Sounds good Simon.

Please be sure not to take anything I said personally. Not suggesting that you did either or anything, just stressing that it wasn't my intent to criticise your initiative at all. Naturally, it was only intended as an encouragement. Like I said, A for effort. I understand and suspected it was a spur of the moment thing. Once you take care of the basics (stable well lit camera image and relatively clean sound) it's all psychology. Putting the camera on a tripod, behind you over your shoulder let's say, allows you to focus all of your attention completely on the subject you are interviewing. You can let it run in advance and just start a conversation. Better even would be to have everything set up in advance, so all you have to do is walk into the room with your client, sit down and start talking, paying no attention to the camera whatsoever. Start it in advance. Tape is cheap. Do tape off any blinking lights or anything else that indicates the camera is running as this will be a source of distraction, and your client may become too self aware. Slowly get into the meat of the matter and let your client/patient take it away while maintaining consistent eye contact throughout. It takes time for a person to completely open up, but they'll do it, granted you win their comfort and trust. If you play your cards right, they'll forget that the camera is even there. Their focus will be on you instead, just as your's would be on them.

Rest assured, nobody expects you to come up with professionally looking imagery, so please don't sweat that aspect. In general, you have more leeway with the image quality than with sound quality. Imperfections, disturbances etc in sound will always by far stand out over imperfections in the image. We take sound quality for granted, yet it can make or break a shot when it distracts. An indoor location does help isolate lots of random ambient noise, so...

I'm looking forward to your next clip. After a while, if you have collected a series of interesting ones, you could maybe produce a montage of highlights; all the best moments... maybe add some subtle ambient background music even. The wonderfully persuasive options, available in the editing process...

Cheers,
d.