When it came to editing my interviews into short films, I had a rough idea of the structure I wanted to use. This was to have the audio of the interview running underneath moving image, so as to avoid static shots of interviewees sat talking. Therefore I needed a sufficient amount of footage to run over the lengthy interviews but without it looking too samey all the way through.

Interview with Michael Hill

For the interview with my Dad, I had underestimated the amount of footage I needed to cover even the shortened version of the audio, but towards the end, as I was running out of ideas, I had the thought of doing a ‘Draw My Life’ style narration which used to be a huge trend in the Youtube community a while back as a way for people to share more of their life stories to their audiences in an engaging and captivating way. I thought this was great as it fits in with the theme of artists and drawing as well as giving my Dad’s interview a little more context when he was explaining growing up in Sheffield. It also helped me out as I had discovered that licensing archival footage was quite a lengthy process and I wouldn’t have had the time to get the edit finished if I had to source lots of clips. I found using google map searches as a good method of giving visual context as there was a lot of explaining locations. As my first proper edit, I was pleased with the outcome of this film, however, I probably spent longer on I than I should have.

 

Interview with Alec Boyd

At this point I had got to grips with the editing process a little more and had a better idea of how I much footage I needed to film, the audio set up etc. For the interview with Alec, I got a decent amount of footage from spending an afternoon in Edale with Alec as he was doing some work for his final project. I had learnt from the filming with my Dad that I should try and film shorter clips with more variety in angles and scenery so when it came to editing I would have a lot more choice of clips which in effect would make it more interesting for the audience to watch. However, as before, the interview was quite long and I didn’t want to cut the film down too much otherwise there would be important parts left out. Instead, I used screen-recording of things like social media pages to help narrate Alec’s responses when he was talking about The Northern Project as well as some of Alec’s own films. I found this added nice dimensions to the film and kept it interesting whilst still in relation to what Alec was saying.

Interview with Poppy Higton

In the build-up to lockdown officially starting, it was all systems go in order to get the interview footage done with Poppy before we both had to leave Brighton. The turn around was very quick so we had an hour together whilst Poppy did some last shots for STASH magazine in which I got a bit of footage for the interview. Although I didn’t get a lot I really liked the palette in the film; it was a very drizzly overcast day in Brighton but that made for great lighting on streets we were on. We decided it was going to be easier to record the interview virtually over Zoom as we were both busy with packing up and leaving to go home so it was a stressful time. I wanted to try to think of an innovative way to set up this film so that it would differ from the other two slightly – because of the unique situation it was already going to be a bit different. I used the screen-recording tool on zoom to get the bulk of my visual footage in that way which was great in hindsight because Poppy could share her screen with me and talk through the magazine that she created for her final project. The split-screen also offered a nice visual of us both in conversation with each other and interacting which the audience will not have seen in my other two films. Unfortunately, I had a mishap with my harddrive which meant I lost the whole record of the interview recording – luckily I had voice recorded the whole thing on my phone and Poppy was happy to have a second call just so I could retrieve some of that footage. In hindsight, I think it worked out better because Poppy was able to share more on her screen with it not being an interview setting and I was able to get more footage as we chatted through what she had been doing.