Organising & Editing International Interview with Don Allen III (USA)

During the project I thought it would be a great idea to see if I could get Don Allen III (@donaleniii) to help me and the rest of the group out. He is a media producer from Silicon Valley USA. I have already worked with him before on a podcast for his channel. As such, I thought I would be able to call on him to return the favour. Please follow him as he is such a genuine person within the industry and will answer any questions you have if you direct message him. He creates tutorials on producing all kinds of work across multiple mediums. He goes live and allows interaction between his followers on design work. I thought he would be a really interesting person to interview especially for our target audience.

He responded and agreed film the interview himself and answer our questions we sent to him prior the initial contact. I conversed with him on how we wanted the footage to look, sent him the script questions we wanted him to answer, but what was great was that I was able to direct the shoot from my living room in the UK. He sent me live updates while he was setting up and sent me pictures of the framing and shots. Another interesting part to it was, he went live whilst answering the questions. So I was able to watch everything he was saying in real time as if I was at the interview. It was also interesting to watch and read the comments people made during the filming of it. They seemed really engaged and interested in the questions he was answering.

However, there was one down side to this. We did not specify how long we wanted the interview to be as we assumed he would not spend no longer than 15 minutes answering the questions. We ended up receiving 45 minutes worth of footage from which amounted to (32gb) in file size. As such we struggled to download such a large file to our laptops. I definitely learned a big lesson from this misshap, as I paid the price in editing time. I spent two days cutting his 45 minute footage down to just a 3 minute short (which was still the longest video in the shorts we produced) this was because he did not feature in the main video, and as such we thought he should have a longer episode. I was hoping we would create at least a 7 minute wonder video in full length with the speakers, however, during discussions we found that, that would not be a great length as people would get board and disengage.

But putting the misshaps aside, it was a great experience and opportunity to be able to work with him on this project and to broaden my connections within the industry.