Making It Sing: An Audio Documentary Institute

This intensive six-day workshop for producers with some experience—or a lot—gives you a chance to focus on a challenging project or to stretch and try something new. You’ve recorded interviews and gathered sound, and you’re ready to construct a six- to twelve-minute audio piece. You’ll bring your own recordings, logged, transcribed, and ready to go. You’ll get instructive sessions and personal, small-group guidance from seasoned radio producers (and from your peers) as you structure and script your story, record your narration tracks (if any), and mix your piece on CDS’s Hindenburg workstations—or, if you prefer, on your laptop with your own editing software. Saturday morning, we listen! The institute will be led by John Biewen along with other staff members of the Center for Documentary Studies and guest instructor Shea Shackelford. (35 hours)

John Biewen is audio program director at the Center for Documentary Studies. Besides teaching summer audio institutes and undergraduate courses, he produces documentaries and features for NPR, PRI, American Public Media, and other public radio audiences. Biewen has been making radio since 1983, including eight years spent producing documentaries for American RadioWorks. His work has won many honors, including two Robert F. Kennedy Awards, the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award, and the Third Coast International Audio Festival’s Radio Impact Award.

Shea Shackelford is an audio documentary producer and creator of The Place + Memory Project, a public media project mapping a landscape of remembered places. His work has been heard nationally on such public radio shows as Weekend Edition, All Things Considered, and Snap Judgment. When he isn’t producing his own stories, Shea is busy training producers and helping stations and organizations to design and create their own projects. His awards include a Bronze Award for Best Radio Documentary at the 2010 Third Coast International Audio Festival. Shea has been part of the CDS summer audio institute team since 2005, and he is a founder of Big Shed, a public media shop specializing in audio and multimedia production.