A fully transparent look at how PodCube is created, including who we are, what we use, and links to resources for you.
Meet the Creators - Learn about the people who make this universe.
PodCube Creation Kit - A detailed list of all the tools used in creating PodCube. Lots of free and open source resources!
How it’s Made - The process of how an episode of PodCube comes into existence
We Need Some Help - And you can support PodCube in ways that are absolutely free!
Meet the Creators
Jordan is an actor, editor, sound designer, and almost literally a doctor of saxophone.
Outside of PodCube, he is a professor of music.
Beyond creating episodes, Jordan manages most of our social media presence, designs all of our 2D graphics, and manages most of our online representation.
Mason Amadeus
Mason is an actor, audio engineer, 3D artist, and nerd for all things post-production.
Outside of PodCube, he is the creative director at 8th Layer Media.
Beyond creating episodes, Mason creates our 3D graphics and videos, and manages all tech/coding aspects of our operation.
Tucker Bettez
Tucker is an actor, writer, world-building genius, and wears glasses. He is also a talented multi-instrumentalist and singer/songwriter.
Outside of PodCube he is [REDACTED] which [REDACTED] quite often. He also participates in a lot of local theater.
Beyond creating episodes, Tucker writes and develops lore for PodCube, manages our newsletter, and wears glasses. He has a very young son who is extremely cool already. (And will probably wear glasses).
PodCube’s Creation Kit
Here is a list of links and resources to everything we use when creating PodCube!
NOTE: If any affiliate/referral links are used, they will be clearly marked as such. Otherwise, they are normal links from which we gain nothing.
Audio Production
REAPER
Mason uses REAPER for post production of PodCube. It is a $60 one-time purchase, with a 60-day evaluation period that does not lock you out. REAPER is an extremely flexible DAW with amazing features, and we highly recommend learning it. It also comes with extremely good built-in VST effects.
We also use REAPER to edit the basic episode videos, and plan to release some in-depth tutorials on how you can do it as well. An example is linked in the toggle below. We recommend checking out REAPERblog for great learning material and resources.
Video made in REAPER
VST PLUGINS
We also have a list of free VST plugins that we use extensively in every episode of PodCube - they’re in a toggle below.
Additionally, we purchased iZotope RX9, iZotope Trash, and iZotope Ozone extensively in our productions. You can often catch those on super-sale on their website.
Free VST Plugins
- The Melda Audio Free FX Bundle contains an absurd amount of extremely high-quality, efficient, visually easy to use, great sounding plugins. They have our go-to compressor, EQ, and convolution reverb in this bundle - as well as many other plugins that are situationally useful.
- The Free Techivation T-De-Esser Plus is a phenomenal de-essing plugin. It’s extremely adjustable and very transparent sounding. It works by compressing only the frequency band (adjustable) containing your sibilance.
Microphones & Interfaces
MASON
Uses an Electrovoice RE320 recorded through an older model Presonus Studiolive Series III console.
JORDAN
TUCKER
Uses an Electrovoice RE20 recorded through a Steinberg UR44 USB Interface
SFX Libraries & Podcast Services
ARTLIST (referral)
Artlist is a subscription-based sound effect and music library. It is not cheap, we pay $299 a year because we make extensive use of this library. The SFX and music are all extremely high-quality and well organized, and it has made the editing/design process immensely faster. This link is a referral link which will get you some free months if you subscribe, and also give us some free months in return.
ZAPSPLAT
Another SFX & music library that is free with attribution, or something like $40 a year without attribution. We use Zapsplat in conjunction with Artlist and between the two of them we can find just about anything we need. Zapsplat is constantly growing and is by far the most affordable SFX library we’ve found. The one major pain-point is that sometimes the website becomes unbearably slow to respond.
PINECAST
We host our podcast with Pinecast! We’ve been grandfathered in to their $5 a month plan, but at the time of writing they offer their starter tier for $10 a month, which allows you to host multiple shows on separate RSS feeds under the one plan. They’re phenomenal and Matt who runs it is awesome. The only thing they don’t do is dynamic ad/content insertion. We DO have a share code, that gets you 40% off for 4 months when you sign up for a paid plan for the first time. Here’s the code: r-2e67aa
GLOW
We’re trying out Glow as a way for listeners to financially support PodCube. It doesn’t require users to make an account, simply add your email and card details. It’s free to set up and it doesn’t look like they charge anything beyond card processing fees, at least for now. Unless you want to add bonus content there, then it’s 55 cents per listener.
Video & Video Utilities
DAVINCI RESOLVE
For more in-depth video work, we use the free version of Blackmagic Design’s Davinci Resolve. It’s an extremely powerful program, with an overwhelming interface at first (and even on good computers you can probably get it to crash lol) - but nothing even comes close in terms of video-editing features.
LOSSLESS CUT
Such a cool little free, open-source program!! It lets you chop a longer video down into segments quickly, easily, and intuitively. We use it to cut longer videos down into clips for social media sharing.
HANDBRAKE
It’s a free, open-source video encoder. We mostly use it to re-encode videos to make the file size smaller, but it can do a lot of other useful things.
OBS STUDIO
An extremely powerful live-streaming software. It is open-source and free, highly customizable with tons of community-made extensions and addons. It is also extremely performant and flexible. We use OBS for our live streams on twitch. The only addon we’re using currently is Move Transition to make the scene-switching all cool and slidey.
