How to Shoot Interviews Like a Pro (ALONE)

here's how you can shoot a very professional looking two camera interview on just a 500 budget alone aspiring filmmakers need ways to make money and shooting talking head interviews is a great way to do it companies need corporate videos they need promos and most of those are going to consist of interviews and they're actually pretty cheap to do and pretty easy to pull off at a professional level if you know what you're doing since we're gonna be shooting this on such a small budget we're going to rent our gear so let's go to borrowlenses.com and the great thing about them is that they will ship the gear straight to your door and they have very clear transparent and low pricing before we get started if 500 is too expensive for you or if two cameras sounds too complicated you can really lower your prices and the complexity of the project by doing a One camera interview shoot if you're going to do that I can make it even easier for you just type my name barlenses.com you're going to get my starter kit and for about 300 for a whole week you're going to get all of this gear which is going to be everything that you need to shoot a One camera interview I put a lot of time into picking out this kit it's very versatile you can use it to shoot a whole short film in a week you can use it to shoot a One camera interview by yourself no problem so you can get this kit for about a week for 300 bucks or you can use the code ssc20 at checkout and you'll save an extra 20 if it's your first order knocking this price way down let's say you're doing a two camera shoot what do you do instead here's what I would do now they have a ton of cameras here you can go with the Sony cameras or like the canons for me I'm more comfortable with the Panasonic Lumix camera so I'm going to stick with that and you know what I haven't tried out the gh6 yet and I really want to so this is going to be a good excuse so I'm going to add that to my cart I'm just going to keep going for now now these prizes are for a seven day rental we actually don't need to rent it that long so all these prices are going to drop down all right so we got one camera that can be our a camera we're also going to want a b camera it doesn't have to be the same but we want it to be the same brand because it's just gonna make matching the colors so much easier so let's get a similar camera and I'm thinking let's go with a gh5 so we'll grab a gh6 for the a camera gh5 for the B camera and we're gonna be good we're also gonna want one of these this is a dummy battery which basically lets you plug your camera into the wall so