Errol Morris's Secret Weapon for Unsettling Interviews: The Interrotron | Hacker News Reader

Errol Morris's Secret Weapon for Unsettling Interviews: The Interrotron

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141 pointsprawn42 comments

"Think about it: How does Morris get such penetrating interviews if the interviewee is just looking at a camera? If they're looking into the lens and not at Morris, it would be hard for Morris to get anything like the unsettling, revealing, startlingly personal interviews that are Morris's bread and butter. Would you tell a flat piece of glass about the biggest mistake you ever made in your life?"

This is formulated to sound as convincing as possible without any evidence, but I don't buy it at all. The recent documentary "Human" is full of heart-rending interviews of people having emotional breakdowns and looking straight at the camera. I'm quite sure they did not use any such mirror system. You can occasionally see the interviewee glancing sideways at the interviewer, but if anything, it seems that talking to a camera gives them the strength to talk about personal things in an unusually powerful way. (Disclosure: I know some people on the production team and have done a bit of work on their website)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdb4XGVTHkE

Couldn't the same effect be achieved by setting the camera back several feet (15 - 20? More?) and zoom in over the interviewer's shoulder?

By the way, I'd not heard of "Humans" before. That first interview is captivating.

If you're very close to the interviewer's eyeline, there's a risk that the interviewer shifting will block the subject.

In his pre-Interrotron films (e.g. The Thin Blue Line), he put the camera fairly close to his head, so it's not direct address, but close.

It's the rubber duck effect. It's easier to reveal deeply personal things to something that does not react in the way a human would.

I'm a massive Morris fan (so much so that I've read about this contraption before), and while I've only watched a few minutes of the documentary you linked, I do think that the interview style is different. It's not just about talking to the camera, but rather about talking to the camera as if it's human - McNamara, for instance, regularly wiggles his finger at the camera, as if he's lecturing to you in your seat. Toss in the fact that Morris regularly shouts his questions or comments from somewhere off to the side - probably somewhere across the same room, as dictated by the way that this system works - and there really is an unsettling way that it feels as if you are the focus of what is happening, with the SecDef during the start of the Vietnam war and your crazy shouty uncle over for dinner.

It's just so hard to articulate how it feels, and I'm sure the effect doesn't work on everyone as well as it does on me. Errol's movies have changed my opinions on both McNamara and Rumsfeld, though, and that's a phenomenally tall order (and, I think, speaks to how vividly human he can make his interview subjects).

Changed your opinions in what way?

I'd seen both of them as something like a character out of House of Cards - Rumsfeld in particular as a obviously corrupt and power hungry man (my opinion of McNamera going in was, I guess, somewhat more nuanced).

Their respective documentaries, though, provided believable human motivations for what they were trying to do. I'm pretty convinced that both men harmed the world in serious ways, but I'm also pretty convinced that both genuinely meant well - which somehow makes me both sympathetic to them and a little frightened at the same time.

When are they going to put this concept into video conferencing? The worst part about a video call us that the other person is looking at your eyes which are usually below his camera so there is a huge conversational disconnect.

When people again tolerate box-like, not-flat, computer monitors. The trick requires an off-axis camera and that requires a mirror tilted at 45*, creating a device slightly thicker than it is tall. There are some tricks (stepped mirrors etc) that might reduce that depth, but to do so without distortion would be difficult.

I'm not sure that a camera hidden inside the screen would work. Getting that 'intimate' effect requires the subject to look directly at the camera lens as they would at another person's eyes. So any camera hidden inside a monitor would have to be aligned with the eyes/face of the image, a problem on larger screens. This is why the technique works best with small screens and probably isn't workable on larger screens or screens situated too close to the subject.

the ability to embed an array of micro-cameras of adequate quality between pixel rows of an LCD is surely only a few years away.

With cameras the size of a pixel, you may be up against some quantum limits re resolution and lenses. It would probably be easier to ape the effect by digitally altering the image on the fly.

What if each pixel was actually a steerable directional two way transceiver antenna in the visible spectrum? o.O

Ok, so now were looking at something a few decades away.

Hey, this could actually make zooming work really really well, depending on how well you could aim the antennas. This might work as a combination telescope / microscope...

>Ok, so now were looking at something a few decades away

Or maybe never? Some things just cannot be done. Physical limits and such.

Well, we've already got the beginnings of visible light nano-antennas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_rectenna). I'm not sure how directional they are, but we do have MEMS cantilevers to point them individually. Granted, getting this all working together as a combined camera/monitor is the kind of thing that could keep a generation of engineers and scientists occupied, with no guarantee of success.

Something like a phased-array camera?

Catch-eye claims to be able to do this [1]. Never tried their software myself.

[1] http://catch-eye.com/

Thanks for this. Once again wasting time on HN pays off.

Edit. They seem to be using this camera which is also very interesting [1, 2]. Unfortunately the camera is still to be released.

1. http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/architecture-and-tech...

2. http://click.intel.com/intelrrealsensetm-developer-kit-featu...

