Podcast Woes

So, I tried to assemble my enhanced podcast in class last night. I thought that I had some really good ideas about capturing the "mood" of the flat world. My whole theme is the feeling of urgency, competition, fast-paced, etc. It's sort of supposed to reflect Friedman's assertion that we'll have to run faster and faster just to stay in place. So, I had all these pictures of crowds, people running races, people at rallies trying to make their voices heard, traffic jams, speeding cars, stuff like that. Sounds pretty good, right? So I went in to Garage Band and started laying my pictures out the way I wanted, and then I added some music, just for practice. But when I tried to preview my podcast, almost every single picture looked like modern art--as in, nothing discernible. So, my podcast that I thought I had made so much progress on was basically a bunch of pixels with about 3 actual photos. Now, I'm not the most tech-savvy person, so I may be wrong, but I'm assuming the pictures that I chose are too small, so when Garage Band blows them up to fit its parameters, this is the result. So, now it's back to the drawing board I guess. Does anyone out there have any suggestions for appropriate size? Or any similar tales of woe just for comfort's sake? As hard a time as I've been having so far this semester, this is like the proverbial straw and camel.