8 Steps to Shooting Interviews // Job Shadow

hey how's it going parker welbeck here with fulltimefilmmaker.com and in this video i'm going to be walking you through my eight-step process to shooting an interview now specifically for this video i'm working on a mini documentary i've already shot one interview and now i'm going to be hauling all the gear into my kitchen and show you from scratch how i would set up a second location for my second interviewee now this video you're watching today is a condensed version of a much more detailed version that you can find inside fulltimefilmmaker.com where we have over 600 tutorials it's our ultimate online film school so if you like what you watch in this video make sure to go check that out where we have over 20 000 students enrolled that are all furthering their video production businesses and helping them make more money but let's go ahead and dive right in my first interview set up over here this is where i filmed with my wife a couple days ago this is the den of our home so i'm gonna roll these cameras here so you can see what we're currently seeing by the way we have sitting here our good friend logan he is a neighbor of mine down the street so first off we got the canon c70 as our main camera and the red dragon as our second camera two camera angles one is a medium one is a tight we'll get into all this later but what you're seeing on the camera right now is with no lighting just natural light coming in through the back window and obviously that doesn't look great and so i'm going to show you what i did with the lighting first off we have an aperture 300d mark ii right here for a key light so we'll pop that on and already you can see what a massive difference just having a key light does right here we have a backlight in the amaron 100x with a mini 2 light dome from aperture by the way of a four foot diffuser on the key light up here nice and big soft light typically for backlights it's okay to have more of a sharp light now this is a little bit diffused but it's going to be sharper than a much bigger diffuser and the goal of the backlight or the hair light is to etch or outline our subject here so that they don't fall into the background so i'm now going to show you what that looks like with him etched out with the backlight pop that on and there you have the before and after showing our nice backlight and then our third light we have over here this right here is the amaron 200x and what this is doing is lighting up our background just to give it a little bit more light so it's not completely black so here is with that background light on and you can see the difference that makes just to light up the back wall the last thing that i would say is our window light is kind of blown out here and so to preserve some of the highlights there in the window we have a couple options we could raise up the intensity of the light so that we could bring the exposure of our camera all the way down or we can put an nd filter gel over the window to just knock down the amount of light coming through that window okay then the last thing to point out is you see these giant v-flats right here one side is black one side is white we have both sides with the black facing us and the reason for that is all the walls are white what does white do it reflects light and so we have all this light pouring into the window three different lights from different angles what happens is when that light hits white walls it reflects which means we're gonna have light coming from sources we don't want it coming in now we have a really nice drop shadow on logan's face right here we don't get that unless we put this black v-flat right here that's blocking the white wall from reflecting any light and then one last light that i forgot to mention is actually outside right there and it's pointing right down into here to light up this side of the couch and this side of him to kind of emulate and act like that's the sun pouring in from the window now the sun is already doing that however when you're working with natural light that sun is moving across the sky clouds are coming in so it's going to be constantly changing how that looks so by having a constant light there will always be at least that one light coming in here to replicate what the sun would do especially if it gets dark like it did with my wife's interview i thought it was only gonna take an hour it took three hours and it started getting dark outside and we had to take off this nd filter it's a good thing we had that light coming in to replicate this light of the sun or else it would have changed dramatically so ideally you have artificial light set up to replicate what natural light would be doing in case lighting dramatically changes you're not living or dying by that natural light last thing you'll notice in this room is acoustic panels one two three four five six seven eight we have eight different acoustic panels in here i could have also thrown down a blanket on the floor we'll do that in the next one all these things help dampen the sound so the audio quality is going to sound a lot crispier you're not going to have your voice reflecting off the walls reverberating making it hard to really hear and pay attention audio is half the viewing experience especially in a documentary where a lot of times you're just putting b-roll over top of the images that audio is actually what's carrying the story of your documentary and so making sure that you take some time to dampen the sound and acoustically treat your room is also super important but okay enough of our first setup let me now walk you through my eight steps to setting up an interview in our second location all right so step one to shooting an interview is the location choosing where you're going to be filming the interview we talked about this a little bit already but because this is a mini documentary