I got in contact with John through email and on the phone last week and secured him as one of our contributors. He agreed to talk to us about the Hauntfest and participate in a fun little 'myth or fact' quiz. We were thrilled to secure John as from our conversations, he seemed like a very natural talker and a good character.
We had already prepared the questions prior to the shoot and created cue cards to prompt the presenter (myself) during the interview. During the couple of rehearsals we realised that we had prepared too many questions - this actually worked to our advantage as it allowed us to practice with John but also keep the interview spontaneous (as we could change the questions we asked him). We also realised that we had prepared too many myths and facts for our quiz, so again we had to cut this down during the interview - this also worked to our advantage as we could again switch up which myths and facts we asked John.
We arrived at the farm at 10am and met John right away. We sat down with him (and a couple of farm dogs) in the office and talked through how the interview would work and what sort of questions to expect. We told him the questions would be about the Hauntfest, when it began and the attractions they had - but we kept the myths and facts for the quiz to ourselves.
Once John was clear about what to expect, he took us on a tour around the attractions so that we could get a feel for the place and also scope out which bits would be good to film for GVs and cutaways. From our recce, we already knew we wanted to film the interview somewhere out on the gravel around the farm land but we weren't completely sure which area we wanted to use. During the tour with John, we found a location that would be ideal for the interview - a spot out on the gravel with a couple of the attractions in the background.
The crew for this shoot was myself, Alex and Melissa. I was the presenter, Alex was on camera (and sound) and Melissa helped with the camera set up and acted as a runner for the shoot.
The equipment used on this shoot was the Sony EX camera, microphone with windshield and headphones. Everything was filmed handheld to give the feeling of being live and to also fit in with our angle and audience - we wanted everything to be very relatable to a younger audience.
We thought we had run into some technical difficulties during the camera set up as the camera didn't seem to want to focus (even though manual focus was on). However, we believe we managed to sort this out, although this will only become clear when we review the clips on a bigger screen.
As mentioned earlier, we also realised we had prepared too many questions, but this was much better and easier to work around than having too little questions. We saved the best questions for the interview and used the others in a couple of rehearsal takes.
The interview went very smoothly, John was an excellent talker and a great character who worked well with the camera.
We realised after the interview that the location didn't work as well as we originally thought it would. The sun had moved around slightly since finding the spot which meant the lighting was a little tricker than it first seemed. We managed to sort this out using the exposure and adding an ND filter, however, ideally it would have been better to find another spot. We had also originally planned to film on the opening night but due to the amount of people attending the event and how busy the staff would be, it wouldn't be safe to do so. Also, due to time constraints, we could not film on another less busy night which would have been more ideal. We also considered asking John to turn the sound off of a nearby attraction, however, we decided against this as it added a bit more atmosphere to our interview and didn't interfere with the sound from the interview.
After the interview with John, we went around the attractions again to film the GVs and cutaways which we had scoped out during our tour. The only issue with taking footage inside the attractions was the low level of light. To compensate for this, we used the torches from our phones to light up certain features we wanted to film. This did actually help to add to the creepy / spooky atmosphere as the low levels of light gave a very ominous feel.
Once we had completely finished all of our filming, we got John to sign the consent form and check with him that it was alright to publish the video on Youtube, UCA and social media - John was happy for this to be done.
Overall, this shoot day was very successful.
What went well:
- organising the shoot was very easy - John was great at responding to us which lead to a very smooth shoot
- the interview itself went very well - Melissa kept good time and signalled after 1'00 when to move onto the quiz and again at 1'40 when to start wrapping up - this lead to us getting our interview to 2'00 on the dot.
- our contributor was a great character and a natural talker - this makes the live segment more interesting as it is all just one long shot - but having a good talker livens it up
- we got a lot of cutaway shots and GVs - these will be placed over the interview to demonstrate to the audience what John is talking about
- we had a lot of access around the location - this allowed us to get an extensive number of GVs
- the sound equipment worked well (which had always been a struggle for me and my projects in the past)
What could be improved:
- we could have found a better location when we realised the sun was interfering - we should have moved round a little more and found some shade where the attractions were still visible in the background.
- it would have been better to film at night when the attractions were open to the public - this would have allowed us to get more clips of people going around the attractions - we also would have been able to get some shots of the actors dressed up
- testing the focus on the camera prior to filming so that this isn't an issue again - this wasted a little bit of time on the shoot day as we had to spend time trying to figure out why the focus wasn't working.
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