Conducting Interviews of Talkative People

Video Transcript

"For every person out there who's shy in front of the camera, there's someone else who just won't shut up or speaks really quickly, and those people have to be dealt with in a different way. One thing you can do, is just tell them, hey, could you please slow down a little bit. Now you don't want someone to feel awkward, but someone who speaks really, really rapidly may blur their words together, throw in words that mess up the whole sentence, so that when the video is played back the audio is basically incomprehensible. Editing rapid speech is also very difficult. So whatever you can do to slow someone down helps. Oftentimes, I ask people to follow my pace, so if someone's speaking quickly, I tell them, can you speak a little bit slower, like this, and as they speak, every once in a while, I'd do this. You don't want to do it too much because you'll drive the person nuts, but a little bit will keep someone at a consistent pace. This is also important because when you're editing, you want consistency throughout the entire clip that you do, and people who speak quickly also tend to speed up, it isn't a constant fast speech. Some people also just don't shut up. That's something that you're going to have to humor to a certain extent, because the one thing you can't tell someone who you're interviewing is, is, hey, could you shut up? Let someone finish what they're saying and once there's a pause in the conversation, then direct them towards some new topic in the conversation or say Hey, could I get a quick rephrase of that with just a sentence or two? But whatever you do, don't cut off your subject because that's going to make the person want to clam up. So use positive reinforcement to get someone to slow down when they're speaking."