@jshield.bsky.social
Audio producer/editor in London, making something new at BBC News • made The Wargame for Tortoise and Sky News • previously at The Times • hello@jshield.co.uk • jshield.co.uk
The BBC is launching a daily podcast in September called The Global Story, hosted by former NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid and ex-Al Jazeera international reporter Tristan Redman. It will explore how America and the world shape each other.
17.07.2025 13:19 — 👍 3 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 1Very lucky to be working on this for the BBC, with a talented team in London and the US
20.07.2025 19:29 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Wargame podcast: Fictional British government faces a terrifying choice in final episode
24.06.2025 01:44 — 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
The finale of The Wargame is out tomorrow (or possibly tonight if you refresh your feed). It took a small army to pull it off. What a talented team.
podfollow.com/thewargame
Five stars for The Wargame in The Times
“Frightening and brilliant”
www.thetimes.com/article/5b1c...
The Observer is hosting a spoilertastic event about The Wargame in its newsroom next month:
observer.co.uk/our-events/i...
Episodes 3 & 4 of 'The Wargame' scheduled for release tonight.
Meanwhile, Russian state media coverage highlights that "they also have a person playing the president of Russia. This one. With a beard."
As a general rule I think adding music to a project as early as possible makes your edit better, because you can fit the speech around the music and vice versa, rather than waiting until the very end of the edit to add music into a finished edit. The ducking tool helps with that.
14.06.2025 16:12 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0Audio of the draft script was temped by an AI narrator, which meant we could record the script just the once, after we'd refined it; 'ducking' meant Descript would automate music levels around speech, giving us a rough automix; and the basic EQ/compressor made it an easier listen.
14.06.2025 16:12 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 03) I've used these for years, but I think they're still underused: the audio effects panel (ducking, high-pass, compressor, limiter) and AI voices. Used together, they meant we could send rough edits for feedback which sounded much closer to the finished product.
14.06.2025 16:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 02) The 'remove retakes' feature. The series running time is 272 mins and we have a lot of script, recorded over about 7 hours in the studio in total, so 'remove retakes' + 'shorten silences' really helped speed up script editing.
14.06.2025 16:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Having video which was vision mixed live, and then working on a single video and audio edit up to the last stage of the process, hopefully saved time. It's the first time I've worked like this but it was pretty straightforward.
14.06.2025 16:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0… this meant that once our edit was done, it could be exported from Descript both to a Premiere timeline (for Sky colleagues to produce the video promos) and to Reaper, where I could swap the video for the original isolated audio stems before sending it to the sound designers.
14.06.2025 16:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0For the audio nerds, here are two new techniques (and one old one) I used to edit The Wargame in Descript:
1) All of the scenes in the Cobra room are edited from video files, which were vision mixed live on the day of the wargame by a Sky News OB team and Spiritland.
That new The Wargame podcast is utterly brilliant. Not had a god tier podcast for ages. This is definitely that.
13.06.2025 15:20 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
The Wargame from Sky News and Tortoise is out today. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we made it happen.
youtu.be/K6o8_onQrFQ?...
Watch out for this tomorrow.
09.06.2025 06:29 — 👍 27 🔁 8 💬 1 📌 0Had a nice chat with Dom Joly on Times Radio about The Wargame, which is out on Tuesday.
06.06.2025 19:03 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I’ll be on Times Radio with Deborah Haynes from Sky News from 2.45ish to talk about our new series, The Wargame.
06.06.2025 13:05 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
This sounds great.
Former senior politicians, including Sir Ben Wallace, Jack Straw and Amber Rudd, play a fictional British government pitched against an imagined Kremlin.
The Wargame: New Sky News and Tortoise Media podcast series simulates a Russian attack on UK
news.sky.com/story/the-wa...
Sky News and Tortoise Media are launching a new original podcast series, The Wargame, which simulates a fictional Russian attack on the UK. #skynews #tortoise
podcastingtoday.co.uk/sky-news-and...
Date for your diary: on 10 June you will want to listen to this, especially if you are in the UK. @deborahaynes.bsky.social brought together a home team of former ministers, generals and top civil servants to game out defence against Russia. The results are interesting.
news.sky.com/story/the-wa...
The Wargame: New Sky News and Tortoise Media podcast series simulates a Russian attack on UK
20.05.2025 23:01 — 👍 12 🔁 2 💬 3 📌 5
From 10 June: Our new podcast series about a wargame that simulates a Russian attack on the UK.
Former ministers and military chiefs play the UK government, pitched against an imagined Kremlin.
news.sky.com/story/the-wa...
I ran some very speedy audio field recording training this week for a TV journalist. Literally 2-3 minutes – it’s all the time we had. What else would be on your list?
09.05.2025 19:33 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Been playing with SpaceBlender, a new reverb plugin, because that is my happy place. Free until 22nd May. Put it in interstellar mode and click the freeze button. It’s magic. And the gated reverb! Lovely. Already used it on a project.
www.soundtoys.com/product/spac...
I’m joining the BBC as an assistant editor in June, to help relaunch The Global Story as the BBC's audio ‘front page’ in the US for international stories. Daily narrative news podcasts are a fairly mature market now, but the BBC could still do something fresh and distinctive, I think. Wish us luck.
03.05.2025 17:34 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0On Radio 4 today at 3pm:
11.03.2025 14:09 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I owe a debt to Paul Smith and Rachel Oakes at BBC Studios for putting up with me while we were making it. It was an honour to interview Curt Bloch’s wife and daughter, Ruth and Simone Bloch, and Gerard Groeneveld was indispensable. Thilo von Debschitz’s work made it all possible
03.03.2025 20:46 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
An episode of History’s Secret Heroes I produced last year is out on BBC Sounds tomorrow, and on Radio 4 next week. It’s about a man who risked his life for satire.
Presented by Her Majesty the Queen, Helena Bonham Carter.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
