Blog Post 5

Blog Assignment #5:

Post a reflection about shooting your vox pops & the expert interview (150 words)

With the extension on the project, my group has pushed back our expert interview. We will be interviewing a local musician in Wilmington. We are still hoping to get in contact with the man who plays the saxophone downtown. He's very talented and we think he will have interesting things to say, but if we can't find him, we have a friend of mine, who is a singer, who said she's more than happy to be interviewed by us. 
Our vox pops were fun. It was intimidating at first to ask a stranger to answer a question on camera. Because we were downtown on a busy Friday night, we found some very interesting characters to participate in our vox pops. Two people said no, but we did find three people to say yes. One of the responses was kind of dry and dull, but our other two vox pops got great responses.
I will update with a response to our expert interview after this weekend. :)

We lucked out! While picking up some more b-roll downtown, we ran into Mr. Glen McRae, the saxaphonist we wanted to interview. He was very nice and agreed to meet us downtown the next afternoon and participate in our interview. When we went downtown at the meeting time, however, he wasn't there. I called the number on the business card he had given me and he apologized, explaining he had forgotten about a class an wouldn't be there for another three hours. Our group decided to hang around. We picked up more b-roll and another vox pop. Finally we got up with Mr. McRae. He played some wonderful jazz music and our recordings came out great. Unfortunately, the sun had just set and the spot he wanted us to interview him in didn't give off much light. We tried playing with some of the settings to fix the resolution, but the image still came out dark. I'm not sure what we should do. We could just use his voice over a bunch of b-roll, but I'm not sure if that will look bad. I'm going to have some work to do in the editing room...

Blog post 3

For our documentary, we will be interviewing a musician as our expert interview. We’ve run into some issues confirming with our desired interviewee, a street preforming musician. We are still trying to get an interview with one of them, but our back up interviewee is confirmed just in case. If things do fall through with our attempts to interview a street performer, we will be interviewing Mark Eaton, a local musician. We plan to shoot the night time streets of downtown Wilmington, with focus on the music scene, specifically street performers. The tone of the interview will be professional, but also sentimental. We want to show the passion of these musicians as well as the enchantment of Wilmington after the sun goes down.

Some questions for our interview subject I have in mind are:

1.      What is your name and where are you from?

2.      What instrument(s) do you play and how long have you been playing?

3.      What type of music do you enjoy listening to?

4.       What type of music do you enjoy to play?

5.      Where in Wilmington do you like to preform?

6.      How do you feel about the music scene in Wilmington?

7.      What do you think about Wilmington’s night life?

8.      Have you ever preformed anywhere outside of Wilmington?

9.      Have you ever experienced any enthusiastic fans?

10.  What do you love about music?

These questions will work for either our desired interviewee or our back up (confirmed) interviewee. However, if we can get an interview with one of the musicians who actually preforms on the street at night, I would like to ask questions focused on what it’s like to preform there. (ex: What’s different about audiences in a venue compared to those on the street? Do you preform just to make money, or is there more to it?)

For our vox pop, we hope to interview people walking by our expert interviewee and other performers downtown. Ideas for questions:

1.      What did you think about their music?

2.      What kind of music do you like?

3.      How do you feel about Wilmington’s music scene?

4.      What do you like about or what do you think most people like about Wilmington at night?

Our current production schedule:

Friday evening (7/8-11) 2/14: Shoot vox pop and try to find and secure our desired interviewee. It’s Valentine’s Day which should mean there will be plenty of people around to talk to, and hopefully multiple musicians will be out as well.

Saturday afternoon-evening (4-7/8) 2/15: Shoot more B-roll and any shots we may not have gotten the night before. We hope to capture footage of Wilmington in the day to contrast our shots at night. A sunset shot on the river is a desired shot for this day.

Monday evening 2/17: Back up interviewee is scheduled just in case we cannot secure an interview with one of the street musicians.

Tuesday-Wednesday: Edit footage.

(Note: schedule is subject to change based on who our interviewee ends up being)