This week was focusing on interviewing for documentaries. I like interviewing people, I like to listen and learn, and as an introvert, I’m always happy to take the backseat in a conversation and ask questions to provoke more words from my subject.

I was really struggling to find inspiration for adding still images to the footage, particularly with the pace of fitting a story into a 2-minute video and my subject was speaking quite fast. Next time I think I’d maybe just ask the subject to speak a bit slower, as it made it quite hard to cut the story together with every sentence being linked by an ‘umm’ or ‘ahh’. I have done a few interviews in the past, and have also chopped together a few interview footage videos so I’m a little disappointed with how the interview chopped together, there are a few points that are clearly cut just before an ‘um’.

In terms of the actual interview I’m quite happy with the result, I asked a lot of open questions and prompted for more detail to get good quotes. The actual interview runs for about thirteen minutes and was cut down to just over 2 minutes. Just as Rabiger (2009) suggests I use a lot of open questions and ask catered questions to the interviewee by listening and adapting to the conversation. The interview was also with my partner, so I got to cut corners in the preamble of getting to know them pre-interview.

I used photos that we took whilst on the trip, and a few royalty-free images from pexels.com to piece the video together with stills. I feel like I’ve got the pacing wrong with some images, but I wanted to keep things relevant to the narrative, and for some of the story I just couldn’t find the right images, so I stuck with one prolonged image (particularly the highway & the travel agency), but I did what I could with what I had to work with. Next time I could probably do some further diving for UGC images to follow the narrative better.

I added a few small sound effects to help push the story, I don’t know whether I’m committed to the idea yet – been listening to too many podcasts in isolation I think.

• Godmilow, J 2002, ‘Kill the Documentary as We Know It’, Journal of Film and Video, vol. 54, no. 2/3, pp. 3–10.

• Rabiger, M 2009, ‘Conducting and Shooting Interviews’, Directing the Documentary, Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 462-481.