talking about renovating a home i wanted the interviews to be in a home setting so the location should reflect in some way what your subject matter is my wife we did it in her home and now we're trying to cheat like our second interviewee which is jackie this isn't her home but we're kind of pretending like it is and so we're switching up the location and coming to what is probably our next prettiest location in our kitchen so when i come into my location i'm looking around looking for something aesthetic something that looks pretty i'm looking for leading lines i'm looking for depth i want my image to have some depth meaning some separation from my subject and the background so the two main spots that i'm noticing that i'll probably want to shoot in is something right here where we have the depth of the kitchen and the dining room and some leading lines coming down there a lot of lights in here giving you some more leading lines another option might be looking this way into the main living room i'm now just going to bring my camera around each of these spots have logan sit there as if he's going to be interviewed and we'll just see how the different options look and as i'm looking at these options i'm keeping in mind that i'm going to have logan on the left side of the frame because i had lex on the right side of the frame and these are the only two interviews i'm doing for this mini documentary and it would be nice to be able to cut between them and have them be on different parts of the frame so they cut nicely together versus if they were both on one side of the frame and ever wanted to use them back to back it might look kind of like a jump cut and let's just see if we like one better than the other here it's tough there's pros and cons i want to see what it looks like with our blinds down back it up a little more let's have you come right here so me and stockton agree that this is probably our cooler location and obviously right now it doesn't look great because he's not lit properly but we will take care of that in a minute so let's grab our second camera angle just confirm we like where he'll be and then we'll move on to our next step okay now we're just double checking our second camera angle okay so step one is in the bag that process took me about 20 minutes but it's an important one because the rest of your steps are gonna hinge on the location you chose step number two is composition composition basically means the framing it also includes the lighting what the overall image is looking like in your camera lighting will be its own step next but right now we're going to talk about the compositional framing and like i mentioned already we want him on the left third this is following the rule of thirds meaning if your subject is talking to the camera i usually have him squared up in the center looking straight at the camera if he's looking at me in this case which i will be interviewing him right here just off of camera if he's looking at me an interviewer then usually you want him framed off to a third instead of square in the middle you can still square in the middle and have him look off for him plenty of documentaries do that as well i personally like if he's looking off camera this way having more league room in front of him and less room of the frame behind him so a third of the frame behind us had two thirds of the frame in front of him that is the rule of thirds so we're gonna be following the rule of thirds here the second part of the rule of thirds is we want his eye line to be on the top third so frames about right here first third second third so that eye line is going to be approximately on the top third of the frame i already have them framed up here in both my angles to be approximately on the left third horizontally and the top third vertically now going to our medium shot here this is going to be our medium shot which is basically waist up and then this one's going to be the tight which is just going to be focusing on the face so you'll notice that his eyes and his mouth are essentially on a third so his eyes is one of the main subjects because that's where people look when they're looking at someone talking but we also look at people's mouths when they talk so those are your two main subjects and so that's why you're framing on those thirds you want points of emphasis points of importance on one of those thirds his right eye is going to be on the other third horizontally now i'm being very exact these are the rules it doesn't have to be exactly frame like this so you don't have to turn on your two-thirds grid and then measure it up perfectly just do what looks right to you looks good looks aesthetic those are just the general locations to be and you guys will watch documentaries though and you'll see hey he's pretty centered he's not even on a third it's okay you know allow your creativity to decide how you want them to be set up these are just the general rules how far apart do you want these cameras to be from each other a typical rule is the 30 degree whirl meaning you want this camera to be 30 degrees from your next camera angle so that when they cut back and forth it doesn't feel like a jump cut like it's slightly different angles but too close together 30 degrees is ideal if you can't get that at least make sure you have different focal lengths which is our next step step number three which is lens choice and the lenses we're using here is the 35 millimeter sigma which is adapted to a 0.71 adapter so that we can use canon ef lenses that allows this to be a full frame look because the c70 is an aps-c sensor a typical wide shot is going to be between about and 50 millimeter we could put on a 50 here and then just scoot the camera back a little bit more i'm probably gonna just stick to the 35 because i like the added depth that we get being able to see more of the room for our tight lens