The Art of the Interview

In terms of progress for our Design Documentary, today has definitely been the most successful and insightful days yet.

This morning we had a look at the importance of producing an appropriate project plan in the initial stages of any video project (especially a Design Documentary!). We did this in a very interesting way though. As opposed to creating a plan for some made up project, we tried to replicate a plan that had already been created.

We received a short talk on the basic structure of a plan, the different areas of importance, and what you might expect to find in these. Immediately following we began watching the first half of the design documentary ‘Helvetica’ by Gary Hustwit (View the trailer here), during which we were to begin creating a plan that we think would be correct for what we were watching. Everyone was very keen to get writing straight away, but we explicitly asked to wait until about 10-15 minutes into the film before taking any notes. This may have seemed like a subtle side note at the time, however it turned out to be very important.

An example of this would be the main character. If we had simply begun to make conclusions about who the main character was from the beginning of the film, we all may have all missed a rather big point. It may seem obvious (well it wasn’t to me) but Helvetica is the main character. It is not until you have properly entered the film that you realise how important Helvetica really is, and that it is not just a film about typography. It really is hailing the importance, and universal appeal of Helvetica.

As we progressed through the film we were able to draw more and more from the film, and the exercise turned out to be very successful. Being given a documentary that was clearly well structured, and very purposeful gave us a great opportunity to create a very well considered Plan.

After this very informative session we had some general catch-up chats, but to ensure everyone was up to speed. Admittedly, going into this session I was slightly apprehensive that in some areas we may have not been where we needed to be. Simply by talking things through we quickly realised that we were all on the same page.

Now for the topic of this post! The Interview!

Having worked as telephone interviewer in my past, I thought I knew quite a lot about the whole interviewing business. How wrong I was! The interviews I was conducting were all pretty straight forward. I knew how to talk to people and make them feel their opinions where important to us. I also knew how to keep someone on the line, and make sure their answers really were what they thought. Up until yesterday, I had never really thought about it from the other perspective.

We were given the task of two people,one talking and one note taking, interviewing one other person with the aim to find out their ‘Most awkward moment’. You may think this would be fairly easy. However, those who were being asked the questions, one of which was me,  were told what we were going to be asked, and that we were to give them a tough time and not reveal anything! Other than just feeling a bit guilty for being a bit of a prat to my friends, I learnt how someone might think when the questions don’t necessarily suit them. This could be because they don’t like/understand the question the way you are wording it, they might not want to tell you, or any number of things. Understanding how people are thinking on both sides of the interview is very important though. I think we all came away with a lot from this exercise, and should be very interesting to see how the documentaries turn out. Curiously, some people have already extensively started filming. That’s not really bothering us though. We are fairly confident about where we are, and can’t wait to get started our selfs.

In the mean time, plan, shooting script, and audio to sort out!

Cut.