[Mark Suszko]

People will forgive a lot, if the content is compelling enough. And an eternal truth is that humans are innately fascinated by other humans. From carnival “freak” shows of old, to Kardashians today, it’s the same thing.

[Mark Suszko]

I think oral history interviews are among the most meaningful work I’ve ever done in my career. These are the things that have lasting value and speak to people of the future.

I get to do it two ways; in a 3-camera studio situation, live-switched, with an expert interviewer on the set asking questions and teasing out the narrative, and occasionally, the same thing out on location, with only one camera, or occasionally 2; a wider 2-shot and a single on the guest.

We don’t do it to be profitable. You seem to be talking about starting out doing these for free as “practice”, then converting this to a for-profit thing. I won’t say that’s impossible. I’ll say that it may be more difficult than you imagine.

Before we talk tech and shopping lists, though, the one biggest thing you need for this is, someone who really knows how to conduct the interview, if you’re just shooting it. Some can shoot and interview at once, but that’s a very tough thing to do well because you’re attention’s too divided. First thing off the top, you don’t just plunk down the gear and shove a mic in the person’s face and tell them: ” Start now, tell me everything.” It doesn’t really work well that way. I work with real pros, historians, who do this for their living, and the first thing they do is put in a lot of time in a pre-interview, mapping-out the shape of this person’s life, that of their parents and relations before them, etc. There is a lot of research into getting the dates and places right as possible, based on fading memories and decaying or incomplete records. Putting the events into a historical and cultural context. There are photos to dig out and parse thru for the ones that trigger a good and complete narrative, and that builds on those narratives to make an overall arc.

If you’re not willing to put in a lot of this gumshoe work first, and it can take days, before you roll a single frame, then this may not be the gig for you.

Interviewing is a skill, framing the right kinds of questions is a skill, and making the choices on the fly of what threads to follow up on as they come up… is all a skill. You will need patience to build this skill, but sitting down and writing out a lot of leading questions will help. You’re a kind of therapist when you do this right, leading people back thru their lives and helping them look at themselves and describe what they see in hindsight.

Then, there’s the actual sessions. We often debrief a guest for multiple, 2-3 hour sessions, over several days. And when it gets good, we’re sorry we can’t spend even more time. But if you’re looking at a for-profit model for these kinds of things, only rich people or funding mechanisms like Not-for-profits or educational institutions can afford to work like this.

Could you come up with a “streamlined” approach to this? I suppose, if you want to just explore one -tiny- slice of a person’s life, one subject, you could go over a single anecdote in a short time, and maybe make it affordable to a wide enough customer base. Maybe another way to go about it would be to get a contract or be “on retainer” with a nursing home, where you just show up every day and record a ton of stuff, get a base rate every week for as many interviews as you can reasonably do. I understand some cruise ship videographers might work this way but I don’t have in-depth insight into that.

That brings up the time suck that editing these can be. That’s why I recommend you don’t edit, not really. The mistakes often tell the best part of the story. It depends on how accurate a historical document you’re setting out to make. If you do 2-camera live-switched, or shoot a single 4K or better camera that lets you punch in and out in real time, when the interview is over, the video’s also basically done, and that’s often the only way to stay ahead of the backlog in editing, to deliver something timely for the guest, if volume production is the goal.

Okay, having run thru the disclaimers, we can talk technique and technology.

Number one is really, really good audio:, everything else comes second. The Rodent is okay, I guess. You might also want to get a lav, just to have the option. Two of them, really, because you will want to have the interviewer’s audio, even if you don’t see them.

Next is the lighting. Old people have eye troubles. I would recommend softboxes for key and fill, and make them dimmable. The softboxes also help smooth wrinkles and make people look better. You may need to throw some light on the wall behind yourself, to reduce the eyestrain on the guest. You can also try using only available light and a bounce card or reflector.

As to cameras, I’m not a fan of DSLR for many of the applications where they are trendy now. And I think oral history recordings, where you need a lot of recording capacity, are better done with a dedicated video camera form factor. That’s my personal view.

The DSLR and a copy stand lets you grab the photos in the same camera as the interview. Though scanning’s maybe better, sometimes you can’t borrow the materials and have to capture them on site.

As to grabbing their old movies, 8mm and super-8 mm film projectors can be picked up on ebay and such. The video formats you’re likely to come across are 8mm video, several flavors of 25 mbs DV, VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C (compact VHS, you can play these in a regular VHS deck using a mechanical adapter) (compact), Sony beta, and maybe some stuff on record-able DVD’s. Your first effort should be to see if the guest still has the camcorder or decks they shot and viewed this material with originally. Most of it’s probably gone now or broken/worn out. Second strategy is to acquire a couple of different decks and a Pinnacle or similar converter box, again ebay is your friend here. Use the converter box to turn the analog or 25mbs DV into mpeg files you can edit with. In your search for DV playback gear, I’d suggest perhaps a used Panasonic DVCPro deck, which is capable of playing back consumer grade mini-Dv tapes at high quality.

