This weekend I spent my Sunday shooting two interviews with participants.
Since I was all over the place on Sunday, there were a lot of things that I found myself rushing with the camera work. For the first interview Nenad, I wanted to try going handheld with all the shots but I don’t think that turned out too well because the shots were really shaky. Then for Vivan I used the tripod, but I was a bit bored of the static shots of her. For both participants I did try to change up the background, though I’m not sure how well that would work – it might be jarring now that I think about it. Of course, this is just what I feel now – everything always looks vastly different in post so I won’t know until I start post-production.
As I don’t really film documentary-type videos, I was very nervous being the interviewer. By nature, I’m not much of a conversation starter so I definitely felt some pressure to continue on the conversation when the participant ran out of things to say. At the same time, I tried to make sure not to put words in their mouth and wanted them to just say whatever came to mind. On top of interviewing, I was also on camera so I guess it was a kind of strange situation having the participants look off into the distance at no one.
It was quite surprising, though, that I found myself really immersed in the role of “documentarist”. I would hold back casual conversation when setting up just because I wanted to capture everything, and even their natural movements like fixing their clothes, hair, or glasses, I tried to capture that without their awareness.
As for the “montagey” footage – I got some close ups of their clothes, hair, face as well as some posters, drawings, and textures around RMIT that I thought might match what they both had to say. For the walking sequences, I got some shots of the both walking from the front and back, and for Vivan I got some of also walking down the stairs. Interestingly enough, Nenad is actually going to be training for catwalking in the future so it might be fun to see the before and after.
In regards to how I’m going to edit the footage, at this point I’m not really sure because I got much more interview footage compared to montagey footage. I think I will try doing a super short 1-1.5 min montage sequence and another cut of all the interesting things they had to say and just ignore that they’re jumping all over the frame.