The Cursed Interview

A few months ago I did an interview with Cleo Wilson, the executive director at Intuit, and due to my inexperience with audio recording it turned out horrible.  Cleo was a great interview, she answered all my questions and I learned alot listening to her talk about outsider art...but the audio had too much of an echo, I could of used it but it wouldn't of been up to the standards I want for my film.  As disappointing as it was that I couldn't use the interview, I learned alot from my failure.


Well, Cleo agreed to do another interview, and this time I was prepared....I hooked her up with my wireless lav mic and the audio turned out perfect....in fact everything about the second interview was an improvement...the composition of the frame, the audio, and I even improved my interview skills....I took the time to go over all my previous questions and really fine tune them, and even put thought into which order I should ask each question.  I've been working on this film for over two years now, and I'm just realizing that I've spent so much time observing Russel and the creation of his reef that I forgotten that there is an art to the interview.


So the reason this blog is titled " The Cursed Interview", is because once I got home and started capturing the footage the tape started acting up on me!....After recording almost 65 hours of footage without a problem I finally had a faulty tape....thats the problem with using tape, it can be very unreliable from time to time.  I was freaking out, cause there was no way in hell I could approach Cleo to do another interview.  Luckily though I was able to salvage all the important parts of the interview!....it took hours of rewinding and playing the tape to get everything I needed.  The ball of stress that was collecting in my stomach finally disappeared, and now that there is a new year I plan on really focusing on my editing....I'm falling back in love with my film.  Its been a hard few months, but stuff is really starting to come together again....and soon I will blog about my progress with editing...Also, I need to get a few more interviews with people from intuit...including interviewing Jerry again, because along with Cleo his interview messed up as well...but that will have to wait till he returns from Europe......HAPPY NEW YEARS!!!


- Elliott