What was thing big Ah – Ha! moment with students during the Storytellers Abroad Multimedia Missions Workshop in Trinidad? How important it was to spend more time on the pre-interview.
We build the workshop time for the students to get to know their subject. This is the pre-interview. Even so, most everyone would start their “formal interview” with the camera rolling too soon.
They learned that if they didn’t know the story before they started, they didn’t know how to take control. They would let the subject talk and talk and talk. This meant they had 60+ minutes of an interview to edit, and every one of those interviews had to be redone.
When we teach how to interview, we teach what the key points you are looking for to help tell a compelling story are.
While this storyline/narrative has been known for a long time in storytelling, we still often struggle to get those key elements.
Subject
Conflict
Resource/Help
Action they took
Call to Action
Now the one thing we add to our stories that you don’t see in a movie theater is a call to action. Now that you have seen this story, we want the audience to know how to get involved.
If the storyteller has taken time to get the story before they roll the camera, those interviews are usually more of a 15 – 20 minute interview. The only reason it isn’t the short 3 – 5 minute finished project is they often have the subject do a few takes. They want to get the best emotional match to the content.
All the students were talking about how next time, they will spend more time getting the story during the pre-interview so that the editing process will be much simpler.