Week 3: An Interview, a Pre-interview, and Some Interview Requests!
Hey everyone, welcome back to my senior project blog for week three!
Monday of this week was interview prep day! Last week I scheduled an interview with my site advisor Alex Ramirez for Wednesday 3/26, so at SAY Sí on Monday I assembled the set for my interview. I also finalized my interview questions by doing some background research on some of Alex Ramirez’s previous projects.
I decided to interview SAY Sí because that location is Alex Ramirez’s primary place of work and it is a place that represents him as an artist. Assembling the set for the interview meant setting up lighting, cameras, sound equipment, and the actual seating area for the interview. Even though the primary source of media I am focusing on is audio for the podcast, I also plan to post promotional video clips of the interviews on various social media platforms. Hence, the reason behind my focus on the lighting and cameras for the interview.
For the interview, I chose to have a two-camera setup. The first camera shot a full shot of the whole interview setup (both the interviewee and I are in frame). The second camera shot a close-up of just the interviewee (only Alex Ramirez is in frame). I plan to keep this camera set up for each of my in-person interviews. Lighting, on the other hand, will not be consistent in each in-person interview. Lighting will change depending on the location of each interview. The location of each in-person interview will likely be different because I want to hold the interviews in a place where each artist feels best represents them. I unfortunately will not be carrying lighting equipment to each of my interview locations. I am a one woman crew, carrying out a job that is usually run by 2-4 people [interviewer, cameraman, lighting tech, sound tech], so I am trying to make my load as light as possible. Luckily, for the interview at SAY Sí, I only had to carry the lighting equipment a couple of feet (from the equipment room to the interview set). I used about 4 different lights. One was a lamp that was in frame and the other 3 were big stage lights out of frame (2 LED lights and 1 incandescent light).
Camera 1 (both the interviewee and I are in frame)
Camera 2 (only Alex Ramirez is in frame)
As for sound equipment, I used the Multi Track Field Recorder and Sennheiser MKE 600 microphones again. Since I had played around with that sound equipment the week before, setting it up was easy, so I didn’t fully put the sound equipment together until the day of the interview.
Because I had set mostly everything up on Monday, there wasn’t much setup left on the day of the interview. I just turned on each of the lights, made sure the cameras were in focus and the right places, connected the sound equipment, put SD cards in the cameras and sound equipment, and hit record. There were some ups and downs on the production side of the interview, though. Since I am a traveling one-woman crew, I decided to practice having only me monitor the sound and cameras. I was able to place the Multi Track Field Recorder in an area out of frame, but still visible to me during the interview. So I was able to see if the recorder stopped recording mid-interview. Unfortunately, since I am in front of the cameras, I am unable to monitor them. So for my interview with Alex, I just hit record and prayed. Sadly my prayers were not answered and each of the cameras shut off at around 12 minutes during the 18-minute interview. The most important piece of media is the audio, so the cameras shutting off six minutes early isn’t that big of a deal. I still have enough video to create the promotional content for my podcast. The cameras shut down early due to a lack of SD card storage, so Alex has decided to get stronger SD cards for projects going forward.
On Monday, I was also supposed to have a pre-interview call with Guillermina Zabala Suarez, but she had to reschedule for Tuesday. I asked her some general questions to get a better understanding of who she is as a filmmaker and a professor, to help me form my final interview questions. I have an interview scheduled with her for Tuesday 4/1 at 2 P.M. at the UTSA campus.
Later In the week, I drafted some emails to request an interview with all of the screenwriters I met at the screenwriting camp, Björgvin Arnarson, an actor and former SAY Sí student, and Haley Elizabeth Anderson, a writer, director, and producer, who I got to interview back in July through the UT DIY Virtual Filmmaking Camp I attended taught by Katherine Propper. I plan to send the emails out on Monday.
So far the interviews are going quite well. The interview with Alex went very smoothly. He had some very intricate answers to my questions that you guys will be able to listen to once I finish editing his episode. I’ve also made an Instagram account, where I will be posting most of the promotional content for my podcast including some teasers for Alex’s episode. You can follow the account by typing “behind.the.lens._” into your search bar on Instagram.
Also here is a link to the account: https://www.instagram.com/behind.the.lens._/?hl=en
Thanks for tuning in! See you guys next week!
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