How to Film an Interview using only ONE Light

hey and welcome to another interview breakdown on this interview we shot with two cameras but we only used one key light and it still turned out to be one of my favorite interview setups that we've done in a long time so in this video I will talk about the location the cameras that we've used how we recorded the audio as well as our simple light setup and at the very end of the video I will also talk a little bit about the really simple color grading and how we match both cameras in post unfortunately I didn't really have any b-roll of this shoot other than one instagram story I made because it was my intention to make a breakdown of this video but don't worry future breakdowns will have a lot more b-roll than this and if you're new here my name is Damian Cooper and this is your chance to subscribe and if you're not new here then welcome back and now let's start by talking about what this project was all about this project was about a testimonial style commercial for one of our clients a beauty clinic and it was mainly about skin care our main protagonist is a former TV presenter now turned public speaking coach and since she's been in the spotlight for most of her career she likes to have her skin freshened up by this beauty Clinic about once a year or so and if you want to watch the full commercial I will link it down in the description below but beware it's in German yeah so now let's start with our location for our interview and here we use the cafe because our protagonist usually meets her clients in a cafe so it just seems authentic our producer found this location for us and in the beginning I was really skeptical because it was a public Cafe which was actually in use and there were people there and I was really worried about it being too loud or being too busy turns out that wasn't a problem at all and location itself was gorgeous when I chose the framing for our interview setup I decided to angle it towards the heart of the cafe to get us as much separation from the background it was also more interesting and we had a lot of depth we also had a lot of natural leading lines in the form of our practicals up on the ceiling and all of them pointed straight towards our interviewee focusing more on what she was saying the location itself also framed her vertically with all of our brick wall beams as well as the drapes on the left and right side of our interviewee we were also really lucky to be provided by this natural checkerboard pattern going from Bright to dark to Bright to dark and I keep talking about about this and a lot of my lighting breakdowns not only does it create interesting backgrounds but it also makes for levels and therefore for more volume and depth in our location if you've seen any of my interview setups you know that I love a wide angle for my main angle on interview setups since she was wearing a really small skirt that was quite revealing but since we were shooting for a beauty Clinic we showed her the framing she loved it and she was okay with revealing a bit more skin on our close-up shots we had the same vertical lines framing our subject we also had a quite busy background with that girl in the back working for example I didn't mind it too much as it was compressed and quite out of focus and it gave more context to where we are and again this was a free location we didn't pay for it and they let us use it for free so we couldn't move anything around or interrupt the guests that were in the cafe now let's move on to the camera equipment that we use for our main angle I used the Canon C300 Mark III with the sigma 18-35 I'm not sure about the exact focal length I was shooting this with but it might actually be around 18 millimeters because as you can see the shot is quite wide for our close-up angle I used a Canon R5 with the Canon 2047d and here I'm pretty sure it's about 60 70 millimeters to get a close-up contrast to our wide angle as well as get the background compressed as much as possible both cameras were also shooting wide open F 1.8 on a Canon C300 Mark III and F 2.8 on the Canon R5 since I was using two different cameras on set and I wanted to make my life a lot easier I used the gray card on set and used custom white balance on both cameras and that way it's way easier to match them in post and I don't know the exact settings we landed on but I'm pretty sure we landed around 5600 Kelvin moving on to the audio my microphone of choice at the time was a single D1 this is an XLR shotgun microphone that I wired directly into a zoom F6 recorder and as I've mentioned on other of my interview breakdowns I love using the zoom F6 because it has something that's called 32-bit float and this is something similar to Raw recording for audio and here's a good example for this because in one take she started laughing loudly and usually if you don't have a safety track or you have a sound guy monitoring your levels the entire time then the Laughing would have been peaked but here I could just level it out in post and we were fine so here's a short clip of the audio foreign to keep both of our cameras as well as our record and sync we use time code and unfortunately the R5 doesn't have a Time code in but with our tentacles sync time code