Anna's followup to Elizabeth's comments!

Elizabeth and I met up last Friday to work on our initial set up for the trial run Oral History. I was definitely thankful we did so because we had some technical difficulties with the volume, as well as the camera focus. After a bit of fiddling (and memory jogging from the session we attended in class), we finally figured it out. We did our final filming Sunday at Elizabeth's house to simulate the environment that we will most likely have with our interview subject. Although the lighting wasn't 100%, the overall outcome of the video sound and the picture were pretty clean. The one thing we both decided we needed to remember is to make sure to position the microphone at an angle where the least amount of rustling/movement will affect it. 

In regards to the actual oral history, I found that asking the questions themselves were much harder than actually answering them. We came up with a few generic questions after reading over the sheet sent out to the class (i.e. what was your background growing up, why did you choose to come to University of Michigan etc). As an Oral Historian, you want to give the respondent plenty of time to answer. When I found myself wanting to respond to Elizabeth's answers, I wasn't really sure how/what was appropriate. A few times I caught myself mumbling "that's so cool". As noted in Conducting Interviews, "A smile or a nod signals that you got the point and will encourage the interviewee to keep talking. Quiet signals are preferable to verbal interruptions, which sound foolish on the recording and clutter the transcript (106)." Those are things I definitely will need to refrain from doing and make sure I give myself a mental reminder before going into an interview. 

The videoing itself went on without a hitch since this was our second attempt (the first time we met we went over camera functions and as previously mentioned had some struggles); the hardest part of the whole videoing process on the second day was the upload time. It amazed me how long it took to upload just 5 minutes of video to iMovie. We did simple clip editing after the upload.