Tina and the Trial-Run: The Movie

Though I've had experience working with cameras before, that didn't stop me from taking a good five minutes to figure out how to load the battery into the camera this afternoon. The whole trial interview process went pretty smoothly, but it did takes us a while to get back into the swing of things. The room we'd reserved was tiny and dominated by a large table with a huge computer on it, so we did not have a lot of space to work with, but I think we managed to find just the right spot for the interview. Setting everything up was a pretty slow process, not at all helped by the space constraints, but Jasmine and I worked well together to figure everything out, and definitely collaborated on remembering everything we went over last Monday in class. I found it very helpful to work with her because we took the time to really try and figure everything out together so that we knew exactly what we were doing, and it helped ease my nervousness about being "Production Manager" for our team. Once we got going, things seemed to fall into place, and my confidence running the equipment began to build. I tried to make mental notes of everything that needed to get done so I could run things more smoothly during our actual interview with Mary Luevanos, and after today, I feel pretty secure about it. After several weird experiments with the sound recorder and once everything was set up and we'd double checked just to be sure the equipment was working alright (perhaps a minor bout of OCD on my part), we slowly began the interview process.

Jasmine had volunteered to be the interviewee, so I felt some pressure to come up with really good interview questions. I went back over the readings from last week in order to prepare myself, but was still pretty nervous going into the interview itself. I wanted to make sure to ask open-ended but specific questions that did not guide or restrict Jasmine's responses, but found that harder that I thought it would be. I went in not entirely sure that my questions would lead anywhere. Luckily, Jasmine was an amazing interviewee, with plenty of charisma and great stories, so my worries were soon put to bed. It was so easy to get wrapped up into what she was saying that I sometimes forgot to keep an eye on the camera. I experienced some of what we talked about in class, where the questions I'd prepared only served as a guide for me and I instead snowballed off of what Jasmine was saying when I did interject or ask her to expand. It turned out to be a pretty fun experience, and I enjoyed the easy flow of conversation that came about as we both got more comfortable. I will however be glad to not have to do all of the interviewing and camera-operating at the real interview, because it was a lot to keep track of. At one point, I noticed that the level on the camera was off and that the lines on the wall looked crooked, so I found a natural stopping place in the interview and fixed it quickly. Because it happened during the trial run, I feel like it won't happen again because once I make a mistake, it sticks in my mind more than the things I did right so I'm sure not to do it again. 

Once we found a natural stopping point, and after a quick "WHERE DID OUR FOOTAGE GO!?!?!?" moment that proved to be no problem at all, the post-production process was pretty quick and painless. We got everything onto the hard-drive with no problem, and I uploaded the footage into iMovie on my computer, since I've worked with it before and wanted to throw a quick little clip up for this blogpost. The hardest part of the post-prod process was actually choosing which clip I wanted to show, since there were several pretty good stories in there. I picked this one because I think it showcases Jasmine's storytelling energy, and it relates to some of what we've been talking about in class. I also think that most of the production elements come together pretty well in this clip, so I hope you enjoy it!