Trust and camera behavior

Feedback given in week 10’s tute was that we had to step away from being claustrophobic, in our documentary of Yianni.

This weekend we discovered what that was. While filming Yianni in the bike store, this opened up the relationship between him and Nick, that we were hoping to capture. The goal of filming this day was to fill out those claustrophobic spaces and get Yianni to talk more of the essence of him as a filmmaker. Spending Saturday morning with Yianni while helping him out with the film shoot was fun, and gave the insight to see how he operated in the filmmaking field. As the hours went, he got used and comfortable having us three together around him and we got to capture more controversial and paradoxical interview material.

Lessons I can learn from the experience of filming Yianni are many. Following ethics was hard but I think it needs to be done and when interviewing one must put a person on the spot, and sometimes cross the border. Talking persuasively and conversational helps but asking questions afterwards also help. For example, as Yianni and I was driving back to the city I asked him what he thought about being put on the spot – off the record for our documentary and from a journalist’s perspective. The curiosity of why I had asked that, made Yianni talk freely of the issues around ethics but as a character of a documentary he thought it was necessary in order to get the production material.

Like Meenakshi, I found it learning full to learn in detail of how to build a trust relationship with the interview object. The more the object knows the filmmaker, the more trust he or she has towards the filmmaker. This importance is seen in how people tend to change behavior in front of the camera. I believe, that it is all about the experience from both sides. Yianni is young and sometimes it is hard to articulate and talk about film making from a beginner level. But when that is said that is how Spielberg must have been as young too. What we are producing might be a portrait of one of Australia’s best filmmakers as young one day, but that remains to be seen.