The Interview

Our task was to research various filming and editing techniques used to film an interview and implement them whilst filming our own interview, we decided to interview Laurence the criminal mastermind.

We decided to film in a small well lit room and didn’t use any other lighting other than the lights in the room, for the second part of the interview we had to hide the interviewees face so we turned off the lights in the room and placed him in front of a window, the light behind him created a silhouette which hid his face and created an outline of the interviewee.

When it comes to camera angles, we had 4 main ones we used along with an establishing shot; a medium shot of the interviewer, a medium shot of the criminal, a close up of the criminal and a medium shot of the victim which uses a silhouette. We only had one camera so we had to vary between the camera angles to give the illusion that the interview was filmed with multiple cameras. We started the interview with an establishing shot that shows where the interview is taking a place followed by a black screen with the interviewer talking over it, when he says “we are filming on camera A” the medium shot of him is show and when he says “and camera B” the medium shot of the criminal is shown, this is just to make the interview feel more like a real police interview that would be recording and also to make it seem like there are multiple cameras in the room. We cycle through these two shots throughout the interview depending on who is talking, at some parts if the interviewer or criminal says a one word question or answer we didn’t change the camera angle as it would seem over edited, we also sometimes filmed one persons reaction when the other one is talking. We only used the close up shot once in the interview, this was to emphasise what the criminal said during the shot and to make it seem like and important or dramatic part of the interview. In the second part of the interview we filmed the victim and used the same shot for that whole section of the interview as we needed to have the lights off in order to hide the victims face, it wouldn’t really look good if we also had a shot of the interviewee with the lights off as you wouldn’t be able to see him and it wouldn’t make sense if we had a shot of the victim in a dark room and a shot of the interviewee in a well lit room. We placed the victim in front of a window which the light shining into the room, this created a good silhouette using natural lighting however we had the camera set so it was too dark meaning we had to edit this part of the video to make the victim visible.

The editing process was pretty simple, it was mostly just a matter of trimming clips, putting them in order and placing sound from one clip over the video of another one. I soon realised that the video would just be going back and forth between interview and interviewee so I tried to add parts where it shows one person listening or reacting to the other, I feel like this makes the interview seem more natural and less repetitive. I also tried to make the interview flow well, for example I wouldn’t leave long gaps between speech, unless it is there for effect and it makes sense to do so, sometimes the interviewer seems shocked by the answer so I would leave a short gap or a clip of him looking through his notes before he asks the next question.