I felt a bit guilty after reading Al Tompkins' piece on video editing ethics, not because I've tried to deliberately con my listeners but because I wonder, after reading his piece, whether I crossed any lines in my 2:30 audio piece.
While I didn't deliberately try to pair completely disparate interviews and sounds, I did include duplicate natural sound in that piece, and I'm wondering now whether I should have, instead, simply taken the entire 2+ minutes of natural sound I recorded and just run it as one long piece under the various interviews I conducted. I'll plan to use the information I learned here so that I don't make the same mistakes in my video piece.
Dave Wertheimer's piece, "Staged, Staging, Stages," provides a great example of completely unethical behavior — asking someone to replicate their actions as though they were doing it in real life. As he also points out, I've found that people quickly forget they're wearing a microphone and are able to speak freely. I don't agree with his technique of not asking questions (though I'm guessing he does on occasion). While it's good to ask open-ended questions so that people open up about their lives, you can't be so vague that your subjects don't know how to respond to issues relating to the story at hand.
These pieces were worthwhile and helped me solidify what I should and shouldn't be doing.
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