Two Movie-Loving Friends Giving Their Instant Reviews And Reactions

Nick Rojas with co-host Nick Boyle produce "The Boyle & Rojas Podcast" - a Podcast about movies the two hosts just saw and their instant reactions to it. Our listeners are our parents, friends and friends of friends. Sometimes Twitter followers of mine will listen.

I don't just like the podcast medium. I love it. I listen to them all day every day since early 2008. I've gone to live-tapings of podcasts whenever I can and plan my daily routines around when I can listen to them. I hosted a sports podcast in 2015 and 2016 before pivoting to this podcast with my best friend Nick. I figured we would talk about the movies we saw anyway (especially since we both had MoviePass) and figured why not record it down so that our friends and family could hear our reviews. So in the Summer of 2016 we started the podcast by uploading it to Soundcloud and hosting it there with an RSS feed. Our first episode took about a day to process through and be approved by Apple Podcasts, which was a cool feeling.

Our initial goals were to have our podcast on the Apple Podcast app and Soundcloud to show that we could pull it off and have an online place to direct people. The other goal was to have 10 to 20 listens an episode. We've exceeded that number on most of our episodes.

Initially we released an episode a week. Then things happened where my friend Nick moved about 40 minutes away and we are busy so now it's about every other week or so. For us it takes about 30 minutes to an hour to record the show then it takes about double that time for me to edit the show and mix the levels. We both have day jobs (and even night jobs) so the time we do it is on Sundays or Monday nights, and we coordinate ahead of time when we are going to see a movie. We're both young guys in our 20s who don't have to worry about kids or wives yet so we have plenty of free time when we're not working.

I spend about $115 annually on Soundcloud to host our material, and that is without a sponsor. I fund it myself because it is a huge passion for the both of us.

We don't have sponsors yet, so we are by no means making money on this podcast at all. The podcast still has benefits that aren't necessarily monetary. For instance this has made my friendship with Nick even better. We have common interests that we share and discuss nearly every single day that helps us stay in touch and gives us a reason to hang out more frequently. We've also learned a few things about movie theaters and the movie business in general that maybe we didn't know before. There are way more directors, actors and production companies that we recognize and are fans of than we were before.

We use a Zoom recorder, two XLR cords and two stick microphones to record the show. I edit the podcast in Adobe Premiere, which isn't an audio software but it is something I'm comfortable with. We have used Zencastr to record when we're not together and we have begun to experiment with Audacity.

We find guests through our family and friends who happen to be with us at the time and they hop on the show afterwards in the parking lot. In fact, most of our guests have been in the parking lot of the theater. Our best episodes are when our guests are in person with us but we've had some great episodes with guests on the show who weren't.

The charm (if that's what you want to call it) is that we don't really prepare ahead of time before most of our episodes. We do our research in the car while we're recording. For things like the Oscars and the end of the year episode we do our research.

We promote the show through our personal Twitter and Facebook feeds, as well as through our show's Twitter account. Our Twitter page has a solid clickthrough rate. Our bigger episodes we post to Facebook though and that gets a great reach. We want to incorporate more pictures in our posts to grab eyeballs.

My advice with new podcasters is to stick with it and find your voice along the way. Don't try to be something you're not because people will see right through it. Also go back and listen to episodes, you'll realize you're repeating the same word over and over again, or you're slurring your words because you're speaking too fast. Re-listening to episodes will only help you get better. A great podcast resource is Brendan Clancy on Twitter. His YouTube and Instagram pages are insightful for anyone looking to get into podcasting. His username is @brendanclancy .

• thenickrojas.com/brpodcast