Notes from a Filming Day

By tonight I was mostly tired.

Somewhere between those two states there was a filming day, fourteen interviews, two camera setups, too much sun, three point lighting, flags, reflectors, schedules changing on phones, conversations about websites, hundreds of old transcripts, educational buzzwords, artificial intelligence, interviewing, editing, and whether I should go to the gym.

Not everything needs to become a lesson, but sometimes enough things bump into each other in one day that you start to notice a pattern.

I have been building a small internal website for the media work we do. It started simply enough. Put the production schedules somewhere we could see them easily on our phones. Then make them editable. Then add the photo list, the b roll list, the interview schedule, the SOPs.

Little conveniences began joining together until it started looking less like a website and more like a system.

That made me think about the twelve campuses we have filmed at so far.

Somewhere on my drives are hundreds of interviews with parents, teachers, students, senior leaders and community members. Hundreds of answers to many of the same questions.

It occurred to me this morning that I have been thinking of them as transcripts.

They are also data.

Not unbiased data. We are quite deliberately asking people to tell us the best things they think about their schools. Nobody is being ambushed by a clipboard on the way to the car park and asked for a rigorous critique of educational outcomes.

Still, patterns are patterns.

And after enough interviews, you start hearing them before they arrive.

Social emotional learning.

Educating the whole child.

Building confidence.

Creating good humans.

There is nothing particularly wrong with any of those things. They may all be perfectly true.

But they have started to feel a little like clichés in a song.

A cliché does not necessarily need to be removed. Sometimes it just needs to be made alive again.

That is probably where I became most interested today.

Most people do not answer questions with stories.

Ask someone what they like about a school and they will often give you a statement.

The interesting part is usually underneath the statement.

Why?

When did you notice that?

What happened?

Who was there?

What did your child say when they got home?

That is where the thing becomes theirs again.

Years ago, working in radio, I learned that asking questions is not really the difficult part of interviewing. The difficult part is listening closely enough to realise there is another question hiding inside the answer.

Today I found myself thinking about how technology might help with that rather than get in the way of it.

If I could see a live transcript while interviewing someone, I would not be using it because I desperately need the words written down.

I already record them.

I would use it because memory is imperfect.

Three minutes into an interview somebody might say something that seems ordinary. Seven minutes later they say something else and suddenly those two thoughts belong together.

You can go back.

Hang on.

You said this earlier.

Tell me more about that.

Or perhaps another person interviewed an hour later says something connected to it.

A student once told me what he thought his parents felt about his education. Later I interviewed his mother and told her what he had said.

“Well, he’s right because…”

In the finished piece she appears to complete his thought.

Another time a mother spoke beautifully about her child while her husband stood watching from outside the frame. When she finished, I asked him to walk in, put his arm around her and tell us what he thought.

“I absolutely concur with what she said.”

Everyone laughed.

I kept the laugh.

That may be where my thinking about our films is changing too.

For a long time the challenge was making them look polished.

Now they do.

The cameras are good. The lighting is good. The sound is good. The editing is good.

They look expensive.

Perhaps once you have learned how to make something polished, the next challenge is knowing when not to polish something away.

Leave the laugh.

Leave the strange phrase.

Leave the pause where someone has to think.

Find the story behind “whole child.”

Let someone speak badly enough to sound like themselves.

There was another version of this thought waiting for me at the gym, or more accurately, in deciding not to go to the gym.

This was supposed to be a peak training week.

Instead, work flattened me.

The younger version of my training brain would probably have said that the solution was simple.

Go anyway.

Push through.

Do the work.

There is some usefulness in that. There is also a point where commitment becomes stupidity wearing a motivational T-shirt.

So I did something that would once have felt suspiciously like weakness.

I changed the plan.

Tomorrow I will move around, do some full body work, stretch things out and see how everything feels.

Then I will build back toward the peak rather than stumbling into it because the calendar says so.

It struck me tonight that all of these things may be versions of the same lesson.

The website.

The interviews.

The transcripts.

The films.

The training.

At first you learn how to do the thing.

Then, if you stay around long enough, you begin noticing the machinery underneath it.

And sometimes getting better is no longer about trying harder.

It is about seeing more.