Why It’s Okay If Your Video Interview Goes Long
Picture this:
You’re in the middle of interviewing someone for a video testimony, you look at your phone and see you’ve been chatting for 30 minutes already and haven’t even gone through half the questions you have.
You start feeling a little anxious.
How am I going to edit this into a 3 minute video?
You start to interrupt your interviewees that are going on way too many tangents to get them back on topic, maybe you can have them word it in a shorter/certain way….
STOP!
You’re getting into your head and getting anxious about how long the interview is but don’t realize that could lead you to sabotage the interview altogether.
Sure, it’s a long interview.
Sure, you’re already going to be working overtime.
But, if you actually want a good interview, here’s a tip:
STOP RUSHING YOUR INTERVIEWS
Guys, I get it. Editing an hour-long interview takes a LOT of time and it gets challenging to edit it down to 3-5 minutes.
I know, I feel you.
But hear me out:
-Your interview is the meat of the testimony story.
-The interview will make or break your film.
Do you agree on these two things?
Then stop rushing your interviews for the sake of time.
Because here’s what can happen:
When you rush something, it puts your interviewees on edge. If you keep giving them suggestions on how to say something they get into a mindset that’s all about PERFORMANCE.
They get caught up in “saying the right thing” “saying things the right way, with the right words” “not messing up”, etc.
You’ve lost the quality of an authentic conversation and turned it into a performance, and when you’re working on a testimony film, you don’t want it to feel like a performance, it should feel REAL.