I shot two interviews at the beginning of this week. Unfortunately, my audio levels on one of them were quite off. The sound quality is low because I had the db levels up too high. When shooting interviews, audio is everything. My mistake while I was shooting is extremely frustrating. I noticed that the levels were spiking as I shot my interview, but I couldn’t figure out how to quickly adjust them on the camera. My subject only had a limited amount of time to interview with me, so I felt a tremendous pressure to not interrupt the interview while I fiddled with the sound settings on the camera. Before my interview, I tested the sound by myself, and for whatever reason the levels seemed fine to me. The bad news is this is a tough lesson to learn because I basically wasted an entire interview; but the good news is that I won’t ever make this mistake again. In addition, I was able to fix the levels for my second interview, so I actually don’t think this will effect my final product at all. Since I’ll need to cut my interview down to a couple minutes, it wouldn’t make sense to use two subjects anyway. Overall, I got quite lucky with my interviews I think. It certainly helped that I planned multiple interviews far in advance of our deadline, but in the future, especially for longer projects, shooting useless interview footage is a giant waste of time and resources.
Now I just have to decide how to weave together a coherent and moving story from the many minutes of interview footage that I have of the Public Safety director.