My only experience with interviewing someone on camera came in my first semester at RMIT, when I made a little two-minute portrait of my brother and his ridiculous collection of novelty erasers.

I thought it was worth a revisit to see how it stands up considering everything I’ve learned over the past two years.

The first thing that stands out is the lighting of the interview — it’s way too bright and too unnaturally yellow, to the point where the halo of light surrounding the subject blends him into the background. I was going for an Errol Morris / Willy Wonka “clean white room” aesthetic, but my home-made lighting rig was too heavy-handed for the task. If I was to work on this film again, I think it could easily be saved with a bit of a colour grade, but that’s a process I’m still not very familiar with.

Secondly, my zooms/pans on the still photos of the erasers are too drastic — distractingly so. I think less is more in this regard, and if I had my time again I’d only enlarge the photos 3-5% in the faux zooms instead of the 10% I did.

In terms of the edit, and how I constructed a coherent string of sentences from what the subject said in his interview, I’m actually still pretty pleased with that. My memory of the interview was that he rambled a lot (which was 100% my fault, I wasn’t sure what “angle” I was going for and so I wasn’t able to properly direct his answers so he gave me what I wanted), but I managed to whittle it down to something usable in the end. The J-cuts and hiding audio edits with cutaway footage works well, and other than the forced inclusion of archival footage (which I hated at the time and still hate now), the cutaways are all pretty good.

All in all, it’s definitely the work of a first-semester student, but two years later I’m still mostly happy with how it turned out.