This video is about how Kat’s mom came to the United States from Colombia. She did not do this for her own benefit, she did this to give her children better lives and a better opportunity. It is amazing how someone can be so selfless; she had to give up a good job and come to a country in which she wasn’t familiar with the language. She moved back to Colombia two years ago, leaving her family behind here. She discusses the hardships in this whole process but all together she is happy with her decision and proud of her children. This video was difficult for us to work together because of the language barrier between me and Kat’s mom. We came up with questions together but Kat had to ask them to her mother in Spanish and we had to keep stopping to translate for me so that we could ask more questions. The b roll was surprisingly easy because since Kat’s mom was coming to visit, we were able to film in the airport and film her mother seeing her children for the first time in a year. Our audio is somehow off in the beginning and we did not realize while filming, however, this isn’t a huge problem because there are subtitles at the bottom. After everything was translated, we edited the interview to what we felt was relevant to our video and then we edited the video within the interview.

For my second project, I chose to interview my friend Jackie. Her life has been rough because she has had cancer, but she was fortunate enough to fight through and beat it. Because of her sickness, she has aimed to become a better person and more healthy. She finds happiness in running and feels it relates to her beating cancer because she never thought she could accomplish it but she surprised herself, similar to running, she surprises herself everyday by pushing herself and going beyond what she thought she was capable of. This video was difficult for me because I found that it was hard to get enough b-roll in a limited amount of time. I also am not happy with the lighting during the interview, but that was something I realized after shooting. Despite the difficulties, I had fun interviewing her and I definitely got a better understanding of how to use iMovie.

My interview with Symphonie was about ten minutes long so I found it difficult to edit this piece to only three minutes. My main focus of the interview was to discuss the club she is involved with here at Wagner. Since this was the center of the interview, I made the decision to edit most of the other topics out. I chose to start my piece with the “natural sound” of her stepping because this is what Symphonie does in her club. By beginning with this audio piece, I thought it would set the theme for the rest of the interview.
I chose to edit my questions out of the entire piece. I found it unnecessary to have my questions on the piece because Symphonie repeated my questions in her answer. When there was silence, I either cut it out or I edited the room tone into the interview so it would sound natural. There were a few times where I left the silence because it gives more realness to the piece (such as you can tell the interviewee is thinking,ect.) I also kept the most important moments when you could tell she was passionate about what the was discussing in the interview. I edited out pieces where you could hear movement around the microphone to make the piece more clear. Some recording decisions that affected my editing is that during the “natural sound” I had to cut the beginning out because I had recorded too soon. Also I had recorded the natural sound without headphones so I did not realize the microphone movement.
For a future interview, I will know that instead of asking too many questions, I should let the interviewee speak more so that it flows better as one audio piece. I also should not be too responsive to everything the interviewee says, that way it makes it easier so that I will not have to edit out my voice. I also know to wear headphones at all times because it picks up more audio.