Co-op Hall first interview

These are photos that I took at our shoot yesterday. We were interviewing an old couple that used to go to the Co op Hall in the 1960s. During the day whilst preparing for the shoot we encountered some problems. First of all we were going to do the interview in the studio with a white screen for a background but we discovered that it was too loud in the studio to film as it was next door to the art room and people were making a lot of noise sawing wood. To overcome this problem we searched for another quiet location, we decided on using the upstairs of the library as it would be silent in there. We took all the equipment such as the lights and white screen down there and we had another problem! The white screen collapsed and unraveled, so running out of time we decided to scrap the indoor filming and do it outside as it was a nice day. Once we had gone to various locations to find a good outdoors place to film, we decided to film where the old college hall was. This location turned out to be very fitting for the interview as Joe (interviewee) used to come the college and also had an old photo of his class standing in the same location.

Filming and Audio Equipment

Now we had decided on the location we had to think about how we would film them, what cameras we would use and also what angles we would film them from. For this we decided to use two cameras, a Cannon 600d and a Cannon 5d, We set them both up on tripods and positioned the 5d at a straight angle to the front of the interviewee and the 600d to the right of them at a close up shot. By doing this we could capture there actions, gestures etc from two different angles and also this gives us a good amount of footage to edit cutaways into the final product. We also recorded our own sound using two different microphones. One was a zoom mic which we used as our external mic and the other was an external mic that we plugged into the camera so that we would not have to sync the two together.

Overall I would say that the shoot went well but there were some mistakes such as what equipment and different locations that we will learn from for next time. I feel like we got some really good footage and got the interviewees to answer some really good questions, and I hope that we get to do more of them and help towards the Co-op Hall documentary project even more.