for lex's interview i was at 50 millimeter 50 millimeters what you're currently seeing right now i'd say a pretty typical tight shot i mean depending on how tight it would be anywhere from 50 50 is kind of the low end so this is 50 we're gonna go into 70 so you can see how that looks this is probably a more typical focal length to be at when you're dealing with these second angle interviews and the reason for that is the facial features look most flattering between 70 and 100 millimeter so at 70 which you are at right now you can get as tight as you want and the face isn't going to look distorted so that's it for lens choice it is important what lenses you choose it does change the overall feel of what you're watching and so make sure you are choosing lenses that make sense and not just throwing on whatever you have by the way this was a 24 to 70 millimeter canon we had here so we're going with the 70 millimeter on that one but moving on to step number four is the lighting this is the fun part so where we get to get creative and really make the look come to life so we're gonna go ahead and grab our key light first so we've got ourselves a four foot soft dome here most are going to be around three feet i'd say three foot diffuser is about as small as i would go for a key light the bigger the key lights the softer the light is going to be wraps around the face nicely a nice transition between light and shadow it's going to be more flattering on the features of the human face it's gonna not show blemishes and wrinkles as much so soft lights absolutely necessary for the key lights usually with these kinds of interviews what you're wanting to do is create a little drop shadow right against the cheek here and underneath the chin so the way to do that would be to position the light to the side and a little bit high you come too far you create what is called split lighting split lighting is when you have just one side of the face lit and nothing on the other side this is less common unless you're getting super dramatic more common would be rembrandt lighting which is going to look something more like this basically where you're getting a nice little corner of light showing up right there and now you're getting the catch light in his left eye so you can see his eye lit up well as well if we come even more we get into what is called loop lighting where you basically just see a little shadow right by the nose here instead of the shadow connecting and making a triangle you have now more light showing up here on the side of the face you still have the shadow along this side but it's not as dramatic i would say loop lighting and rembrandt lighting are going to be your two most popular for these types of interviews but our second light we want to talk about now that we have our key light positioned in the spot we like is a backlight or hair light or rim light depending on where you position it to etch or outline our subject from the background now like i mentioned we kind of already have a natural rim light over here from this window coming in but if we want to be able to control it so we're not depending on again the daylight and if there's cloud coverage or whatever that's going to be changing throughout then we're going to want a constant light on his back okay so here we have our amaron 100 that is going to be lighting up our subject on the back here and typically you want this to be opposite from your key light and you usually want it a little bit higher so it's catching the hair the back and outlining and etching and separating from the background so it's hard to tell what that's doing because of the light that's already coming in so i'm gonna grab one of these v-flats we're gonna see if we can block that light over there from hitting them now again we're using the black side because we don't want this light reflecting off of this and then casting a light back on him unless we wanted that fill light but we already have a specific light set up to do that very thing it's looking better so now it's more controlled doing lighting is really an art there's no right or wrong way to light somebody it's like you're painting an image and deciding exactly how you want it to look there is an element of creativity and artistry we have a lot of light coming in right here walls over here so same thing i did there i'm now going to block off right here and put another black v flat so that we're not getting all this spill light coming in to our subject as well okay so here's on and off see how it just kind of etches his shoulder there gives his face a little bit of light right along the cheek here just kind of leveling them out a little bit and our back light coming into the window isn't intensely blue either there's a little of blue back there but it's not intense so i think like in position where we like them i have to decide what to do with the back now we already have the natural lights there that's great however so if we turn all of those off here's with all the lights off and then one at a time you have just that light just that light just that light just that light and just this light and now here is with everything on and that is it for lighting again we could do this all day long but that's going to be good enough for what we need our next step once the lighting is dialed in is the audio we are only going to be doing a boom mic today because i'm going to be monitoring closely as i go but ideally you have a redundant audio so you have a backup in case something goes wrong with your main audio and the microphone we are using today is the sheps 641 this is an awesome microphone for indoor interviews we have it on a c-stand in a boom pole with setting up your audio pretty much the most important thing to understand is your distance away from your subject common rookie mistake this is too far away now you don't want it in the frame so you got