[DUE SUNDAY, MARCH 3 AT 10PM AS A POST IN THE “INTERVIEW FOOTAGE” CATEGORY]
The backbone of your documentary is likely to be interview footage. As we discussed in class, letting people tell their stories and the story of the neighborhood will be more entertaining and more convincing than simply providing your perspective through voice-over or intertitles (an intertitle or “title card” is a piece of printed text that appears on screen).
For this assignment, you should produce three filmed interview segments (of three different interviewees), totaling at least 12 minutes in length. (The interviews don’t have to be the same length – your 12 minutes could, for example, consist of four three-minute interviews or one eight-minute interview and two two-minutes interviews.)
A good way to approach this assignment might be the following:
- Identify four prospective interview subjects. If you’re focusing on one or more small places (e.g. nail salons), it might make sense to choose interviewees who can provide information about the places (e.g. the owners, managers or workers at the nail salons). If you are taking a broader focus on the neighborhood, think about interviewing a local government official or somebody from a local community group or public institution (e.g. a librarian). These people are likely to be able to talk in an informed way about the neighborhood as a whole. Also – make sure to consider the diversity of your interview subjects – if all of the interviews are coming from one perspective, it will be hard to convey any sense of ‘melting pot’ dynamics.
- Plan your interview. Have at least five or six questions that you plan to ask. There’s no need to stick to only these questions (in fact you should, in addition to the questions, feel free to just have an unstructured conversation with your interviewees), but it’s important to know what kinds of topics you would like to discuss in the interview.
- Importantly, you should make sure that you get people’s informed permission, just like when you filmed your B-Roll. Tell them about the project we’re doing and make sure they’re completely comfortable with being interviewed. If they’re not, don’t push the issue! Just thank them for their time and tell them you completely understand and move on to another person.
- Think about a good location for the interview before you conduct it. Ideally, it should be a place without background noise that will make it hard to record the sound effectively. And it should be a visually evocative location. Rather than interviewing somebody in the back office of a restaurant, you might see if they’ll sit at a table with a view of the dining room behind them. The visual backdrop should suit the topic of the interview.
- Lastly, when shooting the interview, try to keep the camera as still as possible, and the microphone uniformly pointed at the subject. If you can use a tripod or stand of one form or another, that would be great. After you ask a question, try to be really quiet. Don’t interrupt people when they’re speaking. If they give you a short answer to a question and you want more, consider asking them to elaborate on their answer, or even just ask the question in a slightly different way to see if they answer with more depth. It’s ok to ask an important question a few different times in a few different ways – its very possible that there will be some ideas that are ‘lost in translation’ – so finding the right language to communicate with folks is key.
- If possible, try to get non-speaking footage of the person you are interviewing. This might not always be possible – but if the person is willing, try to get a few shots of them in different situations – walking down the street, at a shop, etc. For instance, if you interview a barber, getting a few shots of that person cutting peoples’ hair will go a long way in improving your video.
HAVE FUN!!!
