Video Interviewing

The "How to Shoot Video Interviews" website provides a lot of basic information about how to conduct and film an interview. This site is a great resource for someone who has an idea for a project that includes a video interview but doesn't know exactly how to get started. As someone who has never worked on a project like this before, I found the information provided on this website incredibly helpful. One of the most helpful parts, in my opinion, is the step by step instructions for successfully facilitating an interview. In addition to providing instruction for actually recording the interview, the site talks about how to make initial contact with the interviewee, the procedures you should follow in order to maintain a proper amount of respect and politeness and even a reminder to send a thank-you note after the interview. This type of instruction supplements the more factual directions, like composing and sequencing shots (which is something that I have no previous experience with.) I also found the definitions included in the site to be very helpful, since while it's not necessary to use the correct vocabulary it makes the whole process more professional and cuts down on confusion. The glossary provided is also a great tool to help with this.
While I found the factual information included in this site to be incredibly helpful, if this project were to be used in a classroom there would also have to be a focus on why the interview was being performed, not just how to do it. One of the great things about interviews is that they are an excellent type of primary sources. Students might be more interested in hearing someone talk about how theirr town was founded than they would be in just reading about it in a textbook. Interviews give factual information a human component. Interviews can also help students to understand that primary sources don't have to be old; they're being created all the time. These benefits mean that interviews would be great to use in a history or English classroom, where the focus is on stories and past events. However, they could also be used in a science, math or foreign language classes to interview someone who is an expert in that field.
Once students are comfortable with the reasons for conducting an interview, this site would be very helpful for beginning the process. I have bookmarked this site and will definitely refer back to it, both for this class and in the future.