Shooting interviews is one of the most challenging exercises a videographer will face. It’s even more difficult if you have to be the interviewer and also the camera operator. If you have a lab assistant or student who can help with the camerawork, you can concentrate on the interview. In many cases, though, you will be working alone or don’t want to risk having someone else mess up your shoot (however, they might actually be better than you with the camera, so it’s worth a try).
I like to treat the interview like a conversation. I go to the interview armed with a few, carefully-selected questions designed to elicit interesting answers, but just use these as starting points. I let the subject’s answers guide me to ask more questions….much like a normal conversation would flow. I think this approach produces a more natural and relaxed result, rather than the typical news report style of grilling the subject. My objective is to make my interview subject look knowledgeable and likable.
We are so accustomed to seeing professionals conducting interviews on TV, which seem effortless, that we mistakenly think they are easy to replicate. It’s not. See the video below, which does a good job of showing how to and how not to conduct an interview on camera.
I am not a professional filmmaker. The methods I’ve been describing in this blog are those that have worked for me, a scientist. Some are standard among filmmakers and others are not. I present my ideas and experiences, not as rules to be followed, but as information that may help or inspire. In fact, I would encourage you not to be constrained by anything you read here (or elsewhere) and to develop your own style. That said, there are certain principles that must be understood and mastered. I’ve mentioned a few of these on this blog and hope to describe more in coming posts. It’s possible to break those rules and produce something really different and creative. However, one must achieve mastery of those basic skills before thinking about breaking them. Otherwise, your videos will look amateurish and not attract viewers.
If you are a scientist or student of science who has not yet dipped your toe into the waters of videography, you are where I was five years ago. Since then, I’ve developed a few skills, mostly by trial and error. We are accustomed to this approach in science. We get some basic training in lab technique, technical writing, or oral presentations, for example, in graduate school, but only later are these skills honed and expanded….often during our first jobs. I view videography as just another tool in my toolbox…but a tool that will become increasingly important in the future as science communication evolves.
The reaction I get most often from colleagues is why are you bothering to learn videography and spend (they mean waste) time creating videos? I am reminded of the time when people asked me why I was bothering to learn PowerPoint and no longer using 35 mm slides and overhead transparencies. They were really asking me why I was upsetting the status quo. The older scientists in particular were comfortable with the old technology and simply did not want to change or bother with learning a new way of doing things. Well, we know what happened. Eventually, everyone was forced to learn the new way….or they got left behind. The same is happening with science communication (and communication in general). Even if you are a student now and already familiar with what are new methods to older scientists, you will likely face similar dramatic changes at some point in your career.
It’s really a matter of whether you want to stay on the peak of the wave or let the wave pass you by. Keeping up doesn’t take as much of an effort as most imagine. And that’s what this blog is all about: to show that riding the wave takes some effort initially to get up on the peak, but then requires only minor adjustments to stay abreast. And like surfing, it can be a lot of fun learning how to ride the wave.
Put simply, B-roll is the extra footage you need to shoot to support or augment what your subjects (or you) are talking about in the “A-roll”. The idea is that you will be shooting primary (A-roll) footage of interviews, a laboratory method, or a field site. However, you will need additional material to illustrate aspects of this primary footage. This is the B-roll. For you digital generation folks, a “roll” refers to the old type of photographic film that was wound around a spool. The term has an interesting history, which you can read about here.
I routinely shoot a variety of secondary footage when I go out to capture my primary footage. These include both video and still images as well as sound effects that might come in handy during editing. I always try to get footage of traveling to and from a field site, for example, to use during the title sequence and the credit sequence at the end of the video. Sometimes these clips are shot from a car, a boat, or a plane, and I try to frame the shot so that there is space for the text that I will insert during editing. Here’s a clip that illustrates what I mean:
I shot that footage during the airboat ride to and from the field site where I did interviews and captured other primary footage. I used those clips for both title and end sequence, which worked out well, I think. The entire video can be seen here.
