For my second individual exercise, I chose to interview a group of skaters outside the State Library. This was in part because of its proximity to Uni, and in part because I was interested to work with a subject matter that typically ignored conventions and formal approaches.

I made my interview almost deliberately lo-fi. By this I don’t mean I sabotaged things like audio and visual quality, but rather made ‘mistakes’ which come across as amateur. Close to the end of the interview, I fiddled with the exposure ring on the side of the camera to make the image pitch black, and then slightly overexposed. This was a sort of homage to skate videos and non-professional production in general. I also shot the interview handheld, from a sitting position, and had the subjects stand in front of me. My framing of the three of them was lax and I jumped from one subject to another.

I zoomed in on several different aspects at seemingly random points in the video, but I wanted to gauge reactions up close. When I implied that city skaters were pretty untalented, I zoomed in on the main skater of the group I was talking to to get a facial expression. He didn’t look happy at the statement. This expression was only on his face for a second or two, and without the closeup it would have gone unnoticed by me, and presumably the viewer.

I don’t remember its name but the vox pop we watched in class regarding the elections in Cuba (?) was an inspiration for this approach – the way the camera went from one subject to another effortlessly and suddenly was unlike any interview I’d seen before. It had very little regard for convention, and as soon as it was satisfied with the answer it was given, it darted across to the next subject. My occasionally frenetic camera movements in this interview drew inspiration from this clip. I shot the whole interview in one take unintentionally – I originally planned to cut but the whole thing flowed very well so I kept the camera rolling and everything seemed to work out.

I’m very pleased with the final product. I think the fact that I was interviewing young street skaters allowed me slightly more freedom in my creativity. Things like quick pans and zooms, unfocused cameras, and choppy sound are all at home in this world of more lo-fi filmmaking.