to make sure it's out of the frame however a good distance to shoot for is going to be around 6 to 14 inches currently we are about 14 inches away and you want it pointing just below the mouth you notice i have this on the opposite side of my key light because if i had the microphone over here the microphone would be casting a shadow over the face and getting in the way so we don't want that and then i'm just going to bring this down until i see it in frame right there is where it comes in so we're going to go just out of frame important to also do some test audio don't just place it and hope that it's good listen to it make sure it's sounding good and we'll be plugging in our microphone to the apollo twin x here we have mogami xlr cables i am monitoring on sennheiser hd 650s so i'm going to be wearing these while i interview so i can make sure her audio is clean the entire time she's talking and i'll be plugging my apollo into my laptop i'm recording everything into logic pro x so we're plugging in our twin into what is my macbook pro air you want to make sure your audio levels are sitting between negative 18 and negative six peaking at a negative six all right give me some test audio say my name is logan and i like skateboarding my name is logan and i like skateboarding so now i'm just going to listen back it sounds solid except for the reverb reverb is when you hear your voice echoing all around you so we could get away with what we got right now it would work however in the documentary like i mentioned a lot of times just kind of b-roll over top of the images so the audio is actually in my opinion even more important because it's carrying the story more than the images are so i do think it's worth going through the trouble of bringing in some sound panels some blankets whatever you got to dampen the sound so we're gonna do that next treat acoustically our space we built ourselves a little acoustic fort that took us all of five minutes to set up you know some extra panels you have to bring with you or blankets or whatever so find what you got in your house if you don't have anything dampen the sound before you record audio it's gonna go a long way my name is logan and i like skateboarding my name is logan and i like skateboarding my name is logan and i like skateboarding my name is logan and i like skateboarding our last step before we actually interview somebody is the camera settings the settings i have on this camera are f 1.4 which is as low as this lens will go that gives me a nice shallow depth of field shutter is at 180 degree rule which is gonna be at one fiftieth iso is currently set to 400 on this c70 and we have a built-in nd filter system that goes all the way up to six stops our color balance everything was set to about 5600 kelvin and so we have in camera set to about 5600 kelvin as well to match all those lights picture profile on the c70 is going to be canon c-log 3 and then our red camera over here we actually have the aperture bumped up a little bit to around right now it's at a 5 which is okay when you're at a tighter focal length like that because the space is compressed and sometimes if you go too low of an aperture on those tighter lenses it gets too out of focus and you can't see anything back there just big blur so if we want any kind of detail to be able to have any context to where they're at sometimes you want that aperture a little bit higher so i'd say anywhere from a 2.8 to like where it's at now a 5 i think is a good range to be and what that also does is gives us some wiggle room with those tighter lenses if he's moving around at all at a 5 he can move several inches and still be in focus at a 1.4 we have a millimeter you know so tighter lenses usually a little bit higher and the aperture is good then that's at a 148 shutter speed iso is at 400 over there and that is shooting raw so that is pretty much it for the camera settings and the last step of how to shoot an interview is the actual interviewing process so we're now gonna pull in jackie we're gonna get everything dialed in and we're gonna actually shoot the interview of our interviewee now one thing i did before this interview is i prepped jackie and i told her the context of what the interview is going to be she already knows because we've already done one of these in the past last year we did a documentary that she was in so she has an idea already of what the vision is but ideally you tell your subject give them some context of what's going on and kind of the emotions you're trying to portray i sent her a bullet point of all the questions i'm going to ask her so that she can prepare she can mentally have an idea of what she wants to say and so she's not getting on camera and going uh i didn't think about that question i don't know i already have all the questions prepared laid out i'll go through and ask her one at a time and like i mentioned in the last one we did make sure to listen because sometimes based on what they're saying they'll give you something you didn't expect and if you're listening you can go off of that and dig deeper and ask more questions and get something even better than you originally planned on and anticipated that is it for shooting an interview let's get jackie in here and let's put it all to practice all right so we have our talent here this is jackie coley she was a big part of the project we did that we documented that we're making this video about now ideally you have a stand-in for while you're setting all this up when i do my own interviews i have to be my own stand-in so i'm coming in taking a video looking at it coming back and it takes twice as long so ideally you have someone here like we have with logan that can just sit there for a couple hours while you're setting it up but now that jackie's here she's a little bit different height she looks different and so we are going to just double