Rabiger and Cunningham: effective interviewing

The most important aspect of effective interviewing, is communication. By this I mean that the director or the interviewer that is interviewing the character, must not be interrupted and when we interview Yanni, I think that neither the camera operator or the sound person should talk until after the interview is finished. It can damage the flow of the interview, and also the developing relationship.

In developing skills of interviewing, Rabiger and Cunningham’s article talk about how to treat the talent and effective interviewing. What I learned from these articles and applied into the practice of interviewing was done in a work placement and then into the course TV Journalism. Here are the key points from the articles:

-how to negotiate the information from the interviewed object.
-building a semi relationship to them.
-framing of the object and editing.
-how to conclude an interview.
-setting people at ease, framing questions
-Editing out the interviewers voice
-Take and giving


Where Rabiger talks about editing in and out the voice of the interviewer and how to negotiate the information, I did this in two rounds. In the pieces for ABC Radio National, I did the whole interview first. I had prepared 3-5 questions, but in terms of framing my question, I would make lead sentences of the question. That resulted into a conversational style with the object, and also sometimes a ‘ talk like a waterfall’, which gave plenty of material to work with. It was this negotiation of information that started a relationship with the interviews and in most cases I would let the interviewed object just talk freely about him or her as a background portrait for the interview. In this way it was easier to ask direct and open question about the specific issues and get opinions and facts as well.
In the editing process I selected the main grabs followed by creating a new track for the particular interview. After that, I then voice recorded the voice of the interviewer.

In TV Journalism we were asked to do a vox pop assessment and I thought about how I was going to frame both the interviewed objects and me and my partner Amelia’s pieces to camera. Vox Pop’s for Rabiger ‘consists of asking a range of people the same question and then stringing the replies together in a rapid sequence‘(Rabiger 2004 p. 333).

In some occasions, it Rabiger’s example of making people talk together worked out well here. There were a couple of times during the practice of street interviews, that people coming in groups wanted to be interviewed and they talked more freely and open than others, most possibly because they were communicating amongst themselves. After looking at a couple of examples of news reporters we figured out that we would put them all in the right corner of the frame, just because a communication theory from Cinema Studies pointed out that the eye line from the audience and also the viewer, has a tendency do drop first to the centre, and then a little bit to the right. We also thought in doing so, if we had to put an object into the left side, we would flop the film segment in Final Cut Pro.

In terms of manipulation, I think that both as a filmmaker and a journalist, that I must never make an assumption of a particular grab or a comment. Manipulation works for me, when the story angle is set and I can fairly and honestly produce the story into the angle that it was meant to be.