When we booted up the computer during class and opened up our first premiere project the first thing that popped up in my head was that our interview was wrong. Well, not like completely disgraceful, but definitely not right. When reviewed on a screen bigger than the X200’s monitor, the interview footage is all recorded in soft focus. In our rush to use as much of our time to record as much as possible, it seems we were also sloppy with our camera work and didn’t keep a good eye on our camera focus. We all regret this mistake, and have organized to do another interview session with Terri this Friday to rectify our mishap. I guess our eagerness and focus on getting her to feel comfortable left us misjudging our ability to remember everything we had to check before pressing that record button.

We’ve also noticed that since we were situated next to a window for some natural lighting, that as the interview progresses the exposure and lighting on Terri changes drastically from start to finish. It’s subtle when watching the shot unfold normally, but when we started cutting things up and rearranging it was a big red flag for us. Again it was another camera objective we overlooked and in hindsight should have been a priority for us. We couldn’t balance the the technical needs and personal needs quite well that day, and in the end our footage has suffered. This isn’t to say that all our footage was terrible, our b-roll and locked off shots all look amazing, and with a decent colour grade will make our documentary look bright and colourful like we intended, but our interview footage for now is not to the quality of the rest of our rushes, which is unfortunate but manageable.

Going forward we are definitely going to shoot more b-roll of Terri in her work environment to cover the interview footage and play more with those aspects of the documentary than the simple sit-down set-up we had with her in our soft looking shots. So wish us luck for the next few days as we try to fix our mistakes

Don’t worry, our footage wasn’t almost as terrible as this photo I took during our first editing session.