I feel so lucky that I have such an inspiring young man at my disposal. And furthermore, a subject that fits the hypothesis of what I wanted to achieve through this interview and the audience that I wanted to engage with it. Cormack O’Connor is a young professional who I thought would be perfect to interview and direct at a young, university audience (particularly our media class). Due to the close relationship I have with him, some issues did arise of Cormack’s lack of focus and seriousness. I think he struggled to take me seriously as I have never done anything remotely similar to directing a video in my life.
I hired a H2N Zoom and thanks to our workshop task, already had the mechanisms under control. The struggle was trying to find a quiet area to do the audio recording. I resorted to the quietest place in my home: the bedroom, although there were some background sounds which prompted me to take an ‘atoms’ track to ensure the recording would smoothly edit into the video footage. It was quite easy doing the interview because I know Cormack and his history quite well and was able to direct what he said so this was great. I understand that if I hadn’t known my subject I could have received some spontaneous gold but for what I wanted to achieve, this worked.
I filmed the interview on Cormack’s Canon EOS 5D Mk. III DSLR. I felt super professional filming on the best camera he owns. I emailed the Yarra council to find out about filming on location, but the amount of permits I needed seemed ridiculous in terms of what I actually wanted to capture and what I could film in my own home/Cormack’s working space. I found that by filming in Cormack’s work space added more clarity to the interview because it’s where he is creative with editing and forms all his ideas.
Speaking of editing, I actually had a lot of fun editing and creating my own work. I did originally use a storyboard to generate ideas (which did work well) but with the introduction of found footage, this structure disappeared. Having to use found footage was such a struggle. Firstly finding footage to coincide with the interview and be of high enough quality was rather difficult. I feel like introducing found footage to the interview added a ‘tacky’ feeling. Maybe the footage doesn’t flow as I had hoped, but it reiterates the message of the interview.
While I was creating this interview I was stumped on how to create a narrative structure so the audience could follow along. After listening to the audio over and over again and repositioning it, I finally found a conflict in what Cormack was saying. He spoke about how he didn’t want to undermine the industry by taking too much unpaid work. I was able to make this a conflict and climax even though the tension didn’t build too far.
With the video footage, there is seemingly random edits– particularly of the plants but I thought it was necessary to use this because even though it may not be representing the particular dialogue, it is illustrating Cormack as a person. The plants appear when he is talking about starting his own business, so it’s also a metaphor for growing something. He’s a creative person who cares for his plants and the simple things in life. He loves coffee and these little insights into his life all help display him as more than just a young professional.
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