When I watch media, I am, for the most part, passively observing. The most active I will become is understanding the narrative if it presents a certain level of complexity or new ideas. The due date for our PB3 assignment is not too far away and now is the time to knuckle down and start brain storming. My objective for the rest of the week is to how a greater understanding of people in general and how they respond to certain questions.

I have always been one to step forward and meet new people for the majority of the time. I do ask questions that are typically used in interviewing situations, but I have never really noticed how all of these questions and responses fit together. The flow of the conversations just naturally fall into place.

However I have noticed at times where I have met people who are a bit shy. These conversations tend to be fairly awkward. This could either be the language barrier or just shyness. Despite these obstacles,  I firmly believe everyone has a story to tell. My extended mission is to re-evaluate my questioning style and adapt depending on the next person I meet. Hopefully this will allow me to have deeper conversations and ultimately achieve a good story. In doing so, I will be better prepared for my PB3 assignment where I will conduct an interview with my friend Tristan.

A good quote that I had found on the webs is based on empathy:

“There is absolutely no single aspect of one’s personality that is more important to develop than empathy, which is not a skill at which men typically are asked to excel. I believe empathy is not only the core of art, literature and music, but should also be at the core of society, from ethics to economics.” (Chris Ware)

I believe that empathy is an essential skill to have, especially if I want to achieve a casual and personal feel to my interviews.

In this week’s lectorial we focused on the art form of an interview. In my entire life, I have been through multiple interviews – for job applications and school work. Even the first conversations we have with the people we meet for the first time, can be somewhat called an interview as well. When we engage in conversation with new people, we automatically ask questions that relate to the identity of the person or some kind of back ground check to see if we can develop some kind of relationship with this person in the future. The bottom line is, we are curious beings in nature and we would like to know more about a person, especially if they are really interesting – someone who has had vast number of life experiences. This is why we have interviews. It is a format that can be conducted in many different styles, but ultimately serve a purpose of understanding and unravelling a story of an individual(s).

My only knowledge of interviews comes form what I have seen and been through. I have never conducted an interview on anyone and to sit through Louise Turley’s segment on “The Art of Interviewing” in the lecture was a great learning experience. I found that the foundation to all interviews comes down to the five W’s – Who, What, Where, When and Why? This concept is not so foreign as it was taught to me in Primary School. However, we take the five W’s and bump it another level. We use it as the foundation to our interviews in a macro sense. On a micro perspective we elaborate on open ended questions to drive the interview and, when done right, can we create a complex narrative based on the interviewee’s responses to the questions.

My favourite kind of interviews are ones that can make a seamless transition from regular responses to the five W’s to a significant experience in the interviewee’s life.  A good example of this is an interview conducted by JustKiddingFilms in their segment of JustKiddingNewsDocumentary on Aimee Lee Lucas and her controversial dancing career in Korea.

link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzNw-x8FWcQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzNw-x8FWcQ

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.