Intimate Storytelling for Podcasting: The 4 Key Elements

This class is an insight into artist and journalist Sayre Quevedo’s process for creating moving and personal audio stories, using the four elements he has defined as the tools the documentary storyteller must always return to: Time, Trust, Presence, and Respect. 

Sayre will guide you through his experiences with creating his award winning podcast episode: “The Quevedos”, the story of Sayre’s journey to discover his family history. Listening to excerpts from the podcast, he will present examples on the ways each element showed up at the producing, production, and post-production stage of the audio story.

This class is for anyone working with non-fiction and storytelling, whether you are advanced or simply beginning, this class is an important guide for storytellers to find the soul of the story, and to find patience in the process of creating complex and complicated narratives. 

What you can expect: 

• Learn the four elements and apply them into your process
• Understanding your own pace
• Finding your WHY, why is this story important
• Learning how to record interviews organically 
• Understanding the importance of collaboration in documentary 
• Using archival, mix media 
• Editing in your head 

Sayre Quevedo is an artist and journalist. He works across mediums to tell stories about intimacy, identity, and human relationships.  His work has been featured on National Public Radio, Marketplace, BBC Short Cuts, Love Me on the CBC, and Radio Atlas. In 2018 his piece 'Espera' received the Third Coast/RHDF Directors' Choice Award and his other piece 'The Quevedos' was nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the International Documentary Association (IDA). The following year he won the 2019 Third Coast/RHDF Gold Award for Best Documentary for 'The Return' . It was also nominated for a Best Audio Documentary award by the IDA, his second nomination two years in a row.

Quevedo was the Fall 2019 Podcaster-In-Residence for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and an Associate Producer for The Daily at The New York Times and Latino USA. He currently works as a producer for VICE.