Recording August 4th 2016 at 9pm Eastern Time
Originally posted 8/2/2016 12:42pm - Updated 8/4/2016 1:30pm
We are pleased to announce that we will be joined this week by shipwreck hunting legend John Chatterton. John has been chronicled in many books and media programs throughout the years for his underwater exploits. Recently he discovered a Legendary Pirate Shipwreck and dove the Borehole 10X on Oak Island. Join us we with talk with John about about his experiences with shipwreck diving and searching for lost shipwrecks.
If you have questions you would like us to consider asking John please email us at theshow@scubaobsessed.com, post them to our facebook page or mention us on our twitter account at @scubaobsessed. We on track to start recording around 9pm eastern time on Thursday August 4th. You will be able to hear us live and participle in the chat room at http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/73759 on the night of the recording. The edited episode will be available by Saturday August 6th.
There is still time to pick up one the three best-selling books from his website, www.johnchatterton.com before the show.
Photo of John Chatterton at Oak Island by Howard Ehrenberg.
[Edit - 8/4/2016] - This is an example of what we are providing our patreon supporters.
You can call this bonus material and a behind the scenes preview of how the show works.
We have verified with John that he is still available to come on the program for tonight. All the co-hosts and many of our chat room regulars have been discussing different questions for John and what they would like to have covered. While we do like to keep the program casual and conversational in nature we do prepare for our guests that are kind enough to agree to come on the program.
Here is my recommended background reading for John Chatterton.
It almost needs no stating that you will want to read the two popular books written with him as a main character. I wished my schedule would allow re-reading both of them, but for this interview I will be going from my memory of these books.
On top of that there is the History Channel show he co-hosted called Deep Sea Detectives. It looks like some of these are available for streaming on Amazon Prime. Too much viewing and bandwidth requirements to get to before the interview. Another one where I will be going from memory.
First off we will take a look at published bios. One from his website and then we also check his wikipedia bio. We want to bear in mind that one he has complete control of and the other could be a mix of PR company spin combined with motivated detractors with an axe to grind.
Next up is to get a feel for the type of person John is and the way he answers questions. The easiest way to do this is look at old interviews. There is a positive and negative to going through old interviews. Part of what I like about doing interviews is I get to answer my own curiosity about a person and their experiences. I hope that translates to a good interview in that many of our listeners can follow along in our learning. If I research too many interview it could become me extending my knowledge on a person and starting too deep into a topic. To avoid this I try something I call the "Bob Vila" technique where I pretend to not know the answer so I need to ask the question.
On top of that I look for anything that John has personally authored himself. A great source of that is John's personal website. Here are a few of the article that I especially liked.
Along with this information we take to social media and other ways we connect with our listeners to see what questions they may have. Kevin has done a great job of reaching out to his contacts in the wreck diving industry to get some questions that they would like answered.
Something else to consider is why is a guest willing to come on our little scuba diving podcast? Is it to promote an up coming project? Do they have a book to sell? Do they need to promote their business? Maybe they have a charitable cause they would like to support? Our hope is that they are doing it because they love the sport and enjoy being on programs like ours to share their knowledge. In the case of having John on the program it came from one of our listeners asking if we ever thought about having John on? He said he know John from taking a couple of the dive classes and though he would make a great guest. He volunteered to do the foot work to make the connection between us and the program. Since I knew John would be a great interview no matter what the motivation I took up this opportunity to have someone assist me in this task. Over the years I have had lots of pitches by PR people for so and so to come on the program. As long as the person and/or topic is of interest to our co-hosts and the listeners something can usually be worked out.
We also need to consider to tone and format of the interview. Will it be live? Will it be recorded? With our show format we lean to the causal approach as opposed to a 60-minutes or 20/20 delivery. It doesn't mean that we won't ask uncomfortable or unpopular questions, but we are not out to create a hit piece either. From our research we see that John is a pretty straightforward individual and will make for a great interview.
From this we start to put together an outline for the program that budgets time of around 60 minutes for the interview in our 90 minute program. With a guest like John we will give him as much time as he is willing to provide. If the interview part goes over 60 minutes we will look at the content and see if their is a way to make a bonus episode from some of the content. While this is rare we have done it in the past. We like to joke that we are lightly edited (meaning all the warts and goofs are left in), but we do in fact edit. We run the program through a filter that removes dead air and tightens up the transitions between speakers. We also add the intro and outtro. We add some of the audio cues that we put in the program from time to time. If after going though this process we are at 90 minutes or less we call that good and our editing is done. If we are running over by 5 - 10 minutes then we have some light edits for time to perform. What we cut tends to be what most people wouldn't miss. If we had audio that leaked in from a website we will cut that out. If their is a segment that wasn't as good as some of the others they may hit the cutting room floor as well. The worse thing is when we get to the 94 minute mark like we did on last week's episode (292) and don't want to cut anything more. When that happens I will spend the time to remove those awkward speech patterns that many of us have. Nothing is more tedious that having to remove "ums", "aaannnnnds" "so's" and "youknows" from the program. Those extra 3 minute could cost us several hours in editing.
This went a little longer than expected. If you have any questions for John before the program starts drop us a line on our facebook page or jump in the chatroom as we start the program. We won't be able to get to them all, but we can certainly fit a few of them in.
Thanks for your support!
Darrin
