One of our tasks for the arts award is to interview someone that inspires you. I’ve been having a think about who this might be, and it’s hard because I already work with loads of really inspiring people who I’d love to talk to about their work history, motivation, and passion but I feel like I should use this to contact someone who I don’t know as well to make the most of the opportunity.

To help us with this task Grace and Paddy from Watershed led a 40minute workshop on how to record an interview. I’ve seen them both conduct interview in Watershed before and I’m always fascinated watching them because there’s nothing like pointing a camera at someone to make them become incredibly self aware and normally quite uncomfortable, however they always capture really great footage and make the person they’re interviewing relax. They taught us the technical side and about the equipment which is super handy and also framing, and ways engage with the person you are interviewing. All things that will help with the filmed interviews we have to do later on in the course.

I think I’m going to try and interview Sharon Clark the literacy manager of Bristol Old Vic. I know her a bit already, as she’s a Studio resident and I volunteered during one of her productions, but it would be nice to take the time to properly ask her more about her role at BOV. I guess I identify with her quite a lot as she writes herself, seems to have similar interests as me and used to work at Watershed. I also absolutely love BOV’s spoken word night BlahBlahBlah and would be interested in chatting about how that’s programmed. Alongside that I’d love to chat to the guys at Mayfest and find out more about the festival as it’s one of my favourite Bristol events. The problem with this section is there are so many brilliant people whose brains I’d love to pick. Narrowing it down is the hard part, but I’m going to spend some more time doing research and make a choice later on in the course.

This section of the arts award has also made me think that I’d quite like to arrange to have some one to one sessions with people in Watershed that I don’t have as much contact with and have a chat about their career paths. I did something really similar at Blast Theory who I interned and freelanced with and it was really invaluable.