Responsive: Collaborative Practice: Conducting Interviews

Today we conducted interviews for our Autism Documentary in Room 118, which we hired out for the day. After initially putting up the posters around college and getting the word out on social media, we were overwhelmed with the rapid response we received from people wishing to share their experiences. We had emailed the potential interviewees beforehand to ask them if they had any questions before the interview and whether they were comfortable being recorded for the documentary.

Due to the logistics of renting out the recording studio for the day and not wanting to rush the interviews we rented out a portable recording device from the AV suite, after a short induction and picked a relatively small-ish room to record in. One problem we ran into when we were testing the sound equipment was that due to the room being by a window overlooking a main road, car noises from the street were being picked up on the mic, so we had to adjust the sound levels and conduct a few sound tests before proceeding with the interviews. Another problem we ran into during the recording process itself was the fact that some of the people we were interviewing were quite softly spoken, and not wanting to have to rudely ask them to speak up during the interview, had to adjust the levels during the recording without picking up the background noise.

Over the course of the day we interviewed around half a dozen people for roughly 15 minutes each; a mix of people who both had some form of Autism or had first-hand experience through friends and family members. The experience was both constructive and enlightening. Molly conducted most of the interviews as she had the most experience with Autism out of the three of us in the group, but beforehand we mapped out the sort of questions we would be asking. The key was to ask a few questions as possible and allow the interviewee to speak uninterrupted so we can edit their dialogue down into a short documentary. While conducting the interviews we made sure to listen for moments which would make good short anecdotes or gave an empathetic impression of the speaker.

After we conducted all the interviews we listened to them all again to decide who was going to work on whose interview for the animation. I already had a fairly clear idea as to whose conversation I wanted to animate which the other members of my group agreed would be suited to my artistic sensibilities. We latter went off with a rough idea as to what everybody was doing, developing our own idea in parallel with input from the rest of the group. We'll start editing the sound clips down next week.