Shooting an Interview

Last semester we had a project briefing which was to shoot an interview.

Each of us chose a person to interview and had to present that person to the whole class. Only 4 ideas of interview could be chosen and mine was one of them.

The person I chose was my maternal grandpa. He was a really important person on the Portuguese military that helped organizing and realizing the 25th of April revolution.

Before the interview:

There were several jobs to do about the interview:

• Being the interviewer and think about the questions to be asked
• Being the responsible for the lighting in the room, during the shooting
• Being the sound expert, watch for the mic and everything
• Being the camera man and the several angles between shots

It made sense to me that I was the one asking the questions because it’s my grandpa and I felt like it would be more personal. We assigned everyone a different task of the above (we were 4) but during the real interview everyone helped each other.

Before the real interview we had a couple of classes to practice. We were thought several rules about lighting, space on the screen and mic positions.

Here is the video about the 3 point lighting and here is one of the many videos I’ve watched before the interview to consolidate what we learned in class.

Interview:

All the group had to travel to Lisbon because my grandpa lives there. I thought it would be really complicated to move all the cameras and material and that it would be really expensive.. Turns out everything worked fine. We all traveled in the same car with the material inside it and managed to park near my grandpa’s house!

The setup of the interview went really well and at first I was a bit nervous so I just asked a couple of simple questions and then I started with the real ones (yes, I was more nervous than the interviewee).

All was going great and we had 2 questions more to ask when the battery of our camera died… Luckily we found a movie studio on the corner of my grandpa’s street and the people there did not have a battery for our camera but they were kind enough to come with us with their camera and film!

The rest went smoothly and we went home happy!

After the interview:

We had some problems with color and exposure that we only noticed when editing… But overall I am really happy with this experience!

Check all the details of this project on my report: Interview Report

HERE IS THE LINK FOR THE FINISHED INTERVIEW!!!

(you have to put in a password – 12345)