For the interview task I had to stage an interview with one of the candidates for the student election. This interview also had to meet a specific criteria. The criteria was that the interview would have to be 60 seconds long. The finished artefact of the interview would also have to be subtitled and would require an animated graphic that displayed the candidate’s name and which particular area of the student council that they were aiming to be elected to. This criteria was to ensure continuity, as various candidates were being filmed by other groups and the interviews had to be presented in equal forms in order for the interviews to be democratically fair.

In the health and safety checklist, we identified risks such as the cables that we would be using for the lighting. If the cables were caught on a person walking past it could result in the lights being knocked over. The lights used were really hot and if knocked over could present a fire hazard. Due to this we decided that we would keep the cables to the side so that they were out of the way and therefore presented minimal risk.

Firstly, we set up the lighting equipment and the camera. We used an equal amount of lighting for the backlight, fill light and the key light. We decided that we thought this reasonable, while doing a test film, as it was an appropriate level of light and that it was not too harsh on the subject in terms of visual impairment.

We then set the camera up, aligning the camera with the interviewee’s chair so that the chair was in the second third of the screen.  

When staging the interview, we firstly made sure that our candidate was comfortable by having a brief, friendly chat off-camera. We then tested our lighting, which our interviewee felt was too bright, so we adjusted the lighting so that it was not impairing her vision.

We then adjusted the camera to ensure that we were operating under the ‘rule of thirds’ and we also checked if the lighting was reflecting off the glasses of our interviewee.

Once the interviewee had finished filling in the contributor release form we made them aware that we were to begin filming. We asked the interviewee if they could perform a gesture of sorts, i.e a waving hand, as part of our criteria was to include a gesture that we could include in our editing of the interview as a transition.

We then began asking the interviewee our set questions that were compulsory as part of our criteria. Our interviewee did tend to stumble over words so we politely asked if they were okay answering questions again. We then asked follow-up questions and made sure that these questions were open-ended with room for the interviewee to open up and provide us with enough content to edit the interview into a 60 second clip.

We made sure to give the interviewee’s answers around 5 seconds to sit, as we did not want to interrupt our interviewee mid-interview.

I used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit the interview and put it together.

In editing, I added subtitles to the video to make it more accessible. I also added the candidates name and which role within the student union they were aiming to be elected to.