In Project Brief 3, I chose my best friend as the interviewee and interviewed her for some basic questions, so that produce a short individual video portrait with the fundamental introduction of her. I went back to Nanjing, China which is my home country during the Easter holiday, so Nanjing is the place for the background of the video. I think it is also be the most successful aspect of the video because I used different materials from special aspects, such as traditional Chinese food, environment, daily activities in China. These ideas in China are all different from Australia’s because of different cultures and places. Moreover, I think the daily life could reflect the person’s habits and let the audiences know about the interviewee’s interests directly, so I choose to record the interviewee’s daily life to introduce her. In addition, I used a lot of audios of the interviewee to express herself clearly. Although I did not ask too much the questions, each response of each question are clear and rich enough. The questions I asked are simple and easy to understand as well, so it is easy for the audiences to guess what the questions are.
However, there are still some problematic aspects of the submitted work. The first issue is the cooperation between the background music and the audio of the interviewee. The music I can use are limited, I just can choose from the creative commons music online, so maybe the cooperation between the music and the audio are not perfect. Another one is the interviewee’s intonation is too monotonous. If I do the interview next time, I will pay attention to the mood of the interviewee. If the interviewee is shy to show himself/herself , I need to help him/her to reduce the stress before the interview, so that he/she can show himself/herself in front of the camera. The last problematic aspect is the framework of the interview. The time for the video is limited, so it is necessary to think what I want to express through the video. Thus, the theme of the interview need to improved.
The key learning discovery I made during producing portrait is the importance of the framework. It is necessary to come up with the framework of the video, such as the main idea I want to express in the video, the content I will cover, the questions I will ask in the interview, who I want to interview etc. The completion of the framework will decide the places where you will shoot and the scenes or images and the audios you will record. If do the portrait without the framework, the whole video would be messy and illogical.
The things I learnt in the making process that might be relevant to your broader development as a media practitioner are the logical and active thinking and the communication with the interviewees. Firstly, the skill of communication is important because of the interview. The questions I prepared needed to be simple and easy to understand. I need to be patient and respect the interviewees when I had the conversation with them. Another aspect is the way of thinking should be creative and logical. The video would grab the audiences’s attention or not is decided by the content of the video, so the practitioner need to be active.
