“Watching an interviewee describe something important can be magical, and speech becomes action. Profound interchanges like this are at the heart of making documentary.” – Michael Rabiger, ‘Conducting and Shooting Interviews’
Through listening to the words of this week’s guest speaker Louise Turley, who currently works for the ABC and has previously worked on documentaries, as well as going through this week’s reading ‘Conducting and Shooting Interviews’ I have really discovered a new found appreciation for interviews/documentaries and those that create them.
The way in which an interviewer is able to extract a story from someone or inform the viewer of an issue by having it retold by others can make for a truly inspiring piece of artistry. Of course, there is a large sum of thought and deliberation placed into a documentary before it takes place- everything thought through in order to capture exactly what it is that the interviewer has set out to. Some points to consider when planning an interview being:
- Rehearsing
- Camera preparation
- Prepping the interviewee
- Voice overlaps between interviewer and interviewee
The narrative of a documentary is also integral to the way in which the topic of your interview will be told. ‘Narrative’ is ‘a way of structuring meanings in the form of a story’ or ‘a sense of a sequence of events in some kind of temporal order’. Narrative refers to ‘the way ‘in which particular generalised stories circulate widely within a culture and are seen as valid and predictable’ – also referred to as ideology by media and cultural analysts. There are also some key elements in story which are;
- The Controlling Idea
- Structure (progression)
- Conflict (competing goals)
- Character
- Character change or growth
After listening to this lecture and having done the reading, I came away a little less daunted by the idea of creating my own interview/documentary in Project Brief Three, now having some foundation of where to begin this process.