Week 5 | Food on Film

Interviews and vox pox Exercise Reflection

While doing the interview in class, we went out and grabbed a stranger who is a “talker” and asked the question about the restaurant “Lentil of Anything”. There are a few disadvantages I really do not like:

1. Use a stranger in a formal interview. Before we shoot an interview, it is important that we do some research about the topic, but not just the topic, the interviewee’s background as well. It was very important that he or she knows the background of the topic. Otherwise, when we asked the interviewee if he knows about the “Lentil of Anything”, he said he does not know, it was really hard to keep asking from there.
2. Shooting in public place. Shooting in public place would result in a bad audio reception and the background may always get interrupted during the interview. Rabiger (2009) stated that it may make the interviewee uncomfortable and I agree, but it also depends on the personality of the interviewee, if he is ok with it, then it should be fine. Otherwise, shooting in the subject’s familiar place where he can calm down would be better, such as at his home or work place.
3. Preparing long and boring interview questions. When I saw the preparation of the questions of my groupmates, to be honest, it scared me because it was too long. If I was an interviewee, I would not want to see that, it would stress me out only seeing that long interview. As an interviewer, I would not prepare such long and boring questions. I would rather consider the conversation to be just having a chat, it would keep my focus on listening to the answers but not the questions so that I can adjust the questions according to the answers.

To prepare the interview for my film, I did a bit of research on how to do a formal interview. According to Walbeck (2018), there were a few suggestions I would consider using in my film.

1. Put the camera in a dark side to create a cinematic look. At the beginning of the interview, choosing the right place to shoot is important. First, find the main light source, such as by window, then make the interviewee sit beside the window so half of his face would be lightened. Also, put a second light and the camera on the opposite side from the window so that it would create a more cinematic look.
2. Always have a backup audio. Because audio is considered to be the most important thing in interviews, so having a backup can never go wrong.

For the vox pox, it was really hard to ask hard questions. I only did two vox pox, the results both did not come well. The first question I did was “why do you smoke”, no one was willing to answer me at all, they were either say they did not know or they refused to do the shooting while smoking. The second question I did was “what do you think of authentic Chinese food”, the question was too big for the interviewees, many of them were confused by the questions and could not answer. Then I changed it to “what is the first thing you can think of when talking about authentic Chinese food”, it got better, but still, the answers were either so alike or plain. So, for my film, I would not use any of those vox poxes, because the answers were invaluable to me. Authentic Chinese Food is a project that needs to be explored, so vox pox would not be a good idea.

 

References

Rabiger, M 2009, “Conducting and Shooting Interview”, Directing the Documentary, Taylor& Francis Group, ProQuest Ebook Central

Walkbeck, P 2018, “How to Shoot An Interview | Job Shadow”, YouTube, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ENEuqXDwY&t=1060s>