Woody Wilder, Audio #2, Jobst Elster

Reflection: Considering I was interviewing a complete stranger, I felt rather comfortable throughout the whole interview. I think what benefited me in this regard is that I struck up a conversation with Jobst for awhile before I began to interview him. It also didn't hurt that we shared a common love--soccer. Yet, my annunciation during the interview is what I need to work on. I went in with a plan of what questions to ask, but very quickly went off course and never found my way back to the questions I had intended. Nevertheless, I think the questions I asked allows the audience to get a feeling of who Jobst really is. I had nearly four minutes of video, which at the time worried wasn't enough but soon realized that it was more than enough for this particular project. I began to become more familiar with Audition, but still need to mess around with it to become fluent. As far as critiques go, I knew coming in that I always struggle with annunciation in my interviews. At the time I figured it would be easy to edit out the ums and errms, but quickly realized that wasn't the case. I found that editing is a pain, so the cleaner the original, the better the finished product will be. Luckily, Jobst was clear on his annunciation. I edited similar to as an ellipses would be used in a print story making sure to not take anything out of context. I felt this was fair because as we read in Thompkins' book, "Editing is a park of journalism. But the editing should not alter the essential truth that you are covering. Edited sound bites should still maintain the context which they were spoken" (152). Along those lines, I think I need to work on having smoother transitions, specifically what I say to begin the following question, to make it flow more naturally. Note: I asked him what he said in the German portion of the interview. He roughly translated it to 3-1 to Germany with Miraslav Klose scoring twice. Actual score: USA 4, Germany 3. He was wrong!