Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Shirley's Oral History

For our Oral History Test Run, our group chose to interview Shirley Rivas about her journey to the University of Michigan. Setting up our test run went remarkably well. We did run into some issues getting authorized to rent out the camera for our test run and the actual interview, but luckily, we were able to get the authorization overridden. For our test run, Katelynn rented out the equipment and walked Shirley through how to set up the equipment because she missed our media training center at the ISS Media Lab. Taylor filmed the interview, while Katelynn was the interviewer. Shirley was able to download a film slate app on her phone to help with the organization of the different clips. Our test run was completed in just three takes. We had to pause after the first take because Shirley wanted to have a better scope of the questions, while the second time we stopped due to equipment issues with the camera. The timestamp feature on the camera screen was not working. Fortunately, we had someone from the ISS Media Center help us out.

As a result of our test run, our group realized several key issues relevant to the success of our actual interview with Ms. Juana Gonzalez. Taylor realized how careful we need to be in saving our interviews in 2 or 3 different places to make sure we do not lose anything. Our group made sure to upload our test run interview to our external hard drive, Katelynn’s personal computer, and it was shared via Google Drive to Taylor and Shirley. Taylor also realized how long it actually takes to set up all the equipment necessary for our interview. Another concern that we encountered during our test run was just realizing how much care goes into the filming of an interview. We realized we had to silence our phones, make sure the camera was working properly, make sure the framing was okay, while still remembering everything we learned during our workshop at the ISS Media Center. We realized that even though a lot of care does go into filming, you can plan ahead to reduce your anxiety over some of these concerns.











Taylor Davidson, Katelynn Dreeze, Shirley Rivas



2 comments:

  1. This all looks good! I love that you slated, good attention to detail.
    My only suggestion would be to frame the shot a little closer. The scans look great!

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  2. Shirley, there is so much to your story! I would have followed up with a few questions about your experiences as a student in high school, since it seems like there is a lot of ambivalence there. Whenever I hear a tone of ambivalence regarding public education experience, especially coming from a woman/person of color, I always follow up with more questions (what was it like for you as a person of color in your high school? What were the demographics of your school? When did you first experience racism? sexism? classism?). Also, you kind of dropped in a reference to your girlfriend (when talking about what you did after graduation), I would have definitely left the script (of the question template) at that point and asked you if you were willing to talk about what it was like growing up queer in Florida, and followed up on that. I understand why Katelynn didn't do this given the situation (that she was interviewing a peer, and probably didn't want to seem like she was prying into your personal life!!). That said, one of the challenges of this work is to get people to be reflective about deeply personal stuff while not making them feel interrogated!

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