Art & Animation
BLENDER
Mason uses Blender for all 3D art and all animation. It’s an amazing piece of free, open-source software, with an incredible community of artists and tutorial-makers. Mason swears that it is his favorite piece of software ever - bar none.
CANVA
Jordan uses the paid version of Canva to create all of our 2D art assets and designs. Canva is an extremely flexible web-based design tool that lets you create tons of professional and visually-engaging images. There is also a free version, with a more limited library of templates and assets to choose from.
GIMP
GIMP is a free, open-source photo-editing tool. It’s kinda like store-brand photoshop, but it’s extremely powerful. We use that in conjunction with our other tools for making assets or quick adjustments to images.
ASTROFOX
Another neat little free, open-source program that lets you create incredibly customizable, unique audiograms. It has its issues and bugs, but in terms of audiogram generating programs it stands out because your audiograms won’t look like everyone elses!
Website Design & Utilities
NOTION
This entire website is created in Notion, a free tool that is hard to describe because it can do so many things. It’s a whole data-management platform that lets you flexibly build almost anything using simple drag-and-drop elements. We opted for this (for now) because it was easiest for all of us to contribute to without coding.
POTION
We opted to pay the $8 a month for Potion, a service that facilitates publishing a Notion site to the web with a custom domain and some other customization/optimization features. It’s not strictly necessary to make a public Notion site, but the custom domain, CSS & code injection, and other features it offers makes it wholly worthwhile for the level of polish we want to achieve!
NAMECHEAP
This is a really cheap place to buy domain names, and they let you do wildcard email forwarding which means you can send emails to anything @ your website’s domain. You can set up forwarding or whatever you want thru them, and again it’s just so much cheaper than places like GoDaddy or buying domains through Squarespace or Google.
SWITCHY
This is a link shortening service! Like bitly, but you can use your own custom domain. Plus it can do all sorts of things like tracking, randomly sending people to different destinations based on probability (if you want to A/B test a link or do something fun), and so much more. We use it for PodCu.be shortlinks. It is a $39 lifetime deal for a single license right now (if that deal is expired go here).
Video Game Development
UNITY
Mason is using the free version of Unity to create Seneschals of Scion and our other downloadable videogames. They have an excellent pricing plan where it’s free until you earn a boatload of money using it, then you have to pay for it (at which point it wouldn’t be a problem lol). There are loads of tutorials online for it, and a thriving community around it. Its primary scripting language is C#.
PLAYCANVAS
A web-based platform for developing browser games. Mason is using the free plan on PlayCanvas to build our interactive browser video game content. It’s an interesting platform with a similar pricing model to Unity. There is a thriving community around this platform and lots of learning material available online. Their support forums are extremely friendly and helpful. Its primary scripting language is Javascript, and they have an extensive library used to interface with it.
How it’s Made
An overview of how an episode of PodCube comes into existence.
The Ideas List
We maintain a running google doc containing hundreds of one-line sketch ideas. Here is a snippet of what that looks like.
We all add new items to this list as we have ideas for stupid premises, encounters, characters, or whatever weird stuff pops into our heads.
Some ideas are long and detailed, some are… well… not.
Plotting & Planning
We record biweekly on Wednesday evenings at 8:30pm EST. We’ve actually begun livestreaming these sessions on Twitch so that you can participate, throw ideas at us, and laugh along with us. This is arguably the most fun part of making PodCube.
We’ll take one of the ideas from our list, and spend upwards of 10 minutes hashing out the major beats, the characters present, how it ties into our universe, and iterating on those ideas until we feel like we have the good basis for a sketch.
Then we’ll improvise the full sketch live. Importantly, unlike regular improv, we fully take advantage of the fact that we’ll be editing the recording. We’ve taken to feeding each other lines, taking moments to recover from character breaks, and redirecting a scene mid-improv.
The Edit
It all comes together in the edit and sound design. Our approach to sound design is extremely diegetic - because the PodCube in the scene is the source of the recording, all of the sound you hear must originate in that scene.
We make extensive use of our sound effects libraries, automation of FX parameters, and use of stereo space to try and create the most immersive audio experience possible.
At the same time, we pull the recording of our Zoom meeting into REAPER, synchronize cropped copies of it with each of our audio, and then link it to the audio tracks so that we produce an edited video that matches up with the final audio.
We’ll be releasing more info on how to do that soon, it’s pretty neat (Mason says).
And More
We also spend an extreme amount of time talking and thinking about the larger PodCube narrative universe and how to expand it and tie everything together.
A part of the process unseen to our audience is all of the world-development we do. There is an absurd amount of documents and other files detailing different aspects of our universe, plot arcs we want to do, and larger story beats.
We love creating this show, and we love taking the silliest possible ideas and acting on them with all the seriousness of a Victorian tailor making a dress for the queen. Or something like that. There is an immense amount of ‘behind-the-scenes’ work we do to keep the PodCube universe fresh, alive, and constantly evolving.
We also sometimes put unrelated garbage into the google drive, to everyone’s detriment. But we’d like to think that’s just part of the process.
We Need Some Help
This show is a lot bigger than it might seem on the surface, and we’re doing it as a labor of love.
Support Us
There are several ways you can help us continue to create PodCube, many of them absolutely free! Click the heading above to see a list of ways in which you can help us grow, reach more people, and try to achieve some of the most ambitious, ridiculous, things we possibly can.