360 Interviews from your Hidey Hole
Journalism 360 is a place where you can learn about everything from immersive storytelling to production and gear. This is the first drop in the “production & gear” bucket. Our guest bloggers are preparing to dump a lot of information so be sure to bookmark the Journalism 360 medium page and check back often.
When people ask me what I do, I sometimes respond I play professional hide and seek. Because a 360 camera captures everything, routinely our crew hides from the camera if we don’t want to appear in the shot as in immersive storytelling, location becomes a character. While you’ve been playing hide and seek your whole life, conducting interviews from behind a rock is not child’s play.
First, you need to have a conversation with your newsroom about whether the reporter and crew should appear in the 360 shot. Our crew hides because in our stories, we believe location is a character and we don’t want someone standing in front of our characters. Other shops want users to see the reporter asking questions as it’s important to the story for the user to hear those questions.
Before I get into how to ask questions remotely, I want to caution you to pick your “hidey holes” carefully and work with a crew that’s small enough to cram into something as small as a bathroom stall. I’m serious when I say where you hide can be dangerous. Earlier this year in the DRC, we were filming a family of mountain gorillas in their natural habitat and chose a hiding place, unknowingly, on top of a nest of red ants. Unable to move quickly or run for fear the gorillas would charge us, we endured what felt like an entire army of giant ants crawling through our clothes, biting us up and down our legs! Yet of course. We got the shot.
Once you’ve chosen a safe place hidden from the camera, you’ll want to think about how you’re going to ask questions from that remote location. If you want to appear in the shot, that’s easy. Just do it the old-fashioned way. Stand by or across from the interview subject and ask away. If you don’t want to appear in the shot, here are three options we use. I know this community has more. Please do share in the comments.
1. Prep subject with questions — two at a time. Ask your subject two questions and then hide. Come out after they’ve finished and ask another two, then hide. Before you hide, you have to remind the subject to look at the camera when they answer, otherwise we’ve found their eyes tend to wander around as there’s not a reporter to make eye contact with them. If you use option 1, you may want to plug your wireless mic’s receiver into another device — like a Tascam or a Zoom — that allows you to monitor the subject’s audio. Otherwise, you won’t know when they’re finished answering your questions.
2. Give them an earpiece. An IFB or Interruptible Foldback is a type of in-ear headset that can be plugged into your subject’s phone. Call your interview subject from your remote location and ask them questions through the earpiece. Sometimes, I worry about cell phone interference on our wireless mic so I prefer to use option 1. If you use option 2, be sure you continuously monitor your audio feed with headphones. In addition, if you use option 2, remind the subject the camera is a person so they make eye contact with the camera.
3. Stay in plain site and edit out the reporter in post-production Some documentary filmmakers use another option called “clean plates” and superimpose an existing image over the reporter in post production. To shoot a clean plate, you record video without the interview subject or the reporter in the shot so that you can use that “clean plate” or background video to edit out the reporter in post production. (There’s some debate right now in the journalism community whether this is ethically sound. ONA had a great panel exploring all sides of this at ONA16. Be sure to have a discussion about your shop’s views on cloning and watch for a future blog post on this debate.)
It’s worth mentioning, logistics become even more difficult when the subject and the reporter do not speak the same language. In Brazil, we had to live translate in our hidey hole from Munduruku to Portuguese to English. What worked best for us was to have the translators wear headphones. While one was writing on a notebook the Munduruku to Portuguese translation, the other translator was verbally whispering to us in English.
What tips have you found helpful in conducting 360 interviews? We’d love to hear about them in the comments. Tag … you’re it!
