Wednesday 27 April 2016
Interview arrangement
Having finally established the interview questions and the overall narrative structure for the portrait documentary, i finally managed to arrange a sit-down interview with Oli on Sunday the 10th of April 2016.
However, for a week and a half i did not hear from Oli, as he was having personal problems within his life, and i was not able to contact him for a duration of time, which had me wondering whether or not if he was still up to the task of carrying out this portrait documentary, especially having met his mother and collected a lot of archive material of his upbringing.
Because the interview was arranged short noticed, it gave me little time to prepare a decent location for us to film the interviews at in a controlled environment, so we ended up filming the interview inside of his caravan.
The interview
Surprisingly, during the interview, Oli opened up a lot more than he did during the pre interview, telling me way more information than i had about him prior, pretty much giving me an abundance of information about his upbringing, plus his mindset at time whilst his experiences were happening, and how that changed his life.
In total i got 2 hours worth of interviewing footage that i’m going to edit down into roughly 10-15 minutes
On this day the equipment i brought out was a lighting kit, plus my canon 60D and my sony A7s with my Rokinon 80mm t1.5 cine lens and 24-105mm f4 canon lens, two tripods and lighting Gel plus the wireless senhiser mic. Ideally i would have like to of brought an extra crew member along with me, but because of the rushed preparation for the film date, i was shooting solo, as a one man crew, so i had nobody to operate the sound, or camera.
I printed out the questions to bring along with me to ask Oli, so that i could mark them off whilst talking to him.
Camera work + Audio feedback
This picture was taken at the end of the interview
The set up that i had for the interview was, the sony A7s was capturing the wide shots on the 24-105mm lens and the canon 60D was capturing the close ups on the 85mm t1.5 at t1.8
The lighting set up is a 3 point lighting, with light in front of Oli acting as the Key light with a blue gel on to balance his skin tone, the small light to the left of him acting as the backlight for the side of his face, using scrim to lessing the strength of the light to reduce the glare to the side of his face, and the light to the right of him acting as the fill light (although in the picture it has slightly moved)
Exposure
Because we were interviewing in the caravan little did i know at the time that, even though to begin with i had control over the lights, because there was so many source of lighting coming through into the caravan, throughout the interview, my lighting of Oli changed dramatically towards the end. However, this isn’t too bad, because i can fix this in post, making the shots resemble each other.
Example of Light shot then dark shot
Focus + Framing
Also, on my B-camera, because Oli would move about throughout the interview, and we was filming in such a small environment within his front room, the focus line and framing that i had set up for the close up shot, at times, he would come out of focus and out of frame because he was moving back and forth between answers. If i had been more aware, i should of possibly of gone wider (although i’d have to step down to f4), and stepped down on the T from T2 to maybe T3, however, i would not of had that shallow depth of field and the background would of been in focus as well which i did not want.
The last part of the interview is pretty much unusable for the close up camera, as most of it was out of focus!
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| This is how the image was originally framed up as Oli was sitting leaning up, however, throughout the interview, he changed his position and at the time i did not take this into account. |
Solution...
I am going to keep and edit up and work around this interview with the footage that i have, however, on the blurry shots, i am going to use my wide shot and scale up the image and fix it in post to possibly match the CU shot, adding vignette blur to hopefully try and recreate a shallow DOF similar to that of the CU.
Here's an example of how i will fix and grade the shots in post
Audio
Another problem that i had was that, due to Oli wearing a Lapel mic and because we were inside of a caravan and the weather was very inconsistent, one minute it was very hot, then very cold, so the interviewee would at times rub his T-shirt when giving very good answers, leaving me to have to ask him the same question again to get a cleaner response. I also didn’t notice that throughout the interview, there was some background noise at times that i did not pick up on when the interview was taking place, however, during the edit with the soundscape and also sound track, this will hopefully drown out the unwanted background noises that sometimes pops up.
Interview feedback
The interview went exceptionally well and i got really good answers from the questions i structured because of the pre interview. Although, throughout the interview at some points i felt that some of the questions i asked Oli had sort of took us out of that moment, of getting really good compelling answers to more generic, not so vibrant answers. Kind of like you could feel the mood change when i asked some of the questions, not in a bad way, but in regards to the amount of information plus delivery of the answers.
For example, at times when i would ask him question, i think that because the way i had structured them, they weren’t so personal directed towards Oli and could of been asked to anyone, which in response, he would answer them in a hypothetical way rather than about himself, to which i would then have to ask him the question again, but more directed at him, asking Oli to use himself as an example for the question to answer.
At times, i found myself having a casual conversation with Oli when he asked me questions about his performance and the answers he was providing, giving hiim reassurance that he was brilliant, and doing a good Job, as he was touching upon very emotional sensitive history that he’d not spoken about in years, so at times he seemed worried, so to make him feel confident, throughout the interview, besides nodding and giving him thumbs up, i’d also compliment him on his answers.
After Oli answering the questions, i could of left more of a pause before i asked the next one, because at times i found myself asking another question 2/3 seconds after he answered the question not leaving enough of a breathable gap.
As for the picture recorded throughout the interview, i feel that it went bad, as i was unprepared for the location and didn’t have a chance to bring an extra crew member with me, this lead to my B-camera producing unusable footage, and also the exposure changing drastically throughout the shoot, which not only affects the contrast in the image, but also the white balance as well, so this will mean that i will have to do a lot of work in post to try and correct the shots.
Conclusion
Now that i have the interview, i'm going to add all of the footage into premiere pro and transcribe the footage so that i can form the interviews into a story.
