Tired of tropes about people in LA being fake or vapid, James Kim decided to partner with “audio weirdos” and make a new podcast about different ways Angelenos experience connections and love. His ode to the city is called “You Feeling This?” and it launches on June 27.
“I just wanted more stories about people who are born and raised here and in the outskirts of LA that you don't normally hear about on TV or film,” says Kim. “Those stories are really centered around the people who live in places like South Gate … Montebello … Long Beach or Belmont shores.”
The show doesn’t just focus on romantic love. In the episode titled “Adobo,” the creator of that episode, Tess Bartholomew, tells a story of a mother and daughter. “She [said], ‘I don't want to make a story that is two people falling in love, I want to do a different kind of love story.’ And for me, that's what the show kind of embraces,” shares Kim.
James Kim holds a boom mic on the set of the “Adobo” episode of “You Feeling This?” for a scene featuring actor Sandi Eberhardt. The crew used many different kinds of microphones to capture sound for the podcast. Photo by Julian Park.
To fully create the sonic worlds of these episodes, Kim, sound designer Diego Perez, and sound mixer Daniel Martinez got creative. “We came together and created this wacko technology where we had headbands and put lavalier microphones that are normally put on someone's T-shirt, but we put it on their forehead,” Kim says. “And the other ones … are the headphones in your ears, those are binaural microphones to capture spatialized audio. So when an actor moves, you feel like you're moving with them. Then we had boom microphones. We actually had a 3D VR microphone as well. … And it wasn't to just say, ‘Oh, we're using this high-quality tech,’ it was actually because we were treating every microphone like a camera.”
He adds, “I feel like the people here who actually make up the city, they're all a big, massive community. And I just love that it's something that spreads so far, that's full of so many different people from so many different backgrounds. But we're all here together just trying to live with each other.”