Video is a great medium for sharing human stories. Capturing the heart of those stories, however, requires more than sitting somebody in front of a camera and asking them to start talking. A video interview’s success depends upon the direction the interviewer provides. The goal should not be merely to extract facts; rather, the objective should be to draw a story out of the interviewee. Below are five keys to creating compelling video interviews.
The Pre-Interview
A pre-interview is an informal conversation that takes place a week or more prior to the actual “on-camera” interview, and it can be conducted in person or over the phone.
Pre-interviewing provides two benefits: it establishes the interviewee’s storyline and it assures the interviewer that the story aligns with the objectives of the video. A pre-interview should reveal the highlights of a story but not all of the details. A disadvantage of pre-interviewing is that it can diffuse on-camera spontaneity, causing an interview to seem rehearsed. A solution is to have an assistant conduct a brief pre-interview and relate the story summary back to you.
Prepare Questions In Advance
Come to your interview with specific, succinct questions. Wrestle in advance with your word choice and even sentence structure. Practice reading your questions out loud, eliminating unnecessary words or ones that are difficult to pronounce. For example, when my team was preparing questions for a person-on-the-street interview on the subject of racial reconciliation, one question was, “How many of your friends are of an ethnicity different than yours?” The word “ethnicity” tripped us up, so we replaced it with “race” instead.
Interviewers may be tempted to clutter their questions with too many words. Using extra words in your questions tends to cloud rather than clarify. If people start answering your question before you finish, it’s a strong indicator that you need to shorten your question.
If you are struggling with what questions to ask, start with imagining the ultimate response. Once you have it, write it down. Read this ultimate response back to yourself several times exploring what line of questioning might elicit such a response. The interviewee probably won’t say exactly what you want, but you can at least determine the best way to guide them toward the information you need.
Plan Your Question Sequence
After you have formed your initial questions, give consideration to the order in which they are best asked. It is natural to ask simple questions first. As the subject becomes more at ease, you can move on to material that might be more emotionally charged. In Story, Robert McKee emphasizes the basic story arc—the inciting incident, crisis, and resolution. If you arrange your questions to follow this story arc, it will yield a more compelling interview.
For example, I once interviewed a man whose home burst into flames while he and his family were inside.
My question sequence went something like this:
- How did the day start?
- What was your first suspicion that something might be wrong?
- What occurred next? Take me through your gradual steps of detection.
This interview wouldn’t have had the same effect if I would have started with asking,
“Wow—a burning house! How did you get out?” By jumping to the climax, I would have missed key elements of the story.
Follow-Up Questions
The strongest responses emerge once the interviewee moves from just answering questions to having a conversation. Knowing when and how to ask follow-up questions is the most effective way to create a conversational tone. If the primary questions are aimed at gathering information, then develop the skill of asking a follow-up question to draw out personal details.
For example, I often listen for a single word the interviewee uses, and I’ll pitch it back as a single word question.
Interviewer: What occurred next? Take me through your gradual steps of detection.
Interviewee: As we were sitting watching TV, we heard an explosion and were alarmed.
Interviewer: Alarmed?
Interviewee: We thought something fell over in the garage. As we went to a side garage door to open it up, a garage window blew out. BOOM! It was sort of a miracle he wasn’t engulfed …; which could have happened if I had opened the door a moment before.
Often a single word as a follow-up question will cause the interviewee to give you a spontaneous and natural-sounding answer because they are responding conversationally.
Unlike the initial questions, follow-up questions should not be planned in advance. Listen attentively as your interviewee speaks and genuine follow-up questions should surface for you.
Think like an editor
While working to be genuine and relational, you must also keep your video senses engaged. Here are three tips to help you think like an editor while you are conducting an interview:
1. Have your interviewees answer in complete sentences. Sometimes it helps to have interviewees include a portion of your question in their response. For example, if you ask about a favorite memory, you might request that they begin their answer with, “A favorite memory is …; ” Without complete sentences, you end up with disconnected sound bytes that will be unusable in the edit.
2. Keep alert to distractions. An unexpected noise or minor occurrence in the background can send even the best responses to the editing room floor. If interference occurs, acknowledge the issue without much ado. Stop the recording until the distraction is removed. Then re-start the interview, picking up just prior to where you left off.
You can leverage the interruption to do minor technical necessities. For example, if you’re close to changing tapes anyway, do it when you are responding to the distraction instead of creating another interruption later in the interview. Other tasks might be: adjusting lighting, changing a microphone battery, touching up make-up, or checking playback.
3. Listen for clean INs and OUTs. When editing, every clip has a starting point and an ending point. When there is not a clean audio break between words or the interviewee speaks with run-on sentences, it’s difficult to cut “in” or “out.” In normal conversation, it is not common to pause and wait for the next person to speak. So guide your interviewees to “put a period” at the end of their thoughts. Encourage them to pause and collect their thoughts after each question. Practice this with your interviewees during the warm-up segments of your interviews and you’ll avoid having them speaking on top of your voice.
During the interview, when you hear a strong sound byte, listen for a break that might make a clean “out” point. Once you are confident you have a clean “in” and “out,” you can move on to your next question.
A bad interview can make even a riveting story sound dull—or too rehearsed. As an interviewer, you have the ability to shape and mold the direction of the story, highlighting the most interesting elements and drawing out the personality of the subject you are interviewing. By developing your skills as an interviewer, you will be able to produce better stories on video.
