Team members: Gemma Treacy, Hannah Lambert, Jenny Wong, Mark Mc Gee and Sophie Stapleton.

To begin the production process, we met as a group to discuss a concept and brainstorm ideas. We decided on the theme of Happiness and the questions we wanted to ask. For the first day of production, we rented out two zoom mics, two boom mics and poles, a tripod and a white backdrop. In the TV Studio on Campus, we set up our equipment. We put some coloured tape on the floor to mark where the seats were to be put for both an individual and two subject interview.

We had a lot of different inspirations for this piece. We watched story telling videos on YouTube where they had asked a group of strangers the same question. This gathered an abundance of unique, awkward and funny answers. This style inspired us for our own project and we decided to use and adapt this idea. We also took inspiration from a podcast called “The Laughs Of Your Life with Doireann Garrihy” (2019). This podcast explores all elements of laughter throughout people's lives. She interviews a different Irish celebrity for every episode. Asking the interviewees a number of questions around the one topic was a structure that we liked.

Themes we considered were happiness, emotions and life. Locations we considered for filming included Howth, “Happy Out” coffee shop in Bull Island and Omni shopping centre. A location such as one of the above would have allowed us to gather a range of answers from different age groups. However, the weather is unpredictable and Howth can be quite windy so we took this into consideration and decided that filming indoors would be a better option. Background noise from people or traffic for example could affect the overall production. Participants might not have been as comfortable answering these questions with many people around. The answers might not have been as authentic. Therefore, we decided to book the TV Studio in DCU. This allowed for a more personal, natural interview. We narrowed down five questions to ask each participant around our theme of Happiness. Some questions were asked to groups of two and others answered solo. Happiness means something completely different to everyone and it was wonderful to receive such a range of answers. 

Mark is the chairperson and founder of the Erasmus Student Network DCU. The society had a movie night event on the evening that we were filming so many of his members volunteered to be interviewed. This allowed for a diverse range of students from different cultures to take part in our video and it gave us more distinct answers. Students taking part were Irish, French, American and Spanish. Different cultures hold individual values important to them but recurring themes within answers were family, friendships and relationships. We had a variety of individuals differing in personality and gender. The participants didn’t know the question that was being posed to them until the camera started rolling. This allowed us to capture raw, genuine reactions. Some partakers answered instantly and others needed to take a moment to think and reflect. Sophie in our group and Mark and his partner took part in the interview too. Two friends decided to be interviewed together which resulted in many laughs and a quirky, fun scene. 

Our piece is just over 7 minutes long. We felt we could justify adding the extra time to our piece as we had such a diverse range of answers from so many people. We had 37 minutes of footage all together, so it took us a long time to go through the footage and edit each answer. It then took us some time to select the best answers of each question. We really wanted to include at least one clip of every interviewee as they went out of their way to do this for us and they were excited about seeing the final piece. Some of our interviewees were more confident than others, meaning some answers were longer and more detailed than others. We felt that by the end we had a really good selection of answers chosen.We liked the layout and feel of our video overall so we did not want to cut it down any further. 

On the day of shooting, one of the boom mics that we rented out from the loans office did not work when plugged into the Zoom mic. Luckily, we had rented two zoom mics so we just had to compromise using one instead of two. Although this did work, some of our interviewees were very soft spoken and the extra boom really would have helped in post production to ensure everything each person said could be heard. We had to turn the volume up all the way on some interviewees in post production so having extra recordings would have made a huge difference. 

We had problems with the lighting but we hoped we could fix this during post production. When setting up the studio we wanted to frame the scenes from the waist up. Originally, we had set up the seats in one position but then moved them forward. It wasn’t until we looked back at the footage on a computer screen that we noticed some heavy shadows under some interviewees eyes. To fix this, we should have moved the seats back to the background, not closer to the camera to ensure they were correctly underneath the overhead lighting. We also should have rented some extra lights for the floor to help correct any shadows on the background wall. In Premiere Pro, to correct shadows and colour we adjusted highlights, shadows, exposure and temperature.

We also had a couple of issues with the camera coming out of focus a number of times. This caused a couple of issues when editing. We still wanted the content of what was being said to be interesting, but obviously we had to use the best clips which were in focus so we tried to compromise on this as best we could without letting it affect the overall quality of the piece. 

For next time we would bring another lighting kit to light up the subject from the front and to light our backdrop from below. We would also use a coloured background as white is quite plain and bland, although we don’t feel this affected our piece too much as most of our interviewees were wearing bright clothes. We would also consider renting another camera with a lens for a shallow depth of field just to capture more close up shots and give more dimension to our piece.