E Z R A: An Interview

I had a lot of fun doing this project, but boy did I run into many road blocks!

I learnt that you have to be organised and use your time wisely. During preparation, Ezra and I were on different schedules and were unable to find a time that we could both get together and start filming. He went back home for Easter, and I was working and finishing up other assessments for university. Luckily, we found a time and filmed in one afternoon and I felt I had recorded enough content to create the video.

I wanted Ezra to be as comfortable as possible, so when he asked if he could have some wine to relax I thought  “why not?! That’ll look cool!”

I am an idiot.

It was fine until I got home and started to play around with the cuts. I ended up changing the order of the story to be more cohesive, but that then resulted in major continuity errors with the wine glass. I knew it would happen as soon as I started moving things around but I had no time to get the camera and record again so I had to make do. As someone who loves picking apart shows with continuity errors, I wanted to throw my computer out the window. A good learning experience

The audio is awful. I had to increase Ezra’s audio channel to 4db just so you could hear him, especially in the first part. I can also hear their bird bath dripping and of course the ever present birds. Unfortunately the scenes that the audio appears on are necessary for my story so i had to keep them in there, but I would love to figure out how to delete that.

I wanted to keep the interview as real as possible, so I enjoyed having Ezra do what he wanted, but for the future I need to have a clearer vision on my projects and how I want them to flow. These last few projects have really stressed the importance of storyboarding and vision as I can never fully lay out an idea in my head and execute it properly.

Overall I’m happy with the end result. I felt a little more confident in using Premiere Pro, but I still feel like i’m fumbling around more than I know what i’m doing. Trying to colour grade the shots proved to be very difficult, and some I just COULD’NT figure it out so you can see some shots having different lighting. I know that we had a crash course in our lecture, but for some reason some the files wouldn’t allow me to balance the white. This is something I have to go over again so next project can look uniformed.

I wanted to create something fun that represented Ezra’s personality. The music was a great choice and I wanted it to be throughout the interview, which is why i made the choice to keep it flowing through the whole 3 mins and to just lower the volume, unfortunately though combined with the audio issues sometimes Ezra’s voice gets lost. I also need to be more wary of my cuts as Ezra speaks very quickly and I found that some of his sentences after being cut were just a little off, I tried to rework these but found I couldn’t quite cut the shot in the perfect place.

I exported my video into two formats, but still see distorition in some of the effects, I’ll have to learn what format is best to put it in and ask to see how I can avoid this in future.

Here is the interview: (password is media1)

Edit: I realise now that it takes a while to upload due to internet jargon. Going forward I should probably go into the university or try to upload the day before.