Reflection of Pb3

For assignment 3, we were given the task of producing a two-three minutes video portrait of someone. I had planned to interview my best friend, Becky. I have known her since both of us at junior school so that she would not be too shy and nervous when she spoke in front of my camera. I really had no idea before I started conducting this video without any preparation, such as how to start a interview, what questions should I ask, how to balance scene like justing sitting there and talking or doing the action. Then I start by preparing a list of basic interview questions in advance to make sure I could get all of the information I need. However, what I didn’t realised was my questions are too big and depth without any small talk, it makes my interviewee to be a little bit confused to answer. Therefore I realised I should start with some small and simple questions instead of asking depth questions to allow the interviewee to speak. For example, I just asked her questions like “what’s your hobby” “what do you usually do”. Then I found it is a good way to break the ice is by explaining her background and describing her school life…Then I move on to the heart  of the interview. I asked about several general areas such as her hobby, skills, education and future plans…In addition, I found my interviewee usually just answer my questions like ‘YES” or “No”…In this case, I tried to avoid asking her questions that can be answered with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, instead, I asked questions that force her to go into detail like ‘why do you passionate about….’

When it came to editing part of my video, I had to say that there were several issue made me a little bit confused. For instance, does background music have to be added?  do i need to type questions on the screen? how to balance the shot and scene( just sitting there and talking or doing action?). To be more specific, I am usually not able to balance the background music and the audio from the interviewee. I showed my video to Brain and my classmates as well. Thanks for them that they gave the feedback and some suggestion to me. Firstly, I don’t really have to add music during the whole video. Also, Brain suggested that I just cut my own voice and no need to type the questions on the screen because it is too obvious that what the interview is going to answer. Besides that, the most important thing I had to change is that the interview’s actions and her speaking does not match sometimes. Hence, I edited somewhere again and changed several scenes.

All in all, the whole process of conducting this interview video is not too hard for me. Indeed, although I put all my effort in, there are a lot of room for improvement.