year’s festival and also act as a source of inspiration for other festival organisers around the country. We’ll have a post after the weekend showing you how and what was needed in order to provide coverage for this year’s events.

You can download the MP3 directly here. (16mb, 128kbps) or listen below.