How To Film An Interview (6 Easy Steps) 👌🏻

YOUTUBE
How to film interviews in 6 easy steps

Recently we did something we had never done before. We filmed a “love story” for one of our upcoming couples whose wedding we are filming next month.

For this love story, we directed an interview in which they told their entire story, and we documented it in the most cinematic way possible. Whether you film a love story, a documentary, or even just a talking head for social media, knowing how to film an interview is crucial. In this video, we break it down into 6 simple steps:

1. Find your frame

First thing is first, you don’t want to just set up your camera and call it good. Before you even unload all your gear, take 5 mintues to walk around your scene and figure out exactly where you are going to film. Instead of just eyeballing it, pull out your phone and see what the spaces look like on camera. Which angle is going to give you the most depth? Are you getting bokeh? Are there unavoidable objects in your way? Is the sun’s trajectory going to drastically change the way it looks in the next few hours?

These are all questions that we are aiming to answer before we even set down our tripod. We find 3-4 potential locations, then analyze the pros and cons of each one. Just like if you were to be setting up for wedding toasts, don’t forget to have someone sit in the interviewee chair, just so you can get a feel of what it will actually look like on camera.

2. Exposure & settings

This one is a big one. The biggest mistake that rookies make is that they skip this step. They will adjust the camera setting for the skin tone of the subject and call it good.

You are not a rookie. Don’t skip this.

Before your subject sits down, and you have your camera locked off in place by now, adjust your cameras settings so that nothing is overexposed. The majority of the time you will have windows that will be blown out in the back. The goal of this step is to adjust to that lighting, then later we will bring in our keylight to compensate for lighting on our interview subject.

Even in a dark room, you might have to slap on an ND filter so that the background windows are exposed properly. When your subject sits in the frame, you will notice that they are severely underexposed. That brings us to our next step

3. Setting your key light

Now that the environment of the interview is exposed properly, you need to light your subjects face. Our favorite method of lighting is called Rembrandt lighting. Bring your keylight to roughly 45° of your subjects face, and slightly above eye level. This creates a subtle triangle of light on their opposite cheek and produces a very cinematic look to it.

Since we are shooting on the Sony FX3, we don’t quite trust the LED screen to show us accurate colors or exposure. We rely entirely on the zebras and the histogram. We set up custom zebras to show up on anything that is between 52-62 IRE. This is the sweet spot for us with our skin tone exposure for faces. We will continue to adjust the keylight as bright as it needs to be in order to make sure that those zebras are showing up on the subjects face. If the keylight is maxed out in power output, then we can adjust a few camera settings to give it a slight bump up without letting the background windows get overexposed. For this video, we did this to our ISO. It was at 640, and we barely weren’t getting enough light on Whitney, so we bumped it up to 800 ISO, and it did the trick.

4. Setting your hair light

Everything is coming together nicely, and if you have picked a good frame, you will have a decent amount of depth to your composition. Despite this, you stil want to separate your subject from the background a little bit. That is the purpose of the hairlight. In this video, we used the Amaran F22X, which is a fairly powerful light, but don’t be fooled: you don’t need a super strong light. A small LED light would do just fine.

As a rough guideline, you want the hairlight to be at a 180° angle from the hairlight, and to match the color temperature of any lights in the background. If your background scene has some warm lights like ours did, it wouldn’t make sense for the light on the back of the subjects head to be cool. Make sure that you are taking the whole environment into account when you set the hairlight. Most often you only need to set this light to single-digit percentage power output. It’s meant to be just enough to separate the edge of your subject from the background.

5. Setting your bounce/fill

If you want to go the extra mile, the bounce or fill light will give you what you are looking for. With our keylight set, we are only lighting one side of the face, while the other has just a splash of light on it. We have three options here: add a negative fill to it to make the darkness even more contrast on the subjects face, add a white bounce board in order to bring some more light in, or nothing at all. Of all the 6 steps in this list, the bounce or fill is the most optional. If you ever watch a show like Ozark, they live and die by the negative fill. But when we shoot an interview, usually we don’t bother with one since we are 95% of the way to where we want to be already without it. But sometimes this step is what will make your shot go from good to great.

6. Audio

This step is NOT optional. In fact, this is the most important part of the interview. Who cares how good it looks if you fail to capture any professional audio?

