The Art Of Filming An Interview: Also, How To Trick Your High School Teacher Old School Style!

Hey Steemit! I've been having fun digitizing my old "Film & Television" portfolio that I created during my High School days from VHS recently. I've already posted a few gems up for those interested. Today's assessment piece was our submission of a recorded interview... with a twist!

In school we learned the theory of lighting, how to frame two people in an interview scenario and how to control the audio environment. For those who don't know, the interviewer can be filmed asking questions at any time and this is usually masked in the editing process.

Part of the exercise was to demonstrate how the edited piece can be made to follow any particular agenda. Editing can be a tool deployed in any political pursuit.

So here's the twist!

We worked in a group for this assignment. We approached one of our favourite teachers and asked him to participate in our assignment. He was to play the role of an interviewer and we had selected our German teacher as the subject; a lovely lady who we knew would respect a good prank.

We filled the interviewer in on our plan. The script would be for an interview on piano playing. Our German teacher would be asked questions like

• How long have you played the piano
• Do you play in a group

Those sorts of things. All seems very normal, right?

What we then did is take the interviewer and do another recording in the same location and lighting with similar background audio and recorded a new bunch of questions regarding .... picking noses!

Because we had the answers provided in the interview on video already, we were able to tailor the questions perfectly and by cutting the video and audio at different times, the effect is such that our German teacher was legitimately discussing her nose picking endeavours!

Unfortunately the years have added noise to the VHS audio and the sound cuts are more obvious than they originally were in the late 90s, but the effect is still in play.

We received great marks for the assignment and great respect for the prank. I still recall showing our German teacher the final product. She had no idea and was simply expecting to be shown her piano interview... when she heard herself saying "every now and then I like to therapeutically thump" in response to being asked about nose picking rather than piano playing, it was just one of those priceless moments!

Enjoy!