Speak My Brains

I've just been back into work, albeit briefly, to do an interview for the "making of" documentary that will be on the Hellboy 2 DVD. I've done interviews before, plenty in print and a couple for the radio but this is the first time I've done one on camera. I have absolutely no idea how I sounded or looked. I did notice that I picked the perfect day to have a big zit on my chin so you can look out for that come November. Perfect.

I'd carefully prepared a load of bullet points for topics I'd quite like to have discussed pertaining to the shots I did but the interviewer had his own set of questions so my notes went on the floor and I had to wing it. They attractively lit the wall behind me with a sea blue, no doubt to match my natural skin colouring though I was too busy trying to keep my head still so that they didn't get excessive flare off my glasses from the light they were blasting onto my face to really notice too much. I have, and I'm only writing this an hour after the fact, absolutely no idea what I said. I probably came across as a complete tosser but time will tell.

I find doing interviews for non specialist press difficult from a pitching stand-point. When I'm talking to journalists from computer graphics or film-making publications I know the sort of things they want to hear and I also have a level of expectation on what terms I can expect the audience to understand. It's the same thing with lecturing to students. I know I'll be able to say "diffuse shading", "ambient occlusion" and "displacement mapping" and not have to explain myself plus the people I'm talking to want to know how we did what we did so they can further their own knowledge. What does the viewer of a DVD feature want to know? Do they care how we did the work or do they just want to hear the amusing anecdote about how I spilled coffee all over the director? It's tough to know. Even if they do want to hear how it was done it's difficult to explain it without resorting to a lot of technical terminology. If you don't use jargon you end up saying, "well we shot it all in front of a green screen and then used computer graphics to add in the foreground". No shit? That's so non-specific as to be meaningless. Anyway all of this is really just me excusing myself for when I appear for 5 seconds on this documentary sounding like an ignorant ares-hole. Sorry in advance.