check all of our lighting all of our camera angles and we're going to dial everything in before we begin so jackie i'm going to be sitting right over here and you're going to be talking to me and so i'm going to have you square it up to me like so don't look at the cameras these guys aren't even here you're gonna be looking at me the whole time first thing is audio that's gonna be her comfortable position right there oh i like the white shirt looks good usually have them bring two or three pieces of clothes so that you can test out different looks she had a white and she had a purple she texted me she said which one do you like better i think for this specific set where it's kind of just a clean kitchen look i think white looks better it also doesn't blend with you know like the chairs back there something that pops out from the background something that doesn't blend in with the background so i think white is a good look there now if your focus is shallow you want the eye that's closest to the camera to be in focus this one's going to be in auto focus but this one's not going to be in auto focus so we want to get that focus set right now in the position i'm in right now i'm kind of playing a few roles i'm monitoring audio so i'm watching down there every once in a while again ideally have people doing each of these but i'm a one-man band today to show you that you can do it as a one-man band i am monitoring both cameras from this angle just to make sure they don't shut off they continue recording the battery doesn't run out that she stays in focus the microphone isn't coming in and making sure that she's delivering the lines i need her too so a lot of parts to play all right jackie how did you find the miller family and why did you feel like they were a good candidate for this project each year at christmas time i look for some families that are candidates to receive christmas i look for families that are suffering the effects of cancer my niece sarah sly contacted me and she let me know that there was a family in her neighborhood who had a little boy named timmy who was suffering the effects of leukemia give me some details um about tim's fight with cancer as much as you know what do you know about the story of their battle of cancer in speaking with darcy she can you start that line over but just say darcy related to me or darcy told me darcy told me that their son timmy was diagnosed with leukemia back in august at that time their home was torn apart the husband was sleeping on the sofa because timmy needed to be close to his mom you saw a quick little demo there of me interviewing jackie kind of what that's like that process i was just kind of feeding off of some of her answers she's doing a great job on her own so i don't have a lot to coach her on but if she was constantly looking at the cameras or looking up doing something weird with your hands that's the kind of stuff you want to look for as the interviewer to make sure that what you're seeing visually is going to be able to go well into your edit so that's pretty much it for how i shoot an interview my eight step process those steps will change depending on exactly what you're doing like last time we had a slider in the equation this time no slider all static shots because it's a longer format interview so we're not gonna want a ton of movement just kind of keep us static the whole time but like i mentioned this was a condensed version you just watched if you guys want to see the full version of how we shot this make sure to check out full-time filmmaker where we have over 600 tutorials and over 20 000 students who are all growing their businesses as videographers filmmakers video production companies so if you want to up your game make sure to check that out link is in the description but that's all i got for you guys hopefully you learned something new if you have any further questions for me please let me know [Music] [Music] i learned through this experience that even though i personally could not have made this project happen or made that much of a difference when we come together collectively as a community and a team really grand things can happen miraculous things and what was small sacrifices for each of us became a life change for the miller family tossed in like a castaway what we wanted not what we thought we wanted tossed in we couldn't see it coming what we needed now what we thought we needed don't give up don't give [Music] during a time when the world is pumping so much fear into people and so much division it was incredibly refreshing to me to be involved in a project where no one knew what race religion political belief system anyone was from all of these people came together for the common good of helping a family in need watching waiting patiently from where riches flow my heart gets sure to follow this project is proof again that there is a god who is aware of us and knows the needs of his children and at the end of the day the way that he meets those needs is through all of us [Music] you don't have to be the president of the united states you don't have to own a large corporation all you have to do is wake up and make a choice that you're going to look for a way to be the change that you want to see in the world today and that's why it's important for us as neighbors and as a community and as friends to reach out and lift and love the people that we're surrounded by take everything take everything you

Channel: Full Time Filmmaker

Views: 906,048

Keywords: video interview tips, how to do a video interview, how to shoot interviews, how to film interviews, 8 steps to shooting interviews, tips for interviews, parker walbeck, full time filmmaker, cinematography, lighting tutorial, audio tutorial, c70, red 6k, sigma, canon, interview advice, video interview preparation

Id: Xmn5JhlL3PI

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022