Bureau42-Cast – Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince Roundtable

Well then, there have been murmurs, plans, and plottings backstage until finally, Fiziko, Matt, and I saw (in our respective countries) “Harry Potter & The Half Blood Prince”, and decided to talk about it together on Gizmo (after we couldn’t quite get it recorded on Skype), and now record it. Thus, you, you lucky, lucky devils you, get to listen to it!

Download it here.

EDIT: One other little thing – if you have any constructive criticism or topic suggestions, please feel free to post those in the comments so we can get some topic ideas, or just generally work to make the next installment better.

5 replies on “Bureau42-Cast – Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince Roundtable”

  1. Hey, any plans to do a review/roundtable of the movie “Moon”? Just saw it this weekend and was blown away. Awesome Science Fiction. Not Scifi, not Skiffy, but honest-to-mergatroid Science Fiction.

  2. Just finished it, really enjoyed that :)

    I had a hard time catching the introductions, the sound quality got better about 5 mins in, so excuse me if I don’t use your names. Whoever had the British accent was hard to hear throughout though.

    The round table format is fine but I’m a big proponent of moderation in these sort of things. An order to the questions and topics is much easier to stay interested in when listening to something that’s an hour long. A moderator provides an “anchor” for listeners as well.

    I’m glad you guys decided to keep it more or less in order of the movie. You can’t be blamed for this of course, but you all generally agreed with each other which made it somewhat of a drawn out conversation. Opposing viewpoints make for better listening :)

    As for the content:

    Like you guys, I thought the movie did a great job of conveying the main themes of the book. The intro was great and the acting was spot on. I guess we all agree!

    • Matt is our resident Brit. Listening again now, Alex is the one who seems to be the easiest to hear. He’s the one who hadn’t read the book, if that helps. He’s also the one who got recording technology to work and edited the content, which was a good thing. The raw source is about ten minutes longer than this, and most of that extra time is made up of Matt and myself starting new topics simultaneously followed by dead air as we waited to see who would talk first. I’m quite happy with how much better this sounds than I expected. (I was the loudest and yet most muffled.)

      What I’d like to do next time is to have a formal moderator, and use the silent chat feature more to cue each other about who will talk next and about what. Similarly, we all came in with the notes of what we wanted to talk about, but we didn’t share the notes with each other. We should share bullet points, such as “discuss Christmas attack,” which don’t reveal opinions so we get natural reactions while still allowing us to sequence the conversation in advance. Perhaps even sharing the full notes with the moderator only would help.

      Would it have helped if we hed reintroduced ourselves at the end? We’re also toying with the idea of doing podcasts about classics. (i.e. pull a movie of the DVD/Blu-Ray shelf several of us have and talk about that.) Is anyone interested in that sort of thing?

  3. The film looks great. Characters were given short shrift– a result of having enough characters to populate a small country.

    I hope I can join the next round table.

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