OMG it's real: we're in production!
Ham (Hamilton Ward, my Director of Photography) came over bright and early today, declined coffee, and we did some last minute plotting for our first interview with Dr. Samira Shaikh, who is Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department in the College of Computing and Informatics at the University of North Carolina - Charlotte (UNCC).
It's it little surreal to think back over how much I've learned since I had coffee with Samira back in December 2017. She was also my first preliminary interview (non-recorded interviews) and it was the first time I went from "bots are weird and interesting" to "bots are weird and interesting and incredibly terrifying."
I'm just really grateful to Samira for being so patient with us as we got to her office, set up lighting, framed shots, and eventually got three cameras and audio running for an hour-long interview. I felt a little like being an new art student all over again: sloppily correcting what wasn't working, trying to prevent disasters, the whole time fronting a cool (and totally transparent) façade, and only later realizing it wasn't horrible.
Indeed, the footage came out great, the audio is clear, and Ham's B-Roll is lovely. And we're just getting started.
