I am actually quite excited in getting my hands dirty for Project Brief 3. At this very moment, I have not really started on anything solid, but I have a very good idea on what I’ll be doing for the 1-2 minutes long video. Don’t want to spoil anything for anyone, but I am really looking forward to getting down to the actual production and recording process of my subject and the topics that we are going to cover.

In this week’s workshop, we were taught how to ask questions. And not just any ol’questions, questions that actually grab your audience attention and keep them wanting to know more. I try to keep myself in the audience’s shoes while I was brainstorming for questions that I intend to ask my subject. And I realised this phrase kept popping up in my mind, “And then? And then? And then? And then?”. It is just the fear of not asking enough to sieve out the answers and information I need to keep my audience attention in check. In newscasting there is the “grab” where it catches the attention of the viewer, and usually the “grab” only lasts 3 seconds before you loses the viewer’s attention. Therefore, in order to keep my audience’s attention, I would have to come up with good questions and not just a generic yes or no question for my subject. (Am still brainstorming questions).

As mention above, I’m still very much in the pre-production stage where I’m mainly planning and brainstorming ideas for the entire project. And location has been one of the main things to cover. Since it’s an interview, it should take place in somewhere quiet, where I can record the audio on a separate track and mix it into the sequence if I want to. If I were to do the interview in a crowded area or a place out in the open, whatever audible sound that is not my subject’s voice might bleed into the microphone, and I might have a hard time mixing or getting rid of that in post. Would want to have a big reminder on that, because it’s so easy to overlook that when I have my main focus on the visuals.

Speaking of visuals, there is a torrent of possibilities to carry out an interview, there is the person to person interview, the voice over (where you don’t see the interviewee, just a voice over some visuals), or just the interviewee speaking, and more. One tip that I got from this week’s lectorial was to get the subject to repeat the question in their answer. So if I asked what did you have for breakfast. Instead of my subject saying, “I had bacon and eggs…”, I should get them to say, “What I had for breakfast was bacon and eggs.”. And that would help so much in editing the film later. I would then have the option of including me, the interviewer, in the sequence, or just have my interviewee speaking on the topic. I have not really decided whether I should stick to one or have a mix of both, so I’ll need to consider that before I go into post production.

Another thing I was considering was the song choice or whether to even have a backing music throughout the sequence. But I realised, I would discover that along the way during post production, since I don’t have a hard and solid sequence yet. It would be good to have music to lift things and set the mood, but it might be a distraction for the audience. As mentioned during one of the workshops, while doing an interview or documentary, it is always good to have an instrumental track playing in the background while the interviewee is speaking so as to avoid any clashing with the vocals of a song that might have lyrics in it, so I’ll look out for that.

In a nutshell, I think I’m good to go, and now only thing’s stopping me is arranging a suitable time for my subject to be available for a shoot, but that’s being sorted out as I write this post. So I’m having my fingers crossed…