generators we can actually plug one of them into the R5 directly via the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack and then it creates this weird sounding alien sound which you can then use later with their proprietary software to sync everything into a multi-cam sequence as of right now I ditched the R5 and all of my cameras have time code now but at the time this came in really handy now let's talk a bit about our very simple yet effective lighting setup and as I always do on these interview setups I expose for the background first without using any of our own lights and here I exposed for the practicals on the ceiling as well as the sunlight spilling in so none of the highlights were blown out so the next step was to bring in our key light and this one was motivated by a big window on our camera left and you can see these windows in our background on our wide angle as well as on the close-up as my key light of choice I used a 2x2 flexible light mat with a soft box and diffusion I pointed the light source at her at around a 30 degree angle and I also had the light slightly up to lighter from above and with this key light placement I created somewhat of a mixture between a typical Rembrandt lighting which I used for my interview on cutting edge and a butterfly or beauty lighting which I used on my last interview breakdown I wanted to have her face lit pretty evenly and not have a lot of Shadows in there but I did want to have at least a bit of contrast so that it didn't look too flat either since we had a bright open room there was enough natural bounce coming in that I didn't need to add a bounce card myself and I was quite happy with the contrast ratio that we gotten with just our key light at the time I was using a light mat by Falcon eyes and unfortunately this one broke after a year and the build quality isn't necessarily the best so I replaced it with other light mats and if you need some recommendations I will put some links down in the description below usually my next step would be to set up a rim light or headlight to separate her even more from the background luckily for us we already got a rim light from the ceiling lights from above and in my opinion that separated her enough from the background and as I've already mentioned this was a working Cafe in progress behind the curtain on our camera right there was the kitchen and there was a lot of Raiders going in and out so there was no way of us setting up a light over there on our immediate camera ride there was also hardly any space to set up any light stands so this would have been quite tricky and since I've already mentioned the ceiling light actually gave us some sort of Rim light with a bit of color contrast too I actually deemed that to be enough especially since she was blonde and wearing a bright dress and the background was quite dark so here was actually quite satisfied with the results that we've gotten with only setting up one key light and by placing her on the right spot in the cafe and make full use of the Practical lights that we already had on location and since you guys are always interested let's briefly talk about the color grading and this was probably the most simple I've ever done on any interview setup I shot Raw on a Canon C300 Mark III and I use Silo 2 with the cinema gamut space to color grade the footage I used the original Canon c-lock 2 to rec 709 conversion nut and then literally all I had to do was use one of my custom Luts and put on top of the footage at around 44 the lot that I used for this project was called Bluebird and you can find it in version 2 of any of my custom lab packs and there's a link down in the description below to match the Canon R5 to the Canon C300 Mark III I had to do a bit more extra work first of all I used the original Canon c-lock 3 2 Rec 709 lot to get it back to rec 709 I noticed a small magenta case so I just ever so slightly shifted the tint from magenta towards the greens I then added a bit more contrast to match the Canon C300 Mark III better and as the last step I just threw on Bluebird on top of the footage again and there you go both cameras matched so there you have it this was the full interview breakdown of how we shot this mini commercial using only one light if you like this video then please give it a thumbs up and if you want to know more about lighting then check out my last upload where I talk about three-point lighting but if you really want to master how to shoot interviews then subscribe to this channel because there will be a lot more interview breakdowns in the near future and I will also release a full how to shoot interviews Master Class later this year and now have a nice day and I hope to see you on the next one

Channel: Damien Cooper

Views: 46,370

Keywords: interview lighting, cinematic lighting, how to film interviews, filmmaking tips, lighting tutorial, behind the scenes, cinematic lighting techniques, interview lighting tutorial, interview lighting with one light, interview lighting setup, interview lighting cinematic, interview lighting techniques, interview lighting tips, interview lighting kit, damien cooper, how to film an interview with two cameras, Canon R5, c300 III

Id: WMqyC0mSdIM

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023