You can see some of the stuff we’ve done here:

https://www2.illinois.gov/alplm/library/collections/OralHistory/Pages/default.aspx

I’ll try to answer any other questions you want to ask. Because I wish more people did this kind of thing. It’s personally rewarding as well as useful work, with a purpose beyond selling soap.

[Mark Suszko]

Blown-out whites on a phone don’t look any better on a bigger screen.

[Mark Suszko]

So I’m an old fart, we’ll stipulate to that. That said, I don’t like the idea of “just eyeballing it” on a particular monitor, no matter how good the monitor is, versus using known, stable standards and scopes.

You have no control over what other delivery screens will do to your grade and levels, but if you keep everything within standards using scopes, you stand a at least chance that your output is cross-compatible across as many ways of seeing it as possible. I don’t believe anything remains “just” for one particular platform any more, no matter the original intention; indeed, the hardware sellers and content distributors market a multi-device viewing style where you pick something up on your phone, or your wristwatch, then maybe finish watching it on a bigger screen, and vice-a-versa.

It reminds me of the casual way I slapped a long playlist of music into my car’s playback unit without getting all the levels at least close to the same… and it makes for an annoying user experience when you have to keep cranking the volume way up or down for each song, to keep it appropriate and not overdriven or at a whisper.

I’ll adjust my belt onion and sit down now, so someone else can take a turn.

[Mark Suszko]

The amps available sounds insufficient. What does the labeling on the battery pack say is the MAh rating?

[Mark Suszko]

This will be Mr. Smith’s solution, …right after he gets his time machine worked out. It’s brilliant to do *before* you start. And you’d better believe I’m writing this one down for my own use in the future. But he’s already cooked the omelet and it’s too late to put it all back in the eggshell now.

[Mark Suszko]

And if the re-import thing doesn’t work, is this a situation where audio Roles and auditions might be useful to do a quick re-alignment?

[Mark Suszko]

So indeed, sounds like you’re just “slicing a salami”.

I expect the “slices” need a canned intro and outro, and probably a bug or lower third on each? Once the whole salami is sliced up on the timeline with the blade tool, and you’ve cut out extraneous bits like show graphics and cut-aways, the slices are all you have left. You throw a marker down at the start and end of each slice…?

I don’t know diddly about AE yet, but isn’t there a way to write an AE expression to automate dropping the stock intro/outro and logo bug at every marker you lay down?

Or… you repeatedly copy/paste the intros/outros onto one timeline, as many as you need, like the bread slices in a swandwich… then drag the sliced clips into the other timeline with a ripple? Then do your exports from there?

(Never discuss editing while hungry.)

[Mark Suszko]

Question: if you have all the original camera angles, you can choose to solo one angle for the period of one joke, which I guess takes about a minute. But “selling” the joke often means breaking up the shots and changing angles to the rhythm of the comedian’s delivery, and the reactions, adding “punctuation” to his or her timing. This is a more artful way to present the joke, but in the original program it’s unlikely every joke was punctuated and timed out in exactly this way. The director will likely have lingered a moment here, up-cut a shot there, to give a better visual flow.

So, are you aiming to make each minute segment a “mini concert”, unto itself, re-building the entire little piece with wide establishing/intro shots, then a couple of different quick angles to cover the setup, punchline, and reaction, and if there is a follow-on “button” to that joke, an angle to show that? Or is this a more prosaic and simple “catalog” of the gags, and not concerned with interpreting them or giving them a visual structure? If the latter, you can just pick one angle and let it roll the whole time. And thus you organize the elements to favor that process.

Because how you wanna approach this is going to inform how you organize the elements and how much stuff you need to import in the first place. You can get lucky a lot of the time and just lift whatever the original live switch or edited master did for a particular joke… but sometimes you’ll need to add stuff, repair a cut, or shift a cut because the gag is now independent of the rest of the set. That’s a concern in jokes where you’re working with the rule of three, one mention and two call-backs. And then sometimes a call-back, absent the previous context, means nothing and will fall flat.

Comedy is serious business.

[Mark Suszko]

Maybe a different approach to generating the bullets?

What if you just make -one- bullet, and treat it as a particle generator source/effect? In the generator, you can then type a number or use a slider and create as many identical ones as needed, set up their spacing, etc. Set up and saved once, making repeat iterations and variations becomes easy and fast…

I tend to think of bullets as something to make in the text generator, myself. Maybe we’re not talking about the same thing?