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Filming in research - my trials and errors

Filming in research - my trials and errors

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I love using film in research – but it’s not easy. Here’s my take on how to get film right, based on what I’ve got wrong in the past!

The inherent tension…

Good sound bites are not the same thing as good insight. I’ve been filming interviews all this week with a professional film-maker, Davy Charles (see my Street Mates) and his idea of a good interview was often my idea of not-so-great… He liked respondents who were well lit, with lots of poise, and gave clearly spoken, considered answers. I found these respondents hard to read, and a bit self censoring – I preferred the kind who flapped their arms around like windmills and ran on a bit…

I wanted respondents to be sat of the sofa all comfy – Davy wanted them sat up straight in a chair so they looked good.

The way round the tension?

One answer is to film a lot of footage and be prepared to spend a lot of time watching back. Be prepared to work creatively with your edit and accept that you might get the wrong person saying the right thing and the right person saying the wrong thing…It’s about the film delivering insight when it’s finished, and you can’t be a purist about who said what. You’re trying to communicate a truth rather than say the truth, and there is a difference in that.

When I’m reviewing footage, I use a simple labelling process to start to organise the themes that are coming out of the interviews. I will label all the themes and then ask the film-maker to make a first cut with the clips organised by these themes. I then repeat the process so that I make further cuts until the film is down to a manageable size.

It has to be the researcher trawling through the footage to get the right insight out. It’s the film-maker’s job, then, to make it look good and to help add mood and tone via their editing toolkit. It would be lovely to be able to leave the film-maker to deliver the output – but they just aren’t ‘qualitative’ enough in their interpretation to get what we need out.

When I first started making mini films I always under-estimated how long it would take me to do this editing process. I also tended to leave the editing until after I had written the debrief – like an after-thought, and that meant it was always rushed. Now I build a load of time into the process and always do the video editing before writing the debrief. I’ve found that this has really improved the quality of my analysis and debrief outputs because I am super familiar with what the respondents had to say having listened to them over and over.

An alternative approach that can also work well involves imagining the end product – the output that you want your client to be watching. You can then develop a little mini screenplay/ script pre-research that is useful for the film-maker as a briefing document. It also helps with working up a set of questions that will get you the kind of answers you need for your film (which are again, a bit different from the kinds of ways you would ask questions in a pure research interview). My favoured approach is to do an interview as normal with a respondent (still filmed) and then take a few minutes at the end of the interview with my scripted questions. It’s much better to have pre-scripted questions, as your brain tends to be a bit fried at the end of an interview, so having a crib sheet can really help. Plus what you want to put into your film may be different from what was revealed in the interview too. The script gets you back on course for the outputs you need from your film.

The time and space it takes…

It’s so easy to forget that an hour of footage creates a MASSIVE data file. And massive data files take ages to upload and send on for editing. Here’s the process that Davy and I have worked out to get round the issues of big data (film data, I mean…).

  • He films using an SD card in his camera so we can swap the data around easily
  • At the end of the interview we transfer the data onto the researcher’s laptop and this gets backed up onto a hard drive
  • Davy labels his SD card, and makes sure he has enough cards/ memory to cover the number of hours filming we are doing in each session
  • This means that time needs to be built into the process after every interview to do the downloading – it usually takes about 15 minutes to transfer an hour’s interview

We transfer our edits via Wetransfer (low res) and we only add in the fancy bits to the film (slides, credits, images, music once the whole edit has been done).

We’ve had loads of problems with big files not transferring so again, we’ve learnt to build in time for this. It’s another reason why the film edit needs to be done before the debrief is delivered.

It’s never easy to get the outputs to look brilliant

When interviewing in-home the quality of the film can be incredibly variable (because of the amount of light, the ambient noise, the respondent’s space). That’s really hard to get around, other than to film more footage than you think you will need and/or to set up venues that will guarantee you good light. It’s actually worth scouting out venues to interview respondents in that will deliver good film outputs – it’s something you can get your film-maker to do for you.

It’s possible to DIY

I always deliver clients some kind of filmed output, but sometimes budgets preclude working with a film-maker, so I will do it myself. I use all sorts of different cameras…my iphone, a flip camera and a more professional DV recorder (it cost me about £300 and delivers reasonable quality outputs). I use Sony Movie Studio which has good tutorials on how to do basic editing. Beware video editing software crashes a lot. (I’ve checked with Davy and his more sophisticated software crashes too) so it’s really important to save, save, save. Sometimes I’ll get Davy to ‘snaz up’ what I’ve done, which is a much cheaper option, but still helps the output look less amateurish.

Clients can have low spec technology…

I’ve been caught out by clients not being able to view my lovely videos because they can’t open up MP4s (its’ big corporate companies that are often behind the curve on technology) – so before you deliver your outputs it’s a really good idea to find out what formats they can view in and also how they able to save large data files. Some clients can access cloud-storage and others can’t, some can accept hard disk drives and pen drives and others can’t – it’s worth asking the questions up-front.

When it’s good clients always want to use your film widely

And a final warning, clients can love the footage so much they want to use it outside of market research. It’s worth having a conversation about this upfront with clients so they know what they can and can’t do with the footage. If they think they might want to use it more widely than for internal market research purposes you’ll need to build this into respondent recruitment – remembering of course the MRS code of conduct.

Good luck with your film-making – I welcome your thoughts and top tips too. Do contact Davy too

kath-handonheart

Kath Rhodes, Qual Street Owner

I love love learning and so I invest time and resources with Ambreen and Claire into exploring social psychology, neuro science, creativity and new techniques in research. Read all about it and help yourself to the ideas that will deliver your business the insight it needs

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