ONW 1 in 2000 Interview

The Assignment

For our second video of the year we were told to interview one of the 2,000 brilliant students at our school about one of their favorite memories from the summer or beyond. In my group, I was the one to be interviewed. I talked about the trip that I took this summer to South Dakota and the wonders I saw there. 

Pre-Production

Before we started filming we had to plan. We created a small storyboard showing where we would be filming, we had to choose a place that would fit the theme of our interview. Then, it was the job of the interviewer to write 21 interview questions that we could work off of during the interview. The person receiving the interview was not allowed to have a copy of the questions and was not scripted. This made the interview very natural and less nerve-wracking. We were also told how to conduct the interview. The interviewer would be sitting off screen and to the side so that the person receiving the interview would look at them instead of right into the camera. Once we had all these things down, we were ready to begin filming.

Production

The filming of our interview was very quick because we did it all in one clip. However, getting set up took a little while, we had to play with some stats on the camera to get the microphone to pick up sound. We moved setup as well, the window we were originally filming in front of had too much light coming through and made me look like a shadow. The only problem with filming in front of the courtyard window was that at one point in our video, a person walked by in the background. While filming I had a hard time finding one place to look, it was very tempting to look at the camera. Next time I will be more disciplined to look just at the interviewer. One instruction we forgot was to not pass the microphone back and forth. This created a conflict later in editing.

Post-Production

The first time I edited this video it was very choppy, the interview was too long so I had to cut some unimportant questions out. I also stuttered a few times and there were awkward pauses where I tried to think of what to say. These also had to be cut out along with the pass-off of the microphone.  I used only three pieces of b-roll in the first edit. On the second edit my main goal was to make it have less cuts, I did this by putting in some more b-roll over parts with lots of cuts and taking out the interviewer's voice and replacing it with a question screen. I also added an end screen. The second edit looks a lot cleaner and I am happy with the way it turned out.

What I Would Change

If I were to do this project again I would try to find some different music because the music at the beginning is reused from the How to Use a Hall Pass video. During filming I would make every answer a different shot instead of having one long clip, this will prevent awkward cuts in the middle of sentences. I would also keep in mind only giving the microphone to the person receiving the interview so there is no passing the microphone back and forth. Otherwise this video went pretty smoothly.

Overall

Overall I think our group used the five guarantees of e-comm very well; we collaborated at the beginning to decide who we should interview based on what we had to share. We communicated through post-production to make sure we were editing correctly and that everyone had the clips and b-roll to make a professional video possible. We had effective project management because we finished filming and editing in good time. We each took on a bit of a leadership role depending on our part of the project (For example, I had to make sure I had plenty to talk about my trip to South Dakota and was able to bring in some b-roll). We used our existing technical skills combined with some new tricks we learned with the camera and Adobe Premiere Pro to produce and then re-edit our video to make it more professional. This project was fun because I learned a lot on how to film a proper interview.