The plan that full of mess
with tiny handwriting
As first time of being an interviewer, although having quite an amount experiences on making videos in groups, I was even being more nervous than my friend, the interviewee, since I have to be the director, scriptwriter, interviewer and the cameraman simultaneously.
At the preparation stage, a pretty serious issue had occurred, because of my miscommunication within the interviewee, the one I assumed at first, that I had started planning the interview completely before the interviewee had actually said ‘yes‘ to topics that I am going to interview with. Luckily, I had asked two friends for being the interviewee at the same day, but it still caused a few days of delay on my working plan, which also taught me the true importance of always got the backup plan.
The second difficulty that I had faced would be, focused too much on experimenting ‘extraordinary/professional‘ shots, that overlooked certain basic techniques on shooting an interview, including the Focus, Exposure and White Balance adjustment, shaky shots, and shooting the interviewee in different angles which widely used in interviewing documentary. The desire of advanced movement shots lets me waste most of the time in the filming process of trying on them, which made my interviewee start feeling tired of it (although she thought it’s quite interesting), as well as, I have to waste a couple of hours in fixing the above adjustment problems, that applying Lumetri Color on each clip I had used one by one in order to harmonise them. This problem made me realised the need of challenging difficulties step-by-step, by first familiar with the way of using the camera, and basic movements like panning and tilting, then move to the more advanced field.
Fortunately, I had found a way to deal with the dullness of the single-angle interview scene, by a useful tip found on YouTube about creating camera movements using Premiere, with just turning on the animation function and changing the position/scale value slightly depending on the video length.
For future practices, I would still experimenting some interesting approach on making video/media, but spending less time on it, focusing more on strengthening basics, with finding some alternative ways to let my work look more creative (e.g. Using the software way when having technical shortages). As well as, keep having the habit of preparing a backup plan/location/idea in case of the original one cannot fulfill what I expected or had caused any issues accidentally.
Overall, the whole process of creating a documentary individually was pretty engaging, starting with being nervous about interviewing my friend, with feel challenging on shooting and editing, till to the accomplishment while quite a lot of ideas could be implemented eventually, the monitor turning off and word cloud title as the opening, certain movement shot could still be used, and the successfulness on emotions and action changing.
