Practice Interview

Due Nov 1, 2020 by 11:59pm
Points 10
Submitting a file upload

Set-up: Imagine the History of Science Department is launching an outreach program that features students talking about what they are learning. You have been asked to conduct an interview with a classmate about something they find interesting.

Task: Conduct a 20-30 minute interview with your assigned partner and edit the interview to a 5-8 minute highlight excerpt. The final clip should start with introducing the interviewee and framing the conversation. The highlight excerpt could be one continuous part of the conversation or could be assembled from pieces across the whole interview.

Goals: The first goal is to practice interviewing someone-- What kinds of questions invite people to share their best thoughts in the best manner? How do you follow up on questions to keep the conversation going or to get usable "tape"? How do you put someone at ease?

The second goal is to practice selecting highlights from an interview that both make for good listening and fairly represent the interviewee's intentions. Your partner will hear your edit, so you'll want to edit them to sound like their best selves. If the first assignment was about expressing something you're interested in, this assignment is helping someone else express what they are interested in.

The third goal is to get the hang of recording decent audio remotely.

The fourth goal is to practice core audio editing techniques of cutting out pieces of audio and stitching them together into a coherent whole.

The fifth goal is to get to know someone else from class.

Process:

You will be assigned a partner for this assignment.

Have a pre-interview chat with your partner about what you would each like to talk about when being interviewed. You can pick anything to talk about, but keeping the same topic from the voice memo would simplify things. You should also share the articles you'll talking about with each other, so the interviewer will be able to prepare questions.

Prepare for the interview. Familiarize yourself to some degree with what your interviewee will be talking about. Write questions or prepare a list of topics. Think about what about this topic might be most interesting (relevant) for listeners.

Conduct your interview. For this assignment, you should do this as two separate interviews (Person A interviews Person B, then Person B interviews Person A), rather than as one conversation where you are both experts. It will be easier to parse out when you go to select highlights. You should follow the Lamont Media Lab guide to recording remotely to help get the best possible audio quality.

Listen to the interview and make notes with time codes about which pieces feel like the most representative or interesting. When does the person really seem to "come alive?" This will be when you want to decide if you are going to keep long continuous excerpts or if you want to piece together shorter sound bites. The answer will depend on the particulars of the interview, your comfort level with the editor, and how you want the final piece to sound.

Record any additional introductory, framing, or transition tape you need.

Use Audacity (or the editor of your choice) to clip out and assemble the pieces of the interview. You should also at least normalize the two audio tracks (as described in the basic Audacity tutorial) to balance the volume. You can also experiment with equalization, noise reduction, or other post-production sound improvements.

Save the file as a mono mp3 or m4a and upload it to Canvas.

Resources: