Tuesday, 22 April 2014
So that i could further prepare myself for when i go to interview the stonemasons, i've been researching into interviewing techniques, seeing how the professionals prepare themselves for interviews, learning and noting down their advice, and important steps that they take to ensure a good end result.
Hopefully with this research, i'll be able to use it as a guide post, to refer back to if i need to re-read up on preparing for an interview.
- Jason J. Tomaric - Take time to warm up your interviewee, help put them at ease.... Where i've met my contributors in advance and spoken to them on a daily basis during visits, and also shoot, i feel that they're at ease with me.
- Paul Freedman - The key is, to really be able to make someone comfortable, and make them understand something that we're going to embark on, is something that's going to be good for them, i treat the interviews as a session, and let the clients know that it's going to be food for them.
- Michael Rabiger - A good interviewer works off of what an interviewee says, and not what they want, listen, and listen for subtext!
- Anthony Q. Artis - In the begging, i always ask 1-3 simple throwaway questions, where you from? what was it like when you was growing up? something i know that i'm not going to use, something that might open up the topic, because when people first sit in the chair, you want to warm them up a little bit and get them use to talking. It takes 1-3 question normally to get people warmed up, and get them into the subject matter, then i start to jump into the things where i know that i'm going to get my sound bytes. The only exception to this matter is if you're dealing with celebrities, other than that, if your working with normal people, it's always good to warm them up before you get in depth with the interview.
- Dana Kupper - Although you've planned your questions out in advance, they can sometimes become a hinderance to your interview. if your going to do an interview, you have to be completely prepared, but the contradiction is that you have to put all of that aside, and listen plus ask in a really curious way.
- Michale Rabiger - If you have a list of questions in front of you, and you stick to those question, chances are your looking for the opportunity to get to the next questions, and are not listening to what's there, and a good interviewer work's off of what the interviewee says, and not what they want, you want to make an interview organic, and the organism, is your interviewee, you want to listen and look our for subtext, what's going on under the surface.. Your always trying to tease out that which lyes below the surface, and if you work with a list of questions your not allowing yourself to do that!
How to interview part 3
Foundations of Video: Interviews
with Anthony Q. Artis.png)
The Art of Video Interviewwith Richard
Harrington and Amy DeLouise
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Conclusion
Watching these videos, i've gathered lots of valuable, useful information that will help me to construct a solid interview for the stonemasons, and should also be useful as a reference guide to read back and remember such notes/tips as:
- Warming up the interviewee with basic questions that don't require much thought so that you'll get them ready for your main questions i.e. Where are you from? where did you grow up? etc..
- Using your questions as a guide but not solely relying on them, working mainly off of the answers that the interviewee gives to your questions, further exploring their answers i.e. Where are you from? i'm from a small town called Chatham What was it like growing up in Chatham?
- Getting your interviewee to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end; helping to guide them there.
- Brainstorming and writing down every question that anyone might possibly want to know about the topic at hand, and then go back and edit this list down by identifying the question that most pertain to the goal of your interview.
- Avoid leading questions, or questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no.
- Questions that begin with words such as how, why, where, and what will elicit stronger, more in-depth answers from your subject.
- Avoid questions that begin with such words as: did, are, will and was, because your more likely to get short, general one and two word answers.
- Know when to move on to a new question and be particularly vigilant if your subject appears to be losing energy and getting tired.
- The Soap box question - Your subject will probably still have at least one or two things they'd like to say, that they thinks is important or may have been missed in the earlier conversation. And ultimately, the subject's prospective is the one you really want to capture. i.e. is there anything that I have not asked you about (your thoughts towards being a stonemason apprentice or how you feel about the apprenticeship scheme or anything at all that you want to say to the audience about this topic?)
- The goal of the interview is to get truthful responses that will be useful during the edit.
- The audience will not hear you(ME) asking any of the questions, so could you(Interviewee) please incorporate the questions in the answer so that it stands out alone. i.e. Where did you grow up? (right) I grew up in a small town called chatham (wrong) Chatham
The good thing with these interview tutorials, is that besides giving me interviewing techniques, they also cover other useful supplementaries to interviewing, such as scouting location, equipment/gear, release forms etc.
