ROOM WITH A VIEW: Y3: S1: WK8: Individual Interview Reflection

Interview with James Shaw: Lemons Ceramics
A Reflection

For my individual interview, I decided on speaking to a person I know who is a ceramicist. His name is James Shaw.
You can view the pdf document which details a little of his background information in ceramics and a basic script outline I conjured up for the entire interview, by clicking here.

I thought the interview went well, I was still nervous though, purely because I get anxious about any kind of presentation at all. I tried really hard to not respond vocally, with colloquial language. But, still caught myself doing it. I feel it’s so unnatural and almost feels rude for me not to respond verbally. I was trading vocal responses for gestural ones more so than usual but probably not enough still. I suppose that the beauty of this being a pre-recorded interview is that I was able to edit some of this responsiveness out of the recording. I feel I am generally, an erratic speaker when talking to people. All the thoughts pile out at once and I struggle to articulate anything properly because of it. In turn, I have a lot of trouble listening over my voice and editing clips because of that. It makes me feel like I slip into sounding unintelligible. However, I do try to remain aware of this and fix the habit as I speak. I suppose I have been working on my “radio voice.” I feel I did a good job of following on from James’ answers, giving my input and tying these topics into the next questions I decided I wanted to ask. I make sure to make an effort to engage with the subjects and not rush into other questions too fast, so I don’t sound dismissive. I feel I have always made sure to do extensive research on my subjects for this class, so I don’t run out of relevant information to discuss.

Technically, the interview went smoothly. There was some background noise (probably not actually as noticeable as I think), but that was due to people being really loud in the Greenroom – unfortunate. Other than that, I thought the sound levels were really good. They came up equal and the audio didn’t clip during the recording. I made sure to get the microphone levels right before I recorded any audio.

As I hadn’t done any panel work before and had only seen the basics at the very beginning of this studio, I had no idea how to switch the headphones to hear the studio audio rather than what was playing on Triple R. Luckily I managed to find someone who had just finished up her show and was still in the building. It was a very simple fix, so I felt silly. But I genuinely could not remember which buttons to trigger. I will need to get some practice in before operating the panel (if there comes a chance) for any other shows we do.

I saved the WAV file of my interview which at first didn’t play on my laptop, so I had to delete a miscellaneous blank audio line section from Audacity and export it again. It worked after I did that, thank goodness. After the Lucky Threes (lack of) luck with our audio which we have had, I made sure to triple check it exported properly and that it worked on my laptop – this actually proved to be really stressful as well because there were a group of people coming into the studio directly at 3pm after my booking to go live to air. I was mucking around with my audio-to-hard-drive situation from 2:50pm and narrowly avoided chewing into their air time.

In regard to the edit, I did have to cut back quite a bit of it, as it ended at 25 mins. I just made sure to ask more questions than 7-10 min worth to make sure I definitely had enough content. I probably could have cut this interview down a bit more, as it was a little waffly at times. I had already cut out quite a lot of the content which trailed off a little, as James is quite an explosive talker I would say – a bit like me, everything sort of comes out at once sometimes. As much as there is a natural feel to the piece, it probably could have been chopped a little more to take out a few of the less important moments. I also did try to find some kind of music to incorporate… but I couldn’t seem to find anything which worked with the interview theme.

Here is the final of the interview, with accompanying annotations:

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