Contemporary Interview Editing Techniques
Whether you are making a documentary, mockumentary, or corporate video, interviews can be an effective way to present information to your viewers in a compelling and engaging way.
The interview format and style, the way it is conducted and then edited have undergone some changes over the years. The very questions and the way they are worded have also evolved. For your video, you should at least be aware of the changes then you can make an informed decision as to whether you want to follow the trends or not.
For details about interview questions, you can check out this article 6 corporate interview questions examples anyone can use.
The emergence of new technologies has changed the way we consume video content. It should, then, come as no surprise that the content itself has undergone stylistic changes to accommodate these new technologies and the new way we consume content.
Producing videos requires organizational skills. It also requires interpersonal skills as almost all quality video content comes about as a result of collaborating with other creative and competent people – not to mention the technical skills required, especially when it comes to editing and sound design. Often, for people looking for high-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree, these kinds of creative endeavors – such as video production – can be a good option worth considering.
In this short article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the changes that have come about over the last 30 years when it comes to shooting and editing interviews.
From Conversation to Confessional: How Errol Morris Changed the Game
Traditionally, interviews were shot with both interviewer and interviewee seen from profile. To mix things up, sometimes there would be a hard cut to one of the speakers. But the speaker, invariably, would not be facing the camera but rather they’d be looking at the person they were speaking with. The result would be an interview closely resembling a conversation. The viewer was treated as a mere observer – the 4th wall.
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris found the result too passive and too distant for the effect he wanted his work to have on the viewer. Thus, he began searching for a way to shoot an interview in a way that would be more compelling and engaging, a way to have the interviewee speaking directly to the viewer.
Errol Morris’s frustration with conventional interview filming techniques and his subsequent search for a solution brought him to invent the Interrotron. The device functioned much like a teleprompter, but instead of displaying text the speaker could read while looking directly into the camera, the Interrotron displays a video of the person they are speaking with.
The result is a much more intimate and focused delivery. A trained actor may be capable of answering questions off a teleprompter, but interview subjects rarely have the acting skills or training to accomplish this. Instead, they often appear nervous with their eyes darting about and losing focus. The Interrotron solved this problem.
Errol Morris used the Interrotron when shooting interviews for his 1988 documentary, The Thin Blue Line. The effect was wildly successful and met with praise from both critics and audiences alike.
You don’t need to buy an Interrotron to get the same or similar effect. You can make your own Interrotron with a simple mirror.
Errol Morris’s documentaries – and most notably his unique way of shooting interviews – spawned a host of imitators, so much so that this kind of intimate ‘confessional’ style of shooting interviews is now used in movies, corporate videos, promotional clips, and everything in between.
Image Overlay: The Interview as a Narrative
Off-camera narration has been around ever since audio and visual were combined onto film. It is a staple of nature documentaries as well as historical documentaries that rely a lot on archival footage to tell their story.
Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis is a good example of this technique. He was a documentary producer for the BBC in the ‘80s who went on to produce his own work in 1992 with Pandora’s Box.
In Pandora’s Box, along with his subsequent works such as The Power of Nightmares, The Trap, and Bitter Lake, Adam Curtis uses collage images to illustrate what the narrator is saying.
When an interview is edited in this way, generally it begins with a traditional profile shot of the interview subjects before passing to the collage overlay. When passing from profile shot to an edit with the interviewee shot up-close and facing the camera then moving on to the college, the effect is that the viewer approaches the interview and is then pulled into the speaker’s mind.
Because the interview subject is not on camera for most of the interview, this allows for seamless editing. The editor, without making it at all apparent, can cut out the less important things the interviewee might say and thus create a tighter more impactful narration.
The Bottom Line
There’s nothing wrong with opting for a traditional style of editing for your video. But there are some great filmmakers who have broadened the number of options we have. By exploring the work of Adam Curtis and Errol Morris, we have a few more options to consider, especially if we want our interview to have a more contemporary editing style to it.