When we sat down to make Click Through, we were a little overwhelmed. It’s not like we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. The reason we had not made a video podcast in the past was because making a video podcast is extremely inconvenient and way harder than making an audio podcast.
In audio, you can edit much quicker and cleaner. You can start recording basically any time, any where. You don’t need a set or props or a good outfit. You can just make the show. That was quite overwhelming for logistical reasons such as finding out when and where to record, but it was also overwhelming for creative reasons. Suddenly, we had to create an entirely new show from thin air. From our minds!
If it was going to have anything to look at it, it had to look right. We had, of course, the plain, iconic aesthetic of Wikipedia baked into the show. For much of the time you are watching the show, you are looking at us and our screens, which are displaying (famously not copyrighted) Wikipedia pages. The rest of the show had to match the essence of Wiki without literally copying it. Alex and I had started to describe the show out loud as a blend of the digital and analog experience of being on the internet. Nice idea. Hard to put into practice.
We turned to some friends who had done things sort of like this in the past. First, Richie Bozek (my former colleague at The Ringer, who has become our intrepid video editor) and Harry Krinsky (creator of Nothing But Respect, an excellent basketball podcast, and producer and consultant on a myriad of awesome shows you know). Richie and Harry came to my apartment to shoot a test episode of the show when all we knew was the following:
- Two Wikipedia pages
- Shoot us on video
- Show our screens
The test episode was really bad. We were funny for parts of it, but we didn’t even remotely know the cadence of the show. The show genuinely had no visual elements besides us looking at our computers. Most glaringly, we didn’t have conviction about how we wanted to spend time on each Wiki page.
Harry and Richie gave probably 10 amazing notes that day. This is not a compliment I give lightly. As a podcast producer, I treasure a note that actually leads somewhere. Their notes that day and how we responded to them led to the show you see today. Harry’s overarching theme was that we needed to cut the filibustering, get into the show, and ditch pages as soon as they became uninteresting. Richie’s overarching theme was that the form of the show needed to match the function — we had to either decide on a limited number of clicks to get from the starting page to the ending one, or we had to commit to a timer.
Coming out of that recording, Harry did two other crucial things: he sent us a mood board that included the Byte Magazine archive and he suggested we look into whether there was a local business that might let us record in their space when they were closed. For some reason (probably because my brain is broken), I thought it would actually be really cool to record it in a rotating cast of a bunch of local businesses. That’s how we ended up shooting on location in six different places (and counting).
With reps, we got a little better at hosting the show. We’re still figuring that out. The final piece of making it real was designing what the show actually looked like aside from our faces and the Wiki pages. This was a true collaboration. Alex built the graphic design of the episodes (something he is secretly incredibly good at). Then, he perfected our logo based on a truly bare bones sketch I had jotted in my ideas notebook.
Los Campesinos! let us use “We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed” (a sick song) simply because we wrote them an email and told them what we wanted to make. It was the first song Alex texted me when I asked him what he thought would be good for an intro song.
Our friend Sarah C. Johnson agreed to hand-animate every frame of our intro — the incredible stop motion animation you’ll see at the beginning of every episode — essentially on a whim. The only guidance I gave her was that it would be around 30 seconds, use the Los Camp song, and feature our CRT monitor (which I lugged back and forth to her apartment probably 10 times in two months). And that it would look, uh, something like this.
Richie Bozek and Ronak Nair (who joined this project despite, like most people involved, already having a full time job doing other really cool shit) have cut our videos together so expertly, giving the show an important punch. Saul Malone has talked me through every episode of the show line-by-line to help figure out what sections are working, which will play as clips and breakouts, what we should do more of, and what we should ditch.
I’m telling this story because it’s important to me that everyone knows this core belief that I have: people make good podcasts. Not corporations. Not sponsors. Not AI (obviously). People who share good ideas with each other and give a shit. People who write things down, tinker, and abandon bad ideas. People who are given the creative freedom to do the things they do well.
That is the creative philosophy of Click Through, today and every day, no matter whether we do this for 10 more years or whether this flops entirely and we stop doing it in six months. Thanks for watching!