Our recommendation would be to use a professional-level field recorder that can record in 32-bit float. We love the Zoom F3 and the Tascam Portacapture X8. If you don’t have one, consider renting one for your shoot. You might be asking: why can’t I just use a tascam DR-10L and lav them up?

Technically you could. But here is why you’d be risking a lot. With a lavalier mic, you can’t monitor the audio. That means that you have no idea how the audio is going to sound until you get into the editing room. That is a huge gamble for something as time-intensive as an interview. If you blow the audio, there is no easy way to re-shoot. You want to nail the audio the first time. That is why a field recorder where you can plug headphones into is so important. The rule here is that you don’t roll camera until the audio sounds perfect. Have the subject do some test audio speaking loud and soft, and set your levels to peak around -6 dB. We attached a Rode NTG-5 to our F3 and placed it as close as possible to the subjects without it showing up in frame.

And there you have it! You are ready to record your interview. If your subjects don’t have a specific script that they are going off of, you might need to ask them some questions to drive the conversation. Sit somewhere near the A camera and just talk with them and tell them to look into the camera.

Lights, camera, action baby.

PHOTOSHOP VS CANVA
16 Updates From Canva

As a freelance business owner, you don’t have time to become a designer (unless your business is design).

That is why softwares like Canva are a gold mine. With a few clicks of a button, the sky is the limit in terms of what you can create. Almost every single day we are using Canva to create thumbnails, proposals, and templates.

Up until recently, Adobe Photoshop has been the standard by which every design software is judged. And over the years, Canva has been closing the gap in three crucial aspects:

1. Affordability

2. Ease of use

3. Features & Professionalism

This past weekend, Canva just ended their Canva Create Conference and unveiled some pretty cool newe features. Whether you are in charge of sales, creative, HR, or marketing, there are some new things for you.

(P.S. I am actually a huge fan of the on-stage rap they performed. Others might hate it, but that one wasn’t near as bad as what the folks on X were making it out to be)

AFFORDABILITY

Photoshop is a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud which is priced at $20 USD/month. You can also purchase Photoshop as a standalone app, but that would make no sense because Adobe prices it at $22 USD/month. Adobe’s intentions are clear that you might as well buy all their applications and renew each year.

Canva Pro on the other hand is priced at $15 USD/month, or $120 USD/year. Putting it at roughly 50% the cost of what you would pay to have access to Photoshop.

So in a head-to-head matchup, Canva Pro is the better option. Unless of course, you also need access to Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Acrobat, etc..

EASE OF USE

This one is a pretty simple one. For years, Photoshop has caused people to run for the hills because of how intimidating it is to learn. It requires a good computer with a decent amount of RAM to be able to run it efficiently. Once you have that, then there are still a lot more things you need to learn, and quite frankly…it’s overwhelming. One does not merely dabble in Photoshop. You are either a competent professional, or you have no idea how to use it.

Canva was designed to fix this. In fact, one of their business mottos was to “democratize good design”. This means that for mere commonfolk like you and I, Canva was built to be more intuitive and easy to use. You can still go deep with it and learn to do some pretty fancy stuff, but for the most part, it’s as easy as drag and drop. Not to mention that it comes pre-loaded with thousands of professional designs that you can copy for your own brand.

PROFESSIONALISM & FEATURES

This is where the tides start shifting in favor of Photoshop. It’s going to be a long time before something catches up to the sheer power of Adobe’s workhorse. There are plenty of things that you can do in Photoshop that you can’t do in Canva, like 3D modeling, vector drawing, 3D tools, and much more. But there is nothing that you can do in Canva that you can’t do in Photoshop.

It’s a one-sided battle on this one. But the question remains: do you need all these features? Unless you are a designer for your freelancing business, then almost always the answer will be no. 

MEMORIAL DAY
30-60% Sale on digital assets and online course

If you have been holding off to purchase Wedding Videography: Year One, then the wait is over. We are running a 60% off sale for the next few days in honor of Memorial Day.

And if you need to stock up on our Prestige LUT Pack with gamut.io, our SFX pack, or our Light Leaks, the sale will be 30% off on our online shop.

The code to claim the discount is: “RVMEMORIAL30”