Report on interviews

Earlier in November, I  worked on interviewing a fellow student (Nieve) and this interview was recorded with two cameras and a sound recorder. We also had a clapper board to keep sound footage and both pieces of camera footage all in sync. One camera was further away using a wide angle shot and the other one was closer up. We used soft lighting which is common for interviews, as it is flattering and pleasant to look at.

At first, I found them all really difficult to line up and really struggled to get it all to fit in a way that worked. I kept finding the sound footage didn’t quite fit with the video footage. Eventually I was given some extra time to work on it and at this point: I managed to figure it out. I was informed that I had to find where the clapper board in each piece of footage went on. If you looked at all the footage pieces closely on the timeline: you’d see a certain spike where the clapperboard happened. I learned I had to line all the spikes up and chop all that happened before the clapper board out of the film. I realised that this method makes editing footage with different layers so much easier and they all line up absolutely perfectly with no delay.

Learning to sync different footage layers has always been something I’ve wanted to be able to do and my desire to learn this was one of the main reasons I enrolled on the course in the first place. And it feels like a great accomplishment that I now know how to do that. I’ve only been on the course for two months and I’ve already learned some very useful and important skills that I can use. I decided to portray the footage in a way that when I ask the questions, I would use the wide angle footage, and when it was focussed on Nieve answering the questions I would use the more close up camera footage so I would be using a back and forth pattern method for the editing of this interview.

I also tried to add a few effects to the film. I tried to edit the colouring to give it a unique effect but unfortunately this backfired on me. I found it so hard to control particularly when trying to get both pieces of footage to have the same colouring throughout. I edited the imagery of one of the clips, but the one next to it looked all dark and weird and this was really hard to get right. In fact, learning to get that right is still a skill I haven’t yet learned and hope I can develop. I hope that in time I will learn how to do it properly.

I also introduced the interview with a logo using the image of a clapperboard and the title Film Talk (because the topic of the interview was films) appeared on screen. Looking at it now, I think the introduction may have gone on for a bit long. It went on for nearly seven seconds and I imagine some people with a short attention span might go off it if they were watching. There are a few other ways in which I could have improved the interview. It would have been better to practice the interview before doing it so I could have all my questions completely rehearsed, and Nieve could have her answers rehearsed and I could know which questions would be too difficult for her to answer.

My next tip for improvement couldn’t be helped at the time, but it also would have been good to have a camera angle focussing on the person asking the questions as well. As it is, there are only two camera angles in the film. The wide angle shots show my hands and my question notepad but don’t share anything else which can be a bit awkward to look at because it keeps switching to someone’s notepad and hands but doesn’t show anything else of them! It’s especially awkward at the end when I start talking to the audience but all they can see is mostly my hands. If I ever do an interview again, I think I will try to avoid this. As well as this, I feel like I should also be more cautious about the kind of questions I ask since they can sometimes be too difficult. I also believe that maybe it could have benefited from some musical accompaniment, even if it was only at the beginning and the end. I would also like to learn to change the colouring on all of the clips without making a mess on some of them (like I did previously).