A Canadian’s thoughts on Australia  

Reflection:

I’m happy with how this Interview turned out, particularly in contrast to the first interview I produced.  

Refer to my other article on how my previous interview went. 

Anyway, in my interview with Jack, I made sure to correct each of the mistakes I made in my previous interview. These mistakes included more straight forward questions, less talking as the interviewer, correct framing, and a larger shot. With these being fixed, it really made for a much more reliable and consistent interview. I really liked how my interview was the intro and ending sequence turned out to look, I wanted to do a kind of parody of talk shows like the late-night show or Ellen, but with still keeping the interview professional for future viewers. I wanted to insert simple clips of Melbourne Street life, and clip footage of Political things, but it didn’t tie in with the style that I was conducting the interview. Another thing I think went really well was the small amount of picture editing that went into the video itself. I turned up the contrast a little bit, and added a filter to give it a warm glow, I then added black bars at the top and bottom to give it a wide screen look. This ended up making the interview look quite professional. Despite fixing a lot of errors in my interview, there were still a few things that were problematic. For example, the microphone was very focused on a single area, and I could only really have it pointing in Jack’s direction which made my voice quiet and hard to hear. There was also a lot of white noise that I had to remove in Premiere.

I’ve really taken a lot from this assignment, and I think the experience has taught me lots of things to consider before I go to conduct my next interview. I’ve learnt from this interview that in the future, I need to have a microphone that can pick up a more widespread volume, or better yet, a microphone each. Secondly, I should take more time to recording some extra nodding footage, and even just a repeat of asking the questions for if I want to do voice overs and such.

Lastly, I’ve learnt that making an interview interesting doesn’t necessarily have to involve complex questions, great equipment and a lot of help, but rather, just someone who has a good story to tell that they’re passionate about, and being able to listen and extract as much information as possible about what they’d like to say.  I’ve learnt this from both the interview, as well as the research I did on other interviewers like Louis Theroux and his filming style.