For this interview project, I would say the process was “fairly hard”. I say this because, I had to meet a deadline; I had to write out the interview questions, get a stable subject, a good location, a decent quality camera and shoot for 45 minutes to an hour (which I ended up not doing). I borrowed my video camera from my mom, since she likes to travel a lot. It’s a bit old but it still did the job. The most difficult part was finding a subject. Everyone I asked were either busy or had an unstable availability time. I had the perfect subject in mind, a good friend of mine, who always knows what to say and is a voice of reason but she had finals and had to study. I couldn’t ask my mother because, she had a cold and in general, she is extremely conscious of how she looks on camera, I didn’t want to deal with that. Randomly asking my classmates to sit down with me for a 45-minute interview isn’t really appealing, they don’t know me well enough to do such a favor for me. So, my last hope, my friend Favour from High school, who goes to a different college (Hunter College) where I visit her sometimes. I was a bit worried on how I was going to convince her to sit down and talk for 45 mins, knowing that she was the type of person to get bored of talking about school appropriate topics after a short while. I then remembered the Professor mentioned that in the end, the video had to be cut down to 2-3 minutes. I asked Favour, and she complied, however, for one condition, if I went to a party with her, the same day she was available for use to shoot. I agreed, then we ended up shooting for a total of 15 minutes at her school, then we partied.
Describing the actual shoot, I shot the interview with my friend Favour, at Hunter College. We shot in various places, because of noise and students walking all over. We shot mid-day on a Thursday, after class (around 3). There wasn’t any place in the school that she knew of that’s small and quiet. That is why in the video, we first shot at some open place, then eventually went to a stairwell. But there were students walking up, down and about, plus the echoing there was making me anxious, I thought that what Favour was saying wouldn’t be audible (but it ended up being alright). I asked her about nursing since that’s her major, what one does with a nursing degree after. She said some interesting stuff about it, even though I despised everything associated to the biology subject. I didn’t shoot the video a straight forward 45 minutes (well, 15 minutes), ended up shooting them in clips, because she kept “messing up” (joking) and I was talking more than I should have.
To the actual editing part, having absolutely no knowledge of Adobe Premiere Pro, except some information the professor told us and showed us. I put the clips on my flash drive from the video camera, and imported them to the program. I used an instrumental version of a song called “I am not my hair” by India Arie as the background music, since it gives off an urban vibe, which fits my subject’s personality. I was learning how to use it as I went along, with the professor and my classmates help. I was actually glad that the video was 15 minutes, otherwise, I would have had trouble picking and choosing what to cut and what to edit if it were longer. For the most part, the editing part went smoothly, despite the slight issue with a clip being missing and the video not saving properly (it was eventually situated). This whole experience, wasn’t fun for me, however, it was disciplining and definitely a learning experience.
