Monday, October 12, 2009
Interrotron is watching you - Gavin Owens
I think the invention of the Interrotron is a subtle change in how to capture an interview; this subtle change, however, can have a powerful effect on the audience and the interviewee. It may have been a little awkward for McNamara but, as someone else has mentioned on this blog, there is no doubt he is used to having all kinds of cameras in his face. For the audience, it's really a big difference to have the person being interviewed looking directly at you at all times. McNamara wasn't just talking to Morris but to the audience as well. This creates an immediate connection and grabs the attention of whoever is watching the film. It's engaging and draws you in. As for the interviewee I think that there is another strange effect. Chris found that quote on how Robert McNamara “didn't like” the Interrotron. I think of a hyper-rational man like McNamara and wonder why he didn't like it. It could have been because it is a little foreign to most people. But... I like to think he didn't like it because he understood what the Interrotron does to the person being interviewed. He is a man trained, for the camera, to be poignant at times and evasive at others. I don't care who you are, 20 hours in front of any standard camera and you get comfortable. Spend 20 hours in front of a camera designed not to look like one and that's a whole other ball game. I would like to see some hard research done with this kind of device. I suspect that the interviewee would reveal more than he would if he were “on camera”. Without any kind of research done it is impossible to say for sure.
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I agree with Gavin, and this goes along with one of my points. The Interrotron, even with its ridiculous sounding name, is actually a useful tool. With that fact here that the thing itself doesn't even look like a camera, I can agree that it must have been odd for McNamara to be able to be interviewed by it. As Gavin said, once a person gets used to a particular technique, especially as a political figure, then they develop certain ways to avoid questions and rephrase them. For McNamara, the Interrotron represented a totally new playing ground, one where he would be profoundly uncomfortable (as compared to before), and thus unable to provide any of the so-called evasive and BS answers. In all, one must keep in mind the perspective of the person being interviewed while watching said individual's interview, as to determine the nature of their comments.
ReplyDeleteIt is an intriguing thought, Gavin, regarding doing an experiment to study the effects of the Interrotron (though I don't expect it will happen anytime soon).
ReplyDeleteFrom the audience's point of view, it's probably worth thinking about how *used* we are, in fact, to the effect of a subject looking straight into a camera. After all, the Interrotron technology is modeled on teleprompters, which allow people to read a script while looking into a screen. Think, for example, of our presidents' Oval Office addresses.
I also think the Interrotron can be useful in producing more human responses from the interviewee. It seems that when people look at a camera, they tend to limit their use of facial expressions and body gestures, perhaps because they feel that it would be very awkward to use them. The employment of such motions seems reserved for a conversation between two people, not a person and a camera. A camera cannot "understand" the meaning of different facial and body postures, so why should someone being interviewed use them? With the Interrotron, however, a blank lense is replaced with a human face; instead of actively restricting their expressions, I would bet that it would be difficult for an interviewee NOT to use them when facing a human face.
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