Vox populi, vox Dei

In our very last week for this year, we were surprisingly sent out to collect vox pops for a client and their social work project. After an introduction into the matter and the relevant questions, we quickly assigned crews and crew roles, took the equipment out and left for the nearest shopping centre.

Vox pops are short bits of interviews taken on the street that capture various opinions of the public about a certain -usually political or social - issue. The clearer the opinion, the better for the final product! But this can sometimes become a tad too personal and thus difficult to get someone to speak openly in front of a camera. And this naturally requires the interviewer and his crew to be and act professional at all times.

Seeking your contributors for vox pops, you would usually go for the busy streets with a lot of people, but at the same time also with as little traffic and background noise as possible to capture what your contributor is saying. Which is also why, as always, you need to get your microphone as close as possible.

The following is rather etiquette, but it is nonetheless important and should not be disregarded in order to spare you a lot of trouble. Apart from smiling and looking approachable without towering or jumping at people to get an opinion, you should always ask for their full name and permission to film them. If you can get them to sign a consent form, that's even, but you can also 'trick' them into asking whether a couple of questions would be alright with them while keeping the camera rolling but not yet pointed at them.

As soon as you have permission, you should essentially be ready to start filming, since it is disrespectful to let your contributors wait just because you could not be bothered to pull focus, turn on the camera, or plug in your microphone. Essentially, you should always be ready to film right away. Time is money after all.

Having stated that, it is quintessential - and that ties into not towering over people - that the camera op tries to keep a bit in the background. Because, as we had to experience firsthand ourselves, a camera with a crew coming at you can have quite an intimidating effect.

In fact, you don't even need to be coming at anyone! Sometimes, already standing in the front line is enough to scare people away. It took me a bit until I understood just how much 'power' I held at that point and thus, since I was the camera op on that shoot, kept far in the background until people were ready to be interviewed.

As an interviewer, it goes without saying that you really need to listen to your contributors, to not interrupt or guide them in your questions, and to keep your questions open-ended and to the point, but also to follow a lead if you feel that someone has something interesting to contribute. It also requires you to take rejection like a pro (which was sometimes a tough pill to swallow) and ask a variety of people.

Regarding the latter, this posed a bit of a problem for us that we did not anticipate in the scale as we have encountered.

We were already prepped that it would most likely be elder people who would offer or accept a contribution, but we did not expect that we would only be able to gather elderly folks!

As it turns out, younger and middle-aged people tend to have no time and rush past, not being able (or not wanting) to spend five minutes for an interview. Also, it kind of seems that the more experience someone gathered throughout their life, the readier they are to share their opinions without fear of retribution or consequences. Which seemed quite dominant especially with younger women.

Well, as you can see, this endeavour does always require a good deal of intuition and approachability to actually get people testifying in front of the camera.

This is always a bit of a challenge, especially if you are comparatively new to this and need to juggle a bit. However, roughly 90 minutes, an empty battery, and three interviews later, we headed back to college where we checked the footage.

Turns out, that my material wasn't too bad to begin with, but I still made mistakes I could have easily avoided if I just had adhered to the same workflow: My lighting and my framing changed throughout these three clips, which was - for the first - partly due to the fact that we filmed outside and the weather changed, but also partly because I switched between the LCD-monitor of the AVC and its viewfinder, adjusting the iris of the camera. With the LCD-monitor, it turns out, the image is much darker than it appears on screen and has a slight crop factor.

For the second, due to the fact that we were moving about quite a bit in the cold and thus collectively freezing, I did not pay enough attention on how I framed the interviews, which resulted in footage that was inconsistent and could not be used collectively.

And an additional issue crept up which I did not see straight away when I was filming: A raindrop found its way onto the lens and stayed there for quite a bit, ruining the shot because it heavily distracted from the actual interview.

Well... What shall I say? It was a fun experience even thought there is still much to learn for me.