Before cameras roll, it's important to be prepared for the paramaters of the story. Conducting a pre-interview and taking extensive notes allowed me to understand the parts of his story that were important to him. Seacoast Church requested that his story center on the concept of courage. While it's not always easy to predict how a story is going to unfold, a value based concept like "courage" is broad enough to apply and even give a healthy focus to the narrative.

 

 

Transcribing an interview takes a while but it gives me a rich sense of the full story. Once finished, I write down the story from memory. It only takes a minute to do this - spend any longer, and the details get too overwhelming. This outline provides the framework of the story, and from there I can start figuring out what to take and what to cut.

 

 

Using my outline, I highlighted relevant passages in the transcript, placing numbers next to blocks of text according to how they should be sequenced on the timeline. Lately, I have been using Otranscribe.com, uploading an audio file off a timeline I create of the raw interview. It is so far very stable and speeds up the transctiption process.