This week we had really good luck, and shot three very successful interviews. At the beginning of the week I called Holly and set up another interview time with her for Wednesday. She was quite concerned about remaining anonymous on camera, but we had been thinking about this and she was happy with our plan to shoot only her hands as she talked. We also told her that we would shout her a coffee to thank her for her time.
The first interview we actually shot this week was our second attempt at recording Scotty. This time we got all the gear we needed and were on time. While we were waiting for Scotty to get ready for us, we got talking to a social worker-in-training who did some dumpster diving on the side. She (Jessie) told us about how she uses some of the food she gets to provide free meals for the needy in her community. This fit perfectly with the image of a dumpster diver that we wish to portray, so we asked her to give us an interview. She agreed (after some convincing). It will be good to get another female voice in our film.
After the lucky meeting, we interviewed Scotty again. He asked us if we would like to use the same room, but this time we had had a bit of time to look around and I suggested a room at the back with a black leather couch, yellow walls and a large window (this doesn't sound very attractive but I knew it would look good on camera). We took what we learnt from the repeated Wilson shoots and spent a long time setting up the shot. This year we seem to have spent a lot of time trying to keep the horizontal lines in our frames straight, like in this shot the lines of the window and couch were very difficult to line up as we had to have the camera off to one side because of all the equipment in the room blocking our way. However we spent a lot of time on it and I think we achieved a pretty good shot. The lighing was perfect as it was, with no shadows on Scott's face or yellowish tinge. We did have to ask him to turn off the air-conditioning, but that was the only background noise. Scotty had had time since our last interview to really consider what he was going to say, and so he was extremely articulate and prepared this time round. He went above and beyond the questions we asked him. Like Paloma said, he was an interviewers dream.
Jessie contacted us that night and suggested an interview the next morning, which suited us so we set it up. We wanted to interview her at Newtown Library but it was closed when we got there, so we made a last minute decision to film in WHS library. We followed the same aesthetic we used with Wilson and Scotty, using a mid shot, concentrating on the hands, torso and face, with a flat background and clean white lighting. She was a little nervous and giggly but said some things that will definitely be of use. It was very very kind of her to be interviewed after only meeting us the day before, though.
Our last interview of the week was with Holly. We arranged to meet at Offbeat and she had to bring her young son along, so we were expecting a noisy informal interview. We were planning to film outside but it was very windy and raining a bit so we had to go inside.This shot was something of a fluke really. Holly had brought her own gloves along to cover her tattoos, and these just happened to perfectly match a jar in the background of the frame, which linked the whole shot together. I set up the camera on the table with Holly's hands around her coffee cup on the right and the jars in the background on the left. I ended up just holding the camera for the whole interview so that Paloma could stretch the mic as close to Holly as possible. Although we chose a table as far from the speakers and the other customers the background noise was pretty loud. We did quite a few sound checks but decided that, under the circumstances, it was best to stay where we were. She brought a very personal side to our dumpstering story. Perfect example of the people that Scotty talked about, people for whom dumpster diving is a necessity. There were quite a few topics that she didn't feel comfortable talking about on camera, such as the work she has done/is planning for single mothers. This was unfortunate for us, but of course we have to respect this. We still got some really interesting information and personal accounts out of her. Her son did pop his head into the frame quite a few times, making shots unusable, but there is nothing we can do about that.
I really like this shot, but I don't know how easy it will be to make it flow with the rest of our interviews, which are all shot in very different ways to Holly's, with minimal background noise.
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