British Artists Series : Richard Freestone
It has been in my things to do (context: photography) list in Omnifocus for last three years. I met Richard at a Platinum Palladium workshop he had organized and expecting a polite no asked him at the end if he would like me to interview him and publish it on YouTube and other social media. He was kind enough to say yes however he was moving his studio within beautiful Derbyshire area and was very busy. It took another 10 months and last October I was in his studio for good 3-4 hours. It was brilliant and I had great fun talking to him. He is very natural in front of the camera with deep honeyed voice to boot. His vast experience meant some fantastic anecdotes related to some of my favorite artists. I hope you enjoy the first installment of the series.
I learnt quite a few things from this experience.
First - life can get in the way. It took me almost a year to find time to process the data and edit the video.
Looking back here are some good or sensible things I did in the planning and recording phase -
I used manual focus 50mm Carl Zeiss Loxia. This lens is brilliant for video due to step-less aperture settings and being a normal focal length provided very natural perspective. Focus could have been an issue as we were indoors had it been an auto-focus lens.
I used external audio and did lot of testing before using one. The system I used was a Azden SMX-30 Stereo/Mono Microphone and Tascam DR-05. The quality is really really good with this combo. It can get better if you pay more however it is sufficient for the purpose I think.
Sony A7ii worked really well with the above lens.
Some not so good things I did -
After fiddling initially to hit record on camera and audio equipment I decided to continuously record audio on Tascam. It was painful to edit. I also managed to not record initial 5 min of interview on the main audio equipment. I need to find a solution to start and stop recording video and audio simultaneously.
Da Vinci Resolve is a brilliant video editing program however can be painfully slow. The color editing or grading is one of the best. I used all sorts of help available online to make it fast but it worked inconsistently. I may need a better or faster mac.
I will also need to invest in fluid-head for tripod and potentially automated slider for a second camera. The latter would have been impossible for this interview as the space was at premium.