I usually spend some time at the location of the shoot filming various closeups of plants and animals as well as landscapes, waves breaking on the shoreline, rain, vehicles moving past, people, buildings, shadows, or whatever characterizes the location. I additionally shoot still images, especially closeups of flowers, insects, or other items that I can use in a montage of scenes. Once I’ve completed the interview, then I walk around and shoot video or still images of whatever the interview subject has mentioned. Then, I can insert those images during editing so that a long interview is not just of a talking head, but has interesting images or clips interspersed with the interview footage. Here is an example from the same video as above:
If you are doing a video of a laboratory method, you will want to get various shots of equipment from different angles as well as people going about their work. You will probably work out a lot of these shots beforehand, but it’s always a good idea to shoot extra scenes and even things that are not central to the subject. These types of footage may turn out to be useful during the introduction to the video or as a transition between interviews.
I also capture sound effects that might be useful for a montage of still images, for example: sounds of dripping water, waves breaking, birds or crickets chirping, a crackling fire, lions roaring (got this sound effect on a trip to Botswana).
During my work as a researcher, I got into the habit of setting aside time during a field trip to take photographs for later use in presentations and journal articles. I would first make a list of items that I needed a photo of, and then go out and search for them. Sometimes, I would spend an entire day (during a long field trip) just shooting photos. So it was second nature for me to apply the same practice to shooting video.
Get into the habit of taking your camcorder or camera with you and shoot whatever you are doing–in the lab or in the field. Believe me, it will be worth the time and effort when you sit down to edit your video.
In the previous post, I talked about how brevity is a virtue in making a science video. In this post, I will consider two more features of successful videos (from the list of 10 characterizing a video I analyzed previously):
#3: The video keeps adding information at a steady, relatively rapid pace
#4: There is constant motion going on throughout the video.
The constant addition of new information (and new visual stimuli) keeps the viewer watching. This point is an important one. If you let a segment of your video drag on too long, the viewer will get bored and look for something else more fast-paced and that seems to be feeding them more and more information. As I explained in a previous post, humans are hard-wired to be fascinated by motion. A lot of science videos feature talking heads. Not much going on….just someone droning on and on and on. If you have talking heads in your video, interspersed with images or footage of something else (an animation, a landscape scene, people working), then you make the segment more interesting because you give the eye something to look at other than the talking head. If you only have a talking head (e.g., TED talks), then your talking head must be describing something (an idea or concept or emotion) that sparks the viewer’s imagination or causes an emotional reaction.
Here’s a video that meets the two criteria (constant addition of new information, constant motion) listed above and also is shorter than 3 minutes:
This is an example of informational graphics (infographics), which is a hot trend in motion graphics. It’s clearly an effective way to get science information across in an entertaining way.
In a previous post, I identified ten features that characterized an inspiring science video and pointed out four that I considered to be key to success. I thought I would elaborate a bit on those four key points.
In this post, I’ll talk a bit more about #1: The video is short, less than three and a half minutes in length.
The average video viewer’s attention span is short. People want their information in brief, entertaining packets. Unless they are really, really interested in you or your topic (e.g., your mother), they are not going to sit still for more than five minutes to watch your video. I know that you will be tempted to try to cram a lot of information into your video, thinking it is important to instruct the viewer about all the various aspects of the science topic you are discussing.
I’ve made this mistake and so I know how hard it is to edit out all the footage you shot (of yourself or other scientists) talking about research or whatever the topic was. This difficulty is not unlike editing a scientific paper: we must be ruthless and cut out all the extraneous verbiage and data that do not contribute to the main conclusions. We must be even more ruthless with editing our videos.
Most of the science videos I’ve done so far have been around ten minutes in length, which is probably way too long for all but the most interested viewers. However, I did strive to include a variety of ways to impart information: talking heads, footage of people engaged in some activity, aerial and ground footage of landscapes, animations, historical images, and text explanations. Such tactics help to keep the viewer’s attention, but it’s better to strive for brevity with your message.
Here is an example of a video that successfully imparts its message in 2:49 minutes:
