The Making of Welcome to Night University

welcome to night vale logo featuring eye with crescent moon pupil, power lines, and water tower

For my final project for Domain Fellows, I knew I wanted to make something audio-related. Music is a huge part of my life, but I am no singer and I only know how to play the flute (which is back in my room at home). A close second is podcasts. Choosing a podcast to emulate was easy: Welcome to Night Vale is a quirky, funny, creative podcast — just up my alley.

After deciding I wanted to make my own Night Vale episode, I decided to see if I could find a basic outline for what the basic episode entailed. What I found was even better: a how-to guide for writing a Night Vale episode.

For the music, I went back to where I found the music for my aesthetic video and went to the artists’ page. There, I found a treasure trove of music by Podingtonbear. I combed through the well-organized albums (they’re grouped by genre/mood and I love it) and picked out the music I thought sounded most “Night Vale” to me.

In the initial writing process, I needed to generate ideas. So from Bob’s how-to guide, I used the a random idea generator called inspirobot.

I am an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence.

-inspirobot

This bot helped me think creatively, abstractly, and (most importantly) absurdly. I also highly recommend mindfulness mode. Editing a couple phrases generated by the bot, I was able to make my introduction and proverb for my episode and continue on writing my script.

Lastly, during the writing of my podcast, I decided to make a cover photo that parodied the original Night Vale art. I mean, how could I resist?? Using the Noun Project and Canva, I made this beauty to the right.

Gotten all the way here and haven’t listened to my podcast yet?? Check it out!!

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