Week 9: An Episode Drop, Some Editing, and My Last Interview!
Hey everyone, welcome back to my senior project blog for week nine!
I started this week with editing. I finished editing my interview with Nina Fiore and dropped her episode on Thursday. The editing process for her interview was very standard. I put the Clean Up Noisy Dialogue setting on both my audio and her audio and cut out any long pauses. I mentioned last week that I would go into more details about the editing process for this interview. Because I didn’t have any unusual issues when editing her interview, I don’t actually have a lot of detail to talk about. I finished the editing on Wednesday. I released promotional videos on my Instagram Wednesday night and dropped the episode midday (noon) on Thursday. I released two promo videos, and the episode ended up being 24 minutes long.
On Thursday, I prepared for my last interview for this project. In week two, I set a date for an in-person interview with Katherine Propper. That date was May 9th, which was this Friday. On Thursday, I finalized my questions for the interview and made sure I had all of my equipment ready to go. The interview was at 2 pm on Friday, but it was in Austin, which meant I had to have everything ready the night before, just in case something went wrong, or I remembered something in the morning. I left for Austin around 11:30 am and got there around 1:50 pm because traffic was so bad.
Aside from the traffic, the interview went really well. Because this was my last interview, I decided to take extra precaution. This meant backing up my audio by recording in Voice Memos on my phone. I did not want to have a technology issue during my last interview. I was worriedI was worried about a lot of different things like that the batteries were going to go out in a part of my sound equipment. I checked the batteries in my Multi-Track Field Recorder and camera on Thursday night. Both of them were fully charged, so I wasn’t worried about my camera or recorder; I was worried about my mics. I had already replaced the battery in one of the mics, so I made sure that the mic with the newest battery was Katherine’s. You’re probably wondering, “Why didn’t you just replace the battery?” The batteries in the mics are a pain to get out. So I wanted to avoid it at all costs. The first time I replaced the battery was before my interview with Rickard Armendariz. I was lucky that I was with a visual arts professor because he helped me get the battery out with pliers. So the precaution was necessary because I would not have been able to get that battery out of the mic if it had died. Luckily, the mic didn’t die on me. I felt very superstitious since this was my last interview that something would go wrong.
Nothing actually did go wrong, and I finally found a solution to a problem I had been having throughout the project. I solved my camera problem! It was a spur-of-the-moment solution, but it worked. Because I was recording audio on my phone, I was able to see how long the interview had been going for. At about 20 minutes into the interview, Katherine took some time to stop and think before she answered my next question. I took this time to walk over to my camera and press record again to record the rest of the interview. Simple solution, I know. This would have been a great thing to do for my other in-person interviews, but let me tell you why this wouldn’t have worked.
For the in-person interviews I had after I realized this was going to be an issue, the cameras were always in a tight space. For both my interviews with Professor Guillermina Zabala Suarez and Professor Richard Armendariz, we were conducting the interviews in their offices’ at UTSA. The cameras were very close to the wall and not easy to look through or press record on, without moving the camera. In both of those interviews, there was also never a long period where my interviewee asked if they could have a minute to think about the question, so if I had gotten up to mess with the camera, it would have disrupted the flow of the interview. In Katherine’s interview, both of these things were not an issue. We were conducting the interview in a classroom at UT Austin, so I had the camera on a desk that was easily accessible to me, and, like I said before Katherine asked for time to think about a question, so getting up to press record wasn’t a disruption to the flow of the interview.
I think this interview was a great way to close out my interviewing journey throughout this project. Katherine Propper is a very successful filmmaker for someone so young considering filmmaking takes years of effort (early 30s), having won many awards for short films and having her first feature out in 2023. Our interview was around 34 minutes long. Katherine has also requested to review the media before I post it, so I hope to get it to her by next week.
This weekend, I finally finished editing my interview with Professor Zabala! I am very happy with the end result. I filtered through my cut of the media from last week and fixed the weird audio cuts my friend suggested. I also edited the first half of the episode more vigorously to match the second half. I have two pieces of promo and a 24-minute episode. I plan to send her the pieces of media for a final review on Monday, and I hope to release the content early next week.
I also started editing my interview with Richard Armendariz. I am in the very early stages of editing, so I will go into more detail regarding the editing process next week, but I hope to release the episode early next week.
That’s a wrap on this week! Thanks for joining me. See you guys next week!