HOW TO SHOOT AN INTERVIEW | CANON C70

hey what's going on guys my name is griffin and i'm a filmmaker based out of orange county california and today we're to go behind the scenes of an interview setup so come on take it with me so today our cameras the a-camera is the c500 mark ii and we're using the kawa promonar lenses and our b camera is the c70 and our c camera is the c70 as well usually when i'm doing an interview the way i like to position the lights in relation to the subject is i'll place the light and then i'll place the subject where they look with their eye line and then i place the a camera and the b camera now usually if you can it's best to use at least two cameras now part of the reason for that is you can cut between your a camera and your b camera so if someone's saying something and then um they kind of get lost for a second but then they pick it back up and they start talking again it allows you to cut to cut out the um and the ah and things like that where they sort of have a momentary fumble and you can cut from a camera to b camera and the edit which it just kind of looks seamless for the viewer and you don't necessarily have to do hard cut or alternatively show where they're having a moment where they sort of can't think of what they wanted to say i'll put the a camera in the b camera both where they're shooting on the shadow side of the face and i'll usually make them at least two focal lengths apart so for example on my a camera maybe i have a 35 on my b camera assuming it's the same sensor size i'll usually usually have an 85 or if i'm an a camera i have a 50 on my b camera usually i have a hundred i don't usually like to use two focal lengths that are right next to each other like a 50 and a 75 or something like that because it almost looks like it might be similar framing and then the last thing i would say in relation for the placement of the a camera and b camera i'll usually put the a camera a little closer and wider our b camera comes around in a little bit of a different angle so it's filming just a little bit of a like more of a sighty profile look and then if you have a c camera like we do today and this one is actually really profile so it's shooting more i'll put a clip here of what that actually looks like but it's shooting where it's much more sidey so one thing that i learned i actually learned this i think i learned this one from dave but movement cuts well with movement so today this camera happens to be on a slider so what's going to be happening is dave will be operating this one and he's kind of moving it left to right he gets here slows down nice and steady right to left so it's a really nice look this is a sort of a medium wide shot your b and your c camera if they're also moving a little bit too it's gonna make it just feel a little more natural when you cut from the a to camera to the b camera and then the tip that i got from dave actually was doing what's called a loose head tripod you want to talk about this one so you've got two slider cameras both of them moving so then you've got your third one on sticks here basically what i try to do is i try to keep this in constant movement at about the same speed as what the sliders are doing that way when we cut from a slider shot back to the tripod shot the view is not jarred so much that they're like oh what's going on you cut from movement to movement and it feels nice and fluid one tip i have is anytime you're shooting in a scene with windows is you kind of want to light from the same direction as the window so even with the window light it's actually not a bad looking setup you can see the light on his face it's kind of wrapping across the face right here but it does look a little bit you could say a little too contrasty there and the light doesn't exactly wrap all the way across his face but i do like shooting into the corner because you're getting these sort of leading lines here right here and you also have sort of built-in contrast your shot you have light you have dark you have light dark sort of repeating patterns but one thing i would want to do is wrap the light across the face a little more so what i'll do is i'll turn the light on striking there we go and now it sort of looks like pretty natural you could say so it's one thing to think about if you're lighting with windows in your shot you want to light from the same direction you don't exactly want to just when i originally started shooting interviews i would think okay well we need to even that out you don't want shadows on the face that's totally unprofessional looking but it turns out it actually is professional so i used to want to flood light in from this side to kind of even it out but what you can do instead of trying to kill all the shadows is you just kind of wrap the light a little more across the face you can still see their face but you get sort of a nice wrap across the face and you get kind of like a little rembrandt lighting right here which all rembrandt lighting means it's just like a little triangle on the cheek so that's a little tip for interview lighting when you have windows in the shots i'm here with tyler edwards i'll link his youtube channel down below tyler was one of the guys that was sort of an inspiration for me when i was actually starting youtube and now today is working with me on set so that's super cool yeah but tyler's going to give a little tip on using soft lighting for interviews yeah so like we've said my name's tyler edwards i'm so stoked to be on set again this is all right second time yeah so yeah soft light is really important for uh for a key light the reason why it's soft white is a couple things is it really softens blemishes and kind of hides blemishes on skin tones so it just makes everything look a little bit more pleasing and with heart with hard light it just you get really nasty shadows and it it ends up typically looking a little bit more stylistic the main point is soft light for key lights is really important and that's kind of that's kind of what you want to go to first of all for your interviews just because of how natural looks and how pleasing it looks on pretty much every skin tone out there sweet so our actual lighting setup today is we have aputure 600d and we have just this 100 softbox off amazon but it's a 60 inch octa-box and one of the things you want to do with the soft light any light can basically be soft or hard depending on how far or close it is from your subject so generally speaking if you do want to have soft light where it looks nice on your face so if i'm looking right here you're going to notice nice soft wrapping light on my face and a nice shadow side on this this side here the way you get that is you get the light nice and in close and generally speaking what i'll do is i'll walk the light in as close as possible where it's actually in the shot and then i'll ask someone to stand behind the camera and say let me know when that light's just out and i'll skip the light out one inch at a time as soon as it's out of frame then you know boom that's as close as you can get your light that way you can have a nice soft light the closer your light is going