> Getting that 'intimate' effect requires the subject to look directly at the camera lens as they would at another person's eyes. So any camera hidden inside a monitor would have to be aligned with the eyes/face of the image

Do face detection on the video from the other end, and move/crop it to place the eyes right where the camera is.

This is a bloody clever idea. I am off to the patent office right now :P

But think about how the image would look if locked to the centre of the subject's face. Every little head tilt would translate into wobble of everything in the background. A simple slight nodding of the head would look very unnatural. Our eyes compensate for this, but on screen it might be very strange.

Intel has already solved all this and is about to release a camera that does it (see my sister comment for details). It is still a brilliant idea even if it is not original :)

You'd want to apply a steadicam-style effect to it, only adjusting if the face moves significantly away from that focus point, and even then doing so gradually.

There is (was) a company selling Teleprompter-inspired video conferencing terminals. Never seen one in the wild, though. I think few people are actually willing to pay for hardware just for video chat.

In the first graphic, it looked like the blue person was holding the laptop which was incredibly confusing and seemed totally impractical.

Yes! That confused the hell out of me. Let's also address the horrible background color and the unreadable font.

The formatting in general was bad, too. The first paragraph could've been more clear, and the embedded youtube videos force you to jump around.

edit: WOW! The last paragraph:

  Luckily, the basic idea is simple enough that any enterprising
  filmmaker could probably build her own if she really wanted to. 
  And Hardie's illustrations should make that process even easier.

There's a more readable version of the graphic if you click through to Hardie's site:

http://www.whiterabbitdesigncompany.com/interrotron.html

and then click the PDF link at the bottom:

http://www.whiterabbitdesigncompany.com/uploads/1/4/1/3/1413...

This is also how teleprompters work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprompter

Fun fact: once you know to look, and provided they're close enough to the camera, you can sometimes see the view-ee's eyes making small side to side movements as they read lines of text from the prompter.

Once you know to look? In most cases I've seen it's totally evident, even if its done by the most experienced news presenter...

We recently completed shooting two online courses (MOOCs) using an Interrotron and I definitely think it makes for a more intimate experience between the subject and the viewer, but as with all tech, the interviewer still matters a lot. It doesn't just magically work. You still have to engage and draw out the subject.

In case anyone's interested in ready-made solutions, this company builds Interrotron-like gear:

http://eyedirect.tv/ (video overview: https://vimeo.com/108373352)

Erol Morris is quite brilliant in shaping the narrative of each documentary. I think he has a message to sell and he's found way to make that message come across in a very sterile, non-forced way. I'm curious if Elizabeth Holmes will be a subject coming up. He was recently hired by Theranos to film some videos in the lab there, and around the company. [1] Should be interesting.....

[1] http://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/under-fire-theranos-ceo-stif...

I saw the video shot - it was linked here, I think - and what was released is just a puff piece. She talks about realizing her life's purpose and that leading to the creation of Theranos. Perhaps he got some more interesting footage, too, but I expect the company owns it all as a work-for-hire. (And if they don't, that's really dumb considering they just exposed your CEO to one of the world's great interviewers.)

Well if Theranos continues on its current trajectory, it's going to crater. Maybe then the perfect opportunity for Errol to step in and say Ms. Holmes, lets tell your side of the story.

Hadn't heard that! Pretty interesting, in light of Holmes's interest in Steve Jobs. Morris made a lot of distinctive Apple ads in the (edit:) early 00s ("Switch" campaign, some early iPod ads), several of which included his kid and kid's friends[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellen_Feiss

Anyone else see this when trying to access the first video?

> This video contains content from Zefr SonyPictures, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.

He used the Interrotron on his incredible First Person TV series, which essentially gave us 17 Morris-quality (ie, "as good as it gets") short documentaries.

This must have been amazing to watch back then but now it just seems like a lot of questionable has-beens like Temple Grandin, Josh Harris, the 'Mr. Debt' lawyer (who is now in jail), etc. The series just didn't age well.

I think the TV networks forced Morris to do much more topical subjects than he was used to. His film work has a much more timeless quality. As a Morris fan, I cringe a little at the "flavor of the month" style interviewees from the old TV show. I think this is also why documentaries have so much more potential than TV. There's far more autonomy for the creators and less of a corrupting profit incentive.

Could you elaborate on Temple Grandin as a 'questionable has-been'? I quite enjoyed one of her books recently.

I think she represented the 90s pop-science autism fad (ASD hero worship stuff that trivializes non-HF autistics - which is sometimes called the ableist view) and a lot of her claims are on the receiving end of a fair bit of criticism. That's on top of her clear conflict of interest being a consultant to agribusiness and the Oprah-like PR her people have developed for her:

Some links if you're interested:

http://www.autistichoya.com/2013/08/critiquing-temple-grandi...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/vickeryeckhoff/2011/12/06/horse-...

http://dailypitchfork.org/?p=536

I don't want to be "that guy", but this is just the age-old teleprompter technology re-purposed to show another camera feed instead of text. It's not exactly a "eureka!" invention.

Who would expect a filmmaker to make stunning technical contributions? That's not the point. The point is that he made a slight new change to an existing device to great artistic effect.

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