7 Tips for Filming Interviews
You’ve been asked to get a quick bit of video with a visiting director or the company’s CEO so that it can get posted on the intranet, or you’re at an event where you’ll be meeting lots of your happy customers and need to get some video testimonials for the website...
This means you’re about to shoot some interviews and there are seven key things you need to bear in mind if you are going to get what you need from your interviewees and the video is going to look and sound great! 1. Planning – you may get all of the following 6 steps perfect, but if you don’t have a solid plan, chances are you’ll end up with an incoherent mess… Firstly, write yourself a brief (see ‘6 Steps to Writing a Video Brief’) this will help you to define what the video will need to cover and who it’s for. Next, write out an ‘ideal’ script; in a perfect world, what would your interviewee say to tell the story you need him or her to tell? From this, you can reverse engineer some questions that will nudge your interviewee in the right direction… The next stage in planning is logistics; you need to carve out some time in your day, your interviewee’s day and any extra resources you may need; meeting room? Someone’s smart office? Another important factor is time; always ask for more time than you think you’ll need and that will take some of the pressure off both you and your interviewee to nail it first time. 2. Lighting. If you’re using lights – get them set up and tested. the ideal set-up is a three-point lighting system (see diagram below), where the Key light is the strongest light that illuminates your subject's face, the less bright Fill light 'fills' the shadows caused by the key light, and the Back light defines your subject's outline. However, quite often you’ll have to make do with ambient lighting and a single light to just lift the shadows on the interviewee's face. Another option when you’re outdoors (and have an assistant) might be a pop-up reflector which you can use to ‘bounce’ some sunlight back into your subjects face and lift those shadows. 3. Location; You have a few options here; risk-free but anonymous, or interesting and possibly noisy, busy, changing light and a whole host of other potential problems that will make the whole process more difficult! |
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Also, try to anticipate if the location you have picked (or are stuck with) is somewhere you might be interrupted… |
All that being said, I get it; you’re in an office, your options are limited. However, if you need to film a lot of video, and put in a little preparation, you can have an easy-to-set-up, in-house studio ready to go in 20 minutes.
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4. Camera; Allow yourself some time before your interviewee arrives to check, clean and set up your camera, batteries, cards and tripod; nothing’s going to be more guaranteed to put your subject on edge than having to wait while you faff with the camera and lights. If you’ve brought your camera into a warm building from the cold outside, give it time to warm up to the ambient temperature – you’ll never get in focus with condensation over the lens! Get your camera in place on a tripod, set up your lighting and camera exposure. Test some shot sizes with a willing stand-in (or yourself looking in a flipped over viewfinder). You’ll need to shoot a range of shot sizes so that you can make your life easier in the edit; a nice wide shot to use as an establisher, mid shot throughout and possibly a close up for any important parts of the interview. 5. Audio. Getting the shot right is only half of the job – you need to get good, clear audio or the video will be useless.
Your second source should be a clip-on lavelier-type mic – ideally a radio mic – this gets up close to your interviewee so you’re (mostly) guaranteed to get good clear sound. Once your mics are set up, test the audio levels on your camera – there should be a visual record level and you need to make sure that the level isn’t pushing into the red part – this is known as peaking and will cause distortion on your audio track.
You can test this when your contributor arrives and you have attached the mic – ask them what they had for breakfast as a sound check and they’ll be able to talk for a few seconds while you check levels and adjust if necessary.
Finally, monitor your audio throughout – the best way to know for sure that your audio is recording correctly and not picking up background noise, clothing rustle or wind noise, is to use headphones. If anything causes a problem with your audio you’ll hear it straight away and, if necessary, you can ask the interviewee to repeat their answer so you’ve got it recorded perfectly. (For more detail see our video; 5 Tips to recording Great Audio) 6. Questions in the answer. Unless your voice is going to be in the final edit asking all the questions, you’ll need to brief your interviewee to put a bit of your question in their answer. So, for example, when asked: “what is the best thing about the company?” they should answer: “the best thing about this company is the staff” rather than just “the staff”. This gives you a complete statement that doesn’t need any further explanation. Also, try to avoids asking closed ‘yes or no’ questions as you need your interviewee to expand on whjt they are saying and give you some detail. ‘Why’ questions and ‘tell me about…’ are good ways to prompt your subject into talking about what you need them to talk about. 7. Cutaways. When you have finished shooting the interview, unless it is just a short, single answer piece or a prepared and well delivered monologue or speech, you’ll need to make some edits. When you cut unwanted content like coughs, or umms and aahs (or Dave from accounts inadvertently stumbling into shot) out and stick the remaining pieces together, you will notice that you’ve got a load of ‘jump cuts’ – sections between clips where the interviewees head and body jump instantly into another position. The conventional way to smooth over these jumps and maintain some fluidity and even enhance the content so that more visual information is being taken in by the viewer is to ‘paste over’ the edits with different shots or ‘cutaways’. Cutaways are extra bits of video only (no audio) that distract the eye while the seamlessly edited interview audio continues. Ideally, you can use relevant video clips that illustrate a point being made by the interviewee – some shots of the company’s product being manufactured or sold if that is what is being discussed, or you might choose to use footage of the interviewee at work or speaking to colleagues if he or she is talking about their role during the interview. On some occasions however, you won’t have those options – if there is no archive or stock footage available that will work, or there’s no time to shoot cutaways with your busy CEO. In these circumstances, you may have to resort to the old news footage fall-back of interviewees hands gesturing (see link) it’s not ideal, but it can make a short interview feel a lot smoother than just leaving in the jump cuts. Once you got your interview in the can, you’ll then need to edit it... |