The practice of interviewing is not a foreign concept for me, I have done it multiple times – on air and pre-recorded. However, I, myself, was never interviewed. The prompt of the interview activity was deeply personal and this exercise taught me how an interviewee feels when they share their stories. It is not easy, you get nervous, you laugh at random moments, your sentence structure is in complete shambles. So, this helped me realise that the interviewer needs to be patient and comforting to the interviwee. I was interviewed by my friends, and I still felt uncomfortable. The layout of the questions has to be arranged in a way that makes the interviewee feel at easy and prompt him/her to say something interesting. For example, Sonja asked me “what is your fondest memory of your grandmother?” after I finished my story to make me elaborate further.

As an interviewer and director, I asked Jen to tell her story in a certain structure: the person she thought she was, the moment she realised she was someone else, then the value of the experience as a whole. I wanted her to follow the story arch: exposition, climax, and resolution. The topic of the interview wasn’t sensitive or sad, it had a more positive outlook, which made it easy to navigate and easy for her to tell too. I assume a similar style would be carried out in our final project as we will be talking with experts about something that is not too personal to them. Yet, we will still need to be particular with our questions and wording to make the topic more engaging.