Blog Post #14 - Interview Questions Research

        When creating a documentary, there are a lot of key components. Some of these include live footage, compelling visuals, but especially, informative and engaging interviews. Interviews are arguably the most important part of a documentary as they come from real people in real situations and give their perspective of the documentaries topic. Because of this, before doing my documentary I decided I want to research the proper way to write and use a questionnaire when doing interviews for a documentary. 

        To do this research, I decided to watch a Documentary with examples of interviews and read articles on the correct type of questions to ask when doing an interview. This will help me because it will give me a guideline for how to write my questions and particularly how to ask them to gain the most information and explanation from the interviewee. Doing so will give me both a visual and contextual understanding of how I’m going to perform and film this part of my documentary project.

          The documentary episode I watched is the first episode of the basketball documentary, “30 For 30: Celtics/Lakers: The Best of Enemies.” This document talked about the persistent rivalry between the Boston Celtics and the LA Lakers. While watching, I could clearly notice the significance inside of the interviews. Each interview had a different player who participated in the teams and asked them for their stories, including how they felt about the other team how they felt about their team and what it was like to be a part of that experience. I think that using questions kind of like these in my document will be really helpful as my documentary is also a sports documentary and my interview is are going to be talking about their stress and their perspectives when playing volleyball in tough situation, along with how they manage such a time-consuming sport while also being a teenager in today’s society.

           The article I chose to read was “Interviewing Top-Tier Athletes for Documentary Style Work” Written by Joel Perrella on the website ‘AW Media.’ This article gave a Summarization of the writers tips and tricks towards interviewing athletes in a documentary. An article like this is really important for my documentary as it explains exactly what I’m doing from a perspective of someone who’s already done it, which can directly translate to my skills and how I film my documentary. Throughout the article, he explains how he looks for the personality behind the athlete before he films his interviews. This is important because it gives him a full view on the interviewee ahead of time so he can ask questions to get their true feelings, their background, and they overall view in a deeper way. More specifically, he uses open-ended questions like how and why, on top of a structured questionnaire because it provides more detail and more depth to his documentaries. 

       Following this inspiration and technique that I can put together from viewing the documentary and reading the article, I have a better outlook on how to film, interviews and the type of questions I should be asking within my interviews. This is important because I feel that the interviews are such a large part of what I’m doing with my documentary and if I don’t ask the proper questions, then the interviews won’t flow and make sense with the rest of the content.