Trial Run--Abe, Mike, Christian

With our group and camera equipment clustered together in the living room of my apartment, Mike, Christian and I prepared for our trial run. Setting up all of the equipment and preparing the shot was actually relatively easy and stress-free. Christian had taken excellent notes during our class session at the ISS Media Lab, and so there was little confusion. The voice recorder proved the most troublesome though. We set it to record during the interview as a backup--we thought it a good idea to practice for a backup in the event that we actually needed one during a real interview, as there likely won't be any redoes--but we didn't know it wasn't recording until after we had already wrapped up. Christian managed to get it to work, however. Once we managed to balance out our sources of light, we got a good look, not perfect, but good, we began to sort through good questions. No one the group had been particularly interested in being interviewed, so I agreed to do it. It was the trial interview that proved to be more awkward (and amusing) than setting up the camera.

Most of the questions were generic: Where are you from? What do you want to do? Who were your role models? But it was my inability to answer them without laughing, or the interviewer (Mike) laughing that made it entertaining. I'm terrible at answering questions about myself, particularly superficial questions as they don't require much thought, interest, and are seldom engaging. As a group, we began to realize that doing an interview required a bit of skill and perhaps a little time to get both the interviewer and the interviewee comfortable with one another. Also it was trial run. Much of our concern was with getting the camera ready and making sure that everything worked properly. Still, the nuances to conducting an interview became readily apparent to us. I even found myself looking to Christian (our cameraman) for support on answers to questions that only I could answer. I suppose it was because there was another person in the room who wasn't interviewing me. Overall, though, it went rather smoothly.

Mike: We had an entertaining, yet informative experience reacquainting ourselves with the audio and video equipment. The experience yielded little or no problems from a technical standpoint.  We were able to quickly set up the equipment with no speed bumps. The only difficulty we had was mistakenly wiring the microphone to the wrong input - an issue which we quickly resolved through monitoring sound levels on the camera display. We also gained insight into Abe’s personal aspirations, which include becoming a professor as well as having two to four children.