In my last blog I talked a little about what makes a web-show as opposed to a vlog. I mentioned my team and I were hoping that our interview would help us get some legitimacy and publicity. Not many people are too familiar with what actually goes into making a large four-person-roundtable-interview. To be honest, neither were we. Working on a shoe-string budget was hard enough for just doing reviews and discussion videos ourselves, but when faced with the task of actually working with industry professionals and stepping up to the plate, we were a little nervous.
Before the day of filming I had already met and been in contact with all of the subjects prior to speaking with the team. I had worked out all the details and was ready to make a checklist as to what we needed to film. My team and I met the weekend prior to the interview to give us all enough time to prepare for that coming Friday.
Jesus, our lighting guru, was a little worried about his end of the deal since he had never been to Obsidian Entertainment before, our venue. One of our contacts said that he’d secured the large conference room for our filming and after I told Jesus this he felt a little more at ease when he learned that there were large windows adorning one of the walls. There were also plenty of lights in the ceiling and walls as we found out upon our arrival. Just in case, however, we put all of our lighting equipment down on our list to take with us.
Our team with all our equipment headed up to the conference room!
Michael works our microphone and camera and he was more concerned about only using one of each for the whole job. We spoke for a while and finally he came up with a way to get enough sound equipment to cover all the guests as well as myself, plus an additional camera to give some variety. Jesus had previous experience in those fields so that meant we needed another person to work audio while they worked visuals.
Luckily, Parker made himself available for filming after he heard we needed another hand. Parker is one of our other reviewers and was happy enough to just be at Obsidian as he was a fan of their work. Now we had a three-man crew working all the technical aspects of our interview. The hardest part was next: the questions.
I’d had some practice doing our other videos and was fairly confident on camera. My biggest concern was conducting the interview itself. I had done some phone interviews in the past and peer interviews for class, but this would be my first time doing on camera interviews for the Vault. The most important thing to me was giving the subjects the spotlight and not talking too much myself since I tend to do that when I get nervous.
To prevent this, I prepped questions ahead of time and did my research on them all to ensure I knew what I was talking about. The next task was to make sure I was relaxed so I got plenty of sleep the night before and didn’t drink any coffee to make myself overly hyper. Since we all arrived at the location early we were able to relax and settle in. I got to chat with one of our subjects for a while too so breaking the ice with him helped to calm my nerves.
Mike and Jesus did a terrific job of setting up. They were able to work the two cameras in with one moving between the subjects, and the other holding a stationary establishing shot so the whole room could be seen occasionally. We ended up not needing the lighting and by the time we were finished setting up the crew was ready to go as soon as the rest of the guests arrived.
To be honest, that was the most nerve-wracking part. Granted, we were an hour early and all a little skittish to begin with, but I hadn’t heard from some of our other guests in a week and I hoped they would still show up. Thankfully they arrived precisely on time and we were able to have them mingle and chat with each other. Mike and Jesus checked the audio levels before we began and once it was all set, we went ahead with the interview.
To bore you with every detail of the actual interview would be annoying, so I’ll just give you the end result. After about two weeks of editing on Mike’s part, we released the video this week and within two days received over two thousand views. This was an exponential increase in viewing and we even landed about twelve new subscribers to our channel.
Seeing our video online was helpful because it enabled us to make notes and improve for next time. We had a problem with the audio and it was too soft in some parts of the interview for a few of the viewers who commented on it. I also took some notes for a follow-up interview with one of the guests who happily offered to do one in early November.
Through all of this, we learned a lot. Our crash course in duel-camera filming proved to be a success, but we clearly needed to do some work on audio and perhaps invest in some more lapel mics to really get some crisp sound. Lighting is something that can never be predicted, but it’s always good to come prepared should there be an issue.
Many interviews I’ve seen online are from a point-of-view perspective without any real production value, and I really feel that a professional look like ours really helped us. We’ve even been linked to on several other websites and we expect to see more traffic in the coming days.
To see our interview and the rest of our work, follow the link here: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheGameCreatorsVault
No comments:
Post a Comment