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.
When it comes to video, brevity is a virtue. From shooting clips to the final product, we should strive to keep things brief. When shooting, you want to keep your clips short, preferably under a minute or two in duration. Why? Because you are going to have to review all that footage you shot, perhaps hours of it, just to find a few minutes that you will use in the final product. I don’t know about you, but I find that reviewing long clips can be torture.
It’s much easier to shoot multiple short clips that can be reviewed quickly; those that contain useful material can then be imported to your editing program and the rest can just be archived or deleted if absolutely useless. During interviews, I will film each question and answer separately instead of shooting it as one long sequence. This makes life much easier when I sit down to edit. You can always splice these separate clips together later, even reordering them to tell a better story.
You also want to strive for brevity in your video segments, especially the talking heads segments. The longer the talking head sequence, the greater the likelihood you will lose the viewer’s attention and interest. I routinely intersperse a short clip of a person talking to the camera with footage accompanied by a narration or a montage of photographs. Each segment moves the story forward, but is delivered by different people or other information sources. Here is an example:
In this sequence, I had a brief (32 seconds) clip of a person talking followed by a montage of still images, short video clips, graphics, and narration that moved the story forward. I repeated this type of sequence throughout the video, which can be seen in its entirety here.
Also, as I illustrated in the previous post, you can break up a long interview with other footage, graphics, or photographs so the viewer has something new to look at at frequent intervals. This approach gives the illusion that something new is happening, when in fact the same person is speaking for several minutes.
Strangely enough, I figured this out on my own and very early in my video-making. I only later learned that shooting short clips and keeping your video segments brief were methods that professionals recommended.
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 film making, the dramatic question is what drives the story. Will the good guy win? Will the boy get the girl? How will the journey end? Once the dramatic question is answered, the movie is over.
In science videos, we often fail to identify, much less answer, the dramatic question. We are even stumped at the whole idea of a dramatic question because we are so focused on the facts and on educating the viewer. However, what captures the average viewer’s attention and keeps it is a story (and its underlying dramatic question). Will the researchers figure out how to collect their samples from an active volcano? Which scientific team will sequence the human genome first? How will the scientists navigate a wild river and reach their remote field site with their delicate instruments intact? What motivates a scientist to endure heat, biting insects, and muck to study wetlands? Why should I care about climate change?
Those are all obvious dramatic questions, but can often lead to artificial conflicts or exaggerated challenges designed to imbue an otherwise dull story with drama. The viewer is not fooled by such blatant stratagems. So the videographer must take care in selecting and incorporating a dramatic question into a movie project. It’s possible to be more clever about this and create a video with a dramatic question that directly relates to the science, rather than to peripheral issues. Here is an example in which the dramatic question focuses on the science topic and is even used as the title of the video:
It’s possible to pose a dramatic question about nature, which is not answered or only partially answered because the research is not complete or it’s a difficult question to answer. The videographer has the opportunity to use such an instance to teach something about how science works and about how answers change over time as more information is uncovered. An effective dramatic question is perhaps asked by a non-scientist, stimulating the viewer’s curiosity, and then answered by an expert who proceeds to conduct an experiment designed to answer that specific question because no-one thought to ask the question before. Here is an example of an excellent video in which the dramatic question is about a phenomenon observed by an average person: why do some millipedes glow in the dark?
You notice that both of these examples involve an amazing visual display. What if your topic is not so visual or not so amazing to the non-scientist? I think the answer is that you just need to work a bit harder to show how amazing your topic is and to frame it as a dramatic question.
