Mistakes made, and how I’ve learned from them.
To begin, my interview didn’t turn out the way I’d have liked it to, despite the planning that went into it. On the 18th of April, I prepared my interview, I began by selecting a room in the University that was quiet and well lit. I felt it seemed easier for people to meet in the city than for either me to bike all the way to their far away houses with lots of gear, or to have them come all the way to my home in Preston. My interview featured Shahrzad Rafezi (Sherry) and her experience regarding coming from Iran and living in Australia as a Muslim.
The interview failed for multiple reason, the first of which being because my questions were not straight forward enough, and didn’t invoke a very in-depth response. The responses I received from Sherry weren’t particularly long, and a lot of the information provided was spasmodic. It would’ve needed to be cut and changed, which made for a choppy and unusable interview.
The second mistake I made was talking too much as the interviewer, I reiterated the question far too often, and was always quick to fill in the gaps of awkward silences. I was troubled by my own worry of making the interview awkward and uncomfortable that I didn’t stop to let my interviewee fill in the silent gaps with their stories, knowledge and experience. I too often asked unrelated questions in a hope to lengthen the interview with interesting responses, but since they didn’t link back to clear primary questions, it was pointless. I learnt that I need to keep a level of professionalism when conducting an interview, and not acting too casual or aloof.
The third mistake I made was a novice mistake. I had filmed my interviewee on the wrong side of the wrong side of the shot, meaning she was on the right side of the shot, looking right, whereas she should’ve been on the left side of the camera looking right/ right side of the camera looking left for the shot to make sense. This meant there was no way that I could have films of me nodding without it looking odd and unprofessional.
Having me look from the right to left made sense logically, but it looked odd the way I was on also on the right side of the frame as well, it didn’t make sense to flip the footage, and it also just looked odd to have me on the left looking left.
Lastly, I should have zoomed out a little more, as I felt my interviewee was too close up, and this wasn’t editable, whereas if she were too far away, I could’ve easily edited her closer.
I talked to a few people in the media workshop and asked for what I could do to continue using this footage despite the mistakes I had made. Matt suggested I could use lots of footage related to what I was conducting the interview about, such as mosques, headlines featuring some of the prejudice regarding the Muslim culture, or some stock footage of life in Iran, and not feature the actual interview video at all. I liked this idea, but I didn’t like the amount of effort I’d went through setting up a nice filming space only to simply edit over it. Jeremy suggested I put something in the left part of the screen beside my interviewee, featuring photos and videos of supporting footage. This idea worked well too, but it didn’t solve the problem of my replying nods being rendered useless due to being on the wrong side of the screen.
What did I learn from these mistakes?
- Make sure to have clear and understandable open ended questions.
- Embrace the awkardness during some of the responses, and allow the interviewee to fill the gaps.
- Film the shot on the correct side of the screen, either right looking left, or left looking right.
- Zoom out to make the video easier and more free to edit later.
Hopefully, if all goes according to plan, I will be conducting another interview Tuesday the 25th.
