Project Brief 3: An interview with Tristan Winter

For this assignment, I chose to call it “Stories of Study Struggle Street”.In this interview we go into depth with Tristan’s University career. Overall with the short time that I had with him, there were not many issues and there was more successes than failures. The biggest fail of them all was transferring the wrong file from the Zoom Mic and returning it. This resulted into using the audio recorded by the inbuilt microphone on the camera.

I found the flow and the pacing from Tristan’s responses to the questions that I asked him to be smooth for the most part. This can be seen through the lack of cuts I had to make throughout the A Roll (the long shot of the interview). Occasionally there would be ‘ums’ and slight hesitations, but I chopped them out to make the interview flow better.

The Interview Sequence in Adobe Premiere Pro

In the editing Process, I divided the shots into A-Roll and B-Roll. The A-Roll was the interview shot with the main B-Roll footage. The B-roll segment are the secondary shots that support or have some similarity to Tristan’s dialogue. Using this layout, it was much easier to edit the video.

At the start I had little familiarity with Tristan’s University background. I did three takes of Tristan’s interview and by every take I understood what was important and what needed to change. I manipulated my series of questions as I went with the interview to steer Tristan in the direction that I wanted him to be with his answers. The result was successful and it became a story about a student who was finding himself in the world of media in film.

During the time we were recording, Tristan was a slightly ill. I had to try my best to lay out my questions nice and easy for him to understand. However, in his fatigued state, I was able to portray him as the broke student trying to make something of himself. one could say it was a ‘blessing in disguise’. You could really see this in his expression at the end of the interview.

I felt like listening was a very important aspect of conducting this interview. If I chose to give Tristan a piece of paper with a series of questions to answer, the interview would lack intimacy and personality. The impromptu questions in between the main questions made the interview more casual and it explores Tristan’s experiences to a greater depth.

This assignment was a great exercise to learn how to deal with people. It requires a high level of communication as we have to achieve a good balance of the interviewee’s voice and your own creative direction. You can not force ideas or thoughts onto the interviewee to make the video that you want, because it will not feel natural, especially with people who are not professional actors. Since Tristan was trained in acting, it was much easier to direct him and naturally an expressive person. This made the whole interviewing process easier than expected.