Interviews
Interviewing
I think I found a good line of questioning for when I interviewed Simmers. Initially, I had to avenues I could take, focus on sports or focus on cinema. I decided to use his cinema answers since they were overall more interesting. I found a great opportunity to use some video B roll of a race Simmers described rather than strictly utilizing pictures of it. At one point, there was a noticeable pause in his answer and it lasted the better part of two seconds. With some meticulous editing, I was able to cut it out and still have it sound natural. The color correcting I did to the clips, I think, made it look much better as it kept Simmers from blending too much with the background. Aside from the fact that I used a few pictures that weren't quite relevant to Simmers himself, I still think that this interview edit turned out pretty well. I only ended up shooting one, editing one, and being interviewed once simply because I was working with the other advanced kids and we never did a second take.
Simmers Interview
Interviews
Interviewed
Generally speaking, I would say that I was pretty comfortable during my interview. Dare I say a little too comfortable. One problem I ran into, in hindsight, is that I did a lot of thinking as I spoke. Rather than having my answer thought out, I had to do a bit too much on-the-fly answering. I probably should have waited a little bit more between the question and my answer to give a more well thought out response. I will say that I think the camera should have been adjusted so that the shot was more from the chest up rather than the stomach up. Rather than looking to the right of the camera, the shot made it look like I was looking up and to the right of it. Since I'm much taller than the people I was shooting with, we should have taken the time to make the shot look better than it did.
Interview Ray
Interviews
Filming
Filming interviews, I find, is generally easier compared to filming other things. Given that there is no motion that needs to be tracked, from the cinematographers standpoint, all you really have to do is set one good shot and make sure the person being interviewed stays relatively in place. I think I did a good job not distracting Kerri while she was being interviewed but the fact that the 7D we were using didn't have a rotating screen made actually looking at the shot a bit more difficult. In terms of lighting, we didn't really need to adjust the much as there was enough natural light to make the shot look good. All we really had to worry about was getting a light on Kerri's face because the sun was making her hair stand out on its own.
Kerr Interview
Advanced Camera Use
The lens I was tasked with using was certainly an interesting one. Very quickly I noticed that there was no means of changing the aperture via the lens itself. To that end, the most of the work I did was experimenting with the focus and the ISO on the camera. Though I couldn't really affect the aperture much, it was already set so that I could at least do some fun work with it. I did some testing with adjusting the focus as I got closer or further way from an object and I was able to tell that the aperture was at least set so that I could somewhat blur out what was in the background. As for the ISO, the noticeable difference between inside and outside lighting becomes apparent. Even though it was cloudy yesterday, at 100 ISO, it was still rather bright. Interestingly enough, the moment I went inside to work with the camera, I had to crank up the ISO to 200 or higher. Interestingly, as I would come to be told, most of these higher end lenses don't have a zoom function but mine did. Despite the presence of this feature, it was slow to zoom in and was unable to zoom more than 3x or so. Given that there wasn't much to shoot and I was unable to really take the camera outside, I wasn't able to get any footage worth filming together.
