Um, You Know, Pause - What do I do?!

[chrismoncus]

Today was my first video "interview" at church on the production end. I've had years of experience filming sketches, IMag, and documentary type pieces but no sit-down, loosely-scripted interviews. What I encountered made me immediately want to post here.

The person we were interviewing had a great story. It was so great that after we started putting things away more of his story came out and we set everything back up to film what we just heard. He really nailed it. I think it'll be a great video.

The issue I struggled with throughout the taping ended up being his use of "um" and "you know" as well as just generally taking a bit of time to get to the point. My questions is... how do I (we) deal with that delicately and with tact? Specifically...


What is the best way to ask that the subject quit saying "um" and "you know" without being offensive and with the best result?
How,logistically, should we prepare the subject so that they will be most comfortable and well-spoken during the interview?
Any other tips out there?


I appreciate any feedback on this! Thanks!

[Stevie Nature]

I'd do the old sandwich method. Good, bad, good. Something like, "Man, I really appreciate you telling your story. This has really got a lot of good info for the church. One thing to watch, through, is make sure you're not saying 'um' and 'ya know' so much, and be careful about your pauses. Other than that, everything is great. This is really going to be a great encouragement to the church." Something like that.

A lot of it has to do with tone and body language. I've always found that in dealing with people it's not as much what you say, but how you say it. If you look petrified to tell this guy about his "ums", he going to be freaked out about them as well. If you just touch on it briefly, and are upbeat about it, it should give the correction needed, but not make the guy overly nervous.

Also, you want to give the guy the questions beforehand, so he can kind of frame his responses. Also, I'd encourage the guy to write the responses out, just to hammer out some of the wording. Make sure the guy knows he doesn't have to memorize the answers, but it would be good to know what he's going to say when asked.

[chrismoncus]

Thanks for the quick reply. We kinda did some of that but still had the questions. Good info to go on. I'll bring this (and other replies) to our planning meeting next week so we'll all get better at it.

Thanks!

[worshiptrench]

We only do a straight into the cam interview (looking down the lense) if they have exhibited they are phenoms on cam. Otherwise, I'll sit right under the lense and have them talk to me. (this looks more conversational).

Some people just cannot get rid of the um thing. That's why we make no initial promises. Here are some other tips to help with that http://www.worshiptrench.com/?p=155

[Stevie Nature]

worshiptrench,

I checked out those testimonies. Those are awesome. Great testimonies for one. God still does amazing things. The editing and background music and such was really good. Someone there knows what he's doing.

[dtpuga]

Chris,

You handled it right man. You just ask them the same question again and tell them why you are asking them again. Once they have thought it out once it will usually flow better. Getting the questions to your interviewees only helps if they read it when they get it ahead of time. And then, some people just don't make good camera subjects no matter how good their story is. We have left a handful of people on the editing room floor so to speak in the past couple of years. Thankfully, our pastor or whoever asked them to originally do the video got the job of explaining that we hadn't gotten what we needed.

I have a follow up question from Chris's original. Say that you get your cameras set up and you get your 'subject' to say exactly what you had dreamed he would say, and then you look over to your other camera guy and realize that the past 5 minutes he had his camera paused. Ha Ha. What would you do THEN? I decided to re-ask the same questions and pretend like we just wanted to hear it a different way.

Peace out,
Travis

[twc_admin]

Travis,

That's hilarious- from an audio perspective, I've done that a kazillion times. Just last weekend, I let my client lay down almost 3/4 of an entire song vocal track (flawlessly, I might add) before I realized that ProTools had not locked into Record mode - must've been a slip of the finger. I was watching the screen scroll, watching the levels, and not paying attention to the "edit" screen to not notice there was no audio waveform graphing in there.

In this case, I just said "dang, I blew it - my bad - that was so good, I know you can do it again".

I've also done the OPPOSITE - I've said "just start telling your story for practice and we're going to set some levels, etc", but really, I was already ready ... and sometimes I'd say "great - well, you thought we were setting levels, but really, we recorded that take, and it was GREAT!".