Filming Shoot 2 - Stephen's Interview

The day before we planned to interview Stephen, we had recorded Louise's interview and because I booked the camera out, I brought it back home to download Louise's footage onto my laptop. There were a few problems with downloading Louise's interview onto my laptop. So when it came to the day of filming Stephen's interview we then had to cancel, as there was no space left on the memory for Stephen's interview. The only time Stephen was free was a week later.

When it came to interviewing Stephen the second time I made sure that I had gone to the studios to take off previous filming we had done so that we had enough space for his interview.

As we was getting closer to our deadline, and only had a couple of weeks to complete our film, Charlie went to the studios to edit some of Louise's footage, while me and Sophie went to the Young Lives Foundation in Maidstone to film.

When we met the foundation the first time, we discussed on possible filming areas for Stephen's interview, so we booked ahead a meeting room.

Me and Sophie planned that we got the closer shots of Stephen and then after asking a couple of questions zoom out so that we had a variety of shots to choose from.

Here is a photo of the set up for Stephen's interview.

When we framed Stephen's shot we discovered that the lighting was very poor as only one side of him was lit, due to him being positioned near a window. So we tried to see if it would make a difference by using the main light, but when we looked on the camera the lighting came across yellow. So instead we didn't use the main light and used a tall lamp behind the camera to act as a back light, to even out the lighting. This worked much better, the lighting appeared brighter without having a yellow casting.

Here is a photo of how we used the the lamp.

Halfway through filming we started filming our closer shot of Stephen, but where he was so fidgety by the time we had finished asking the questions he had moved out of shot. Luckily we checked that shot over and was able to re-film it.

After that we the rest of the interview was very successful. We got some actuality shots of Stephen working on the computer, i.e. close up of typing, screen of computer, mid-shot of him on the computer, close up of eyes, etc. We also got a variety of shots of posters and drawings around the room.

Overall even though we had some problems we were able to solve them. In the future I will definitely download the footage off the camera straight away, to avoid download problems and interferences with other footage.