2nd shoot.

We are back from the shoot. What an tiring day it was! The shoot was not that bad but it was not perfect either.

We, again, had a lot of problems during the shoot. As this was our first time ever, running behind people and convincing them to give interviews, it was very hectic and time consuming.

So, first of all we had difficulties in finding the people who would actually give an interview after listening to details of our documentary. A lot of people used to first agree to give interviews but later after they had found out that the interview was going to be taken on a video camera they simply refused to give an interview. Either because they were ‘shy’ or they did not have the permission from their parents or husbands to appear on camera. In some cases, a few ladies listened to the concept with great interest and showed a lot of enthusiasm. They then asked us to wait for 10 minutes so that they could do some work of theirs and promised to return for the interview. We waited for them for more than 20 minutes and later we realized that they ditched us :/ this wasted a lot of time and energy of ours!

As we had to run after people at different areas of the mall, it took a lot of time for us to set the camera again and again at different locations for every new interview. We had to carry the load of the tripod at almost all the floors of the mall which was very enervating.

Moreover, Sound was the biggest problem! In the mall the walls are construed in a way that they echoed the sounds due to which we heard a lot of noise in the interviews. There was loud music and hundreds of people talking because of which the voice of our interviewee was lost in between all those sounds. We could not place the camera at a short distance from the interviewee either as the camera would not have been able to a take a mid-close up of the interviewee while giving the interview.

In order to escape from the hundreds of different sounds dominating the entire mall, we decided to go take interviews in different shops. However, the shop managers refused to let us shoot in the shops as they were not permitted to let people take pictures or make videos. Finally, to our advantage, we located two to three shops that allowed to take interviews inside. They were very nice to us and even agreed on switching off the music so that we could easily record the voices of the interviewees.

Lights were also a big issue. Every shop and corner of the Mall had different types of lights due to which the lights in the interviews we recorded could be seen at varying levels. However, interviews are supposed to be completely natural without any make up. These interviews are recorded this way due to which these lights should not be an issue.

Later on, after we saw the videos on the computer we realized that we were so much caught up in finding people and explaining to them the whole concept behind the documentary, we forgot to take shots that were of equal level. Some shots covered a lot area of the surroundings whereas, the others were mid close up shots which covered comparatively lesser area, which disrupted the flow and the cohesiveness of the clips when played in one order.

However, after experiencing all these problems we have learned a lot. We are now aware of all the possible problems we could face during the interviews and we will try our best to eliminate all these problem as much as we can the next time we take interviews at some other location. I think of all these dilemmas as lessons. We have learned our lesson and now we are prepared to take the kind of interviews we are aiming for.

I’m afraid I have no pictures to post here. Honestly, we were so busy in taking interviews that we completely forgot to take our pictures or make videos. But I think we could be excused considering the number of problems we faced during our visit to the mall.

-Enthusiastic about the second ‘batch’ of interviews.