Interviews with WW2 Veterans

Hello Everyone!

Recentally on the 10/04/09 Dean and I were down at the Somerset Legion House filming and interviewing the Veterans of WW2.

The time we had arranged to interview the verterans was at 2:00pm as it is just after their lunch time which is convieniant for us all.

Unfortunatley Dan couldn't make it to any of the interviews as he had to work some overtime during the Easter Holidays.

Dean and I arranged for us both to meet up for 12:45pm so that we both had an hour to plan in advance for the day and also to check that the equipment is working ok.

Just as well we arranged this becuase bad luck cursed us on the start of the day. Unfortunatley the plastic fitting on the eject button broke due to the ware age of the camera which left us in the lurch as we couldn't use it.

Fortunatley we had a spare camera to use as we took one out before half term. The spare camera was indeed around at Dans house. Luckily though his dad was in and lent us the fully working camera which served us well through out the day.

After all that kerfufull the time is now 1:30pm which left us half an hour to buy some DV Tapes before heading off towards the Somerset Legion House.

The time is now just 2:00pm and we have finally arrived to our location. As we had entered the building we received a warm welcome from the management and to our surprise there was a whole queue of WW2 Veterans just waiting to talk to us.

Feeling a littlebit overwhelemed Dean and I set to work of setting our equipment up in a private room and framing our shot ready for interviewing.

Our roles for today were that Dean was the interviewer and cameraman and my roles were cameraman and boom operator.

The interviews that we had recorded were a little bit hit and miss as some of veterans gave a mixture of open and closed answers.

This was understanderble as some of them were in their 80's and 90's+ and some were even trying to remember their involvement of the war.

Some residents even became a little bit emotional to talk about it so we had to deliberatley cut the interview short to avoid upsetting them.

Dean and I had begun to realise that this was not at all easy as we had hoped and we were begging to find it tiring.

The time is now 5:15pm and we had now just finished interviewing everyone who had volunteered to be interviewed. We both ended the day by taking some cuttaway shots of the exterior of the building along with some establishing shots of one of the veterans who we had interviewed.

Today has mainly been a big learning curve for us of how to properly interview people especially when they're senior members of the public.

The areas that Iam pleased with today s that we have filmed some really good interviews that would be a great benefit to when were editing. Iam glad that Dean has now got on to working with the camera properly that he is beggining to get more confident with it when framing shots.

The areas where Iam not that happy with is that the room where we held the interviews didn't have much of a nice background except for a few military paintings on the wall. This made things quite limited for the amount of camera set ups we could do for the different interviews, but we had to make do with it as it was the only private room we were allowed to use.

Today has made me confident with our next film shoot at R.A.F. Flower Down House which would take place on the 17/04/09. After todays experience I feel as though we are going to do a lot better on the next film shoot as we now know what to expect and seeing in our minds for definate what the finished project is going to look like.