to be and the bigger your light is going to be the softer it'll be on the face and generally speaking smooth things out just like tai was saying and it'll make you look a little better so one of the really important things when you're filming an interview is you want to make sure you have really good audio so what i like to do when i walk into a room is you can clap i'm not going to do it because it'll be really loud but you clap and you can notice if there's an echo in the room or not typically if there's like wood floors or something like that you're going to have a bit of an echo so one thing you can do to kind of combat the echo is you can use sound blankets these assemblies are actually really cool because they're white on one side they're black on the other so you can use them as either a fill or as negative fill and today we're using this fill because it's pretty contrasty so it sort of gets rid of some of that echo and at the same time it acts as a little bit of fill and helps fill in some of the shadows on the shadow side of the face so in terms of audio another thing i like to do is a best practice is to run two sources of audio so a lot of times you can run what dave's doing right here is a lavalier mic and so that lavalier mic would either clip on to like the shirt right here or alternatively what you might do if you have a nice small lav like this so yeah all you would do this is a bit more of a professional look is you take the lav and take this thing you kind of just sandwich it in between just like that and then you take the little there's a different version so this one's it's like a little furry dead cat basically but there's also other versions that are just felt each of them work just fine you kind of sandwich this around and then what you do once you have your talon you can peel this and you can apply it the best spot for the lab is kind of right between the chest line right here right center chest you don't want it right here a lot of people put it right here you get a really throaty sound it doesn't sound very natural if you actually put it right here kind of right center chest it's going to have a little bit more of a full natural sound sometimes with female talent what i would suggest doing is you can just ask them and suggest hey go ahead and put it center chest and apply it to yourself because you don't want to be like a creepy weirdo use the mic clip on that bra strap as well that actually works really well as well which are we doing that one today i'll probably do that cool let's do that one today so another little tip for audio the other way we talked about the lavalier mic the other way is what's called a shotgun mic typically so the key thing with the shotgun you know whatever one you have is is probably okay the biggest thing is mic placement you wanna i heard this i don't know from curtis judd or somewhere online but you kind of take your finger and go like that and that's kind of the distance if you can get in that distance that's like the real sweet spot so i think 12 to 18 inches is generally considered best placement and you don't necessarily want to aim it directly with their mouth what i like to do is actually aim it just in front of their mouth if i set it for right here it's kind of aimed right at dave's mouth which is great and then if dave sort of does one of these things now he's going to be off axis from the mic and it's not it's going to pick up the top of his head it's going to sound really weird so what i like to do is i'll aim it kind of like their chest so it's just it gives a little bit of breathing room so you can actually scoot it just a little bit forward that way we're still right at about 18 inches but if he leans forward he leans back it's still gonna be pretty good either way around and then that combined with the lav usually you use one or the other that was another thing i figured out when i was first starting i was like oh like why does it sound so weird if like both of these like the lab and the shotgun at the same time but if you just usually you'll pick whichever one sounds better which most cases it's going to be the shotgun as long as you get it nice and close to your subject but the lab is always a great backup if it for whatever reason wasn't close to your subject so funny story the first time i met dave i was actually filming a hillsong united concert at staples center and dave was working with hillsong united and i'd rented some cow anamorphic lenses i've shot on these lenses a bunch now and i also rented an alexa mini which it's a it's a pretty sick setup to be honest but i never shot with anamorphic lenses myself so most people know the anamorphic lenses have those horizontal flares one thing that threw me off is when i got it i was trying to put the lens and keep in mind i didn't get a film score or anything like that i thought okay well if it's horizontal flares it only makes sense that the lens would be horizontal like this well turns out that's not how you put anamorphic lenses on i quickly figured that out but one thing i'll usually do is i'll look for what looks like the top of the lens and it's a little different on every lens but there's usually writing on the top that indicates where to go there's a little notch right there all you need to do it's an anamorphic lens you put it so it's vertical and you line that little notch up with this little one notch right here on your pl mount you line them up and you got to kind of wiggle it a little bit once it's in you press against close the pl mount before you let go you just kind of want to make sure it's not going to fall off and then when you set your iris you're just doing it with this and you're setting your focus here if you're using a focus motor like today we're using a nucleus m that would just line up on here just like that so maybe that'll save you guys a little bit of embarrassment or stressing out if you don't know how to put a anamorphic lens on to a pl mount one thing i like to do before i start the interview is on all the cameras i'll call it the settings so like hey guys we're at 5600 white balance nd4 stops iso 800 you know whatever literally call all the settings and match them across all the cameras if you're within the same ecosystem so typically for me i'm shooting the c500 the c70s they all match i know that so i can match settings across the cameras and it's going to make it easier in the edit to match all the looks and then another thing i'll do is before we start rolling when you start the interview that's kind of when you start to build the rapport with your subject you start to get the interview subject really comfortable what i like to do before we ever call action is i'll check make sure i got plenty of space in my memory card make sure i got a full battery because once you start you don't really want to break the flow and have to go like hey oh real quick i got to change your battery and maybe your subject was getting real emotional or something like that so it's nice if you can make sure you're dialed and you can record for like maybe at least an hour you know you've got plenty of battery and plenty of media so that's what i like to do before i start the interview so one of the things when i'm running an interview i like to sit on the same height stool as my subject that way you can basically get the same eye line so tyler if i were to you can i'm recording right now so watch i see this if you were to make eye contact with me right here notice how the eye line looks kind of weird looks like he's looking down i'll turn them if i were to just kind of stand up and you're looking right here it looks like you're kind of looking up which is sort of a it's an awkward look and i'm going to put the screen overlay here so we'll see what's going on but now if i sort of match his height i come right here it gets real conversational so it matches the eye line which looks good and it looks like a natural way to look like you're having a conversation so it feels better already so generally speaking it's going to allow them to kind of relax into position another thing i like to do is if you don't have another camera operator like if you're shooting an interview by yourself and say you're operating a camera you can put like a piece of tape on the wall or something like that you can say hey i know it might seem a little funny but you can just help me out for this you put a piece of tape on the wall and you could say when you're giving your answers you could just look at that piece of tape that's kind of a way to do it if you're solo operating for an interview so what i like to do when i'm running an interview is i'll have my questions prepared ahead of time that way you don't have to stress out about like okay what am i going to talk to this person about you're kind of getting nervous because like oh shoot like i already asked him a few questions and like i can't really think of anything else now and you also kind of want to know what you're looking for in the edit and you want to lead your subject to say in their own words what you're looking for you you need to know what you want out of it otherwise you're just going to wind up with like hours of footage and you're going to have to try to figure it out in the edit you're going to realize oh man they never talked about that really cool part on their story so what i like to do if i already know my subject and i know what story i'm looking for i'll make some bullet points of key things that i really want to hit in the interview and i'll try to lead them with some questions like i might say tell me about a time when you're young and there was something really tough that happened and i already kind of know what the thing is that i might be looking for so i'll try to lead them to a question and don't feel afraid to suggest ways they might say it if you're looking for something more condensed or a little shorter you could say hey that was great can we try a version where you say that whole thing in one sentence and it'll help you kind of speed things up in your edit instead of having to always chop out words and reformulate sentences that they never really said so another thing you want to do with your subject don't cut cameras unless you're done with the interview basically like if your subject might be getting emotional or something like that keep the cameras rolling and you don't want to give your subject affirmations like if you say hey tell me about a time you know of something tragic that happened when you're growing up or whatever the thing might be as they're saying the answer you don't want to go right wow oh my gosh that's crazy no way you don't want to be saying that it's going to ruin your audio and it's it sounds amateur but if you think about in a conversation anytime you're talking to a friend or something like that you're always sort of like going oh wow dang oh man really whoa and it's going to ruin your audio if you do that for obvious reasons so you want to be quiet and even give yourself five seconds when they complete talking you don't want to jump right in and start saying something else so they finish saying their thing and you're like wow hey that was so good give a few seconds and it's going to give you a chance if you want a chance in the edit to extend a pause out and then cut but you still want that room tone you won't have to make some awkward jump cut there i like to remind the person who's being interviewed to give context to their questions if you ask a question and you say tell me about the hardest thing that ever happened to you as a child and they say losing a parent what you'd actually see in the edit would just be losing a parent and there's no context to the question before the interview starts i'll ask them to answer everything in complete sentences so instead of saying losing a parent they might say the hardest thing that ever happened to me as a child was when i lost my father and now let's talk about a dark subject but um you know if if you're talking about something you want to give a complete context of what you're talking about instead of just saying just the answer where it's like two or three words so that's kind of a nice way when you get to the edit when you're actually cutting out the part where you're asking the question the viewer is still going to understand what's being asked all right guys so we're actually on a real set today we just finished filming interviews literally all day long that's kind of why i thought hey let's make this video on filming interviews but one of the cool things is this is like a bonus tip and you definitely don't need all this gear right when you start but one nice thing if you have your client on set is if you can have a client monitor um what has all the feeds of the camera so this is our a camera b camera and our weird unloaded c camera but if you can have all your feeds where your client can see and give any feedback they might have and also if you have a hair and makeup artist on set or if you have anybody else that might be someone who's giving input it's really nice if they can all see the images of the camera and then it prevents people from like sort of like you know like trying to be all up in your business when you're just trying to off your camera so i like to have a separate monitor for them and maybe your hair and makeup person might say oh hey you know i'm noticing that there's a hair that's a flyaway or whatever or maybe the client might say hey you're showing a logo of one of our competitors or something like that so that's one nice thing this one's already off like i said we already wrapped but i'll put some b-roll of what it looks like when the feed is up and you can see in real time what the cameras are capturing so it's a nice little bonus tip you know once you kind of eventually build up your gear and you've kind of got all your main stuff investing in some client monitors is actually pretty nice thing all right guys thanks for sticking around for this video hopefully got something out of it if you like this kind of content consider hitting that subscribe button and i'll see you in the next one take care you

Channel: Griffin Conway

Views: 28,972

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Id: 0CUFrk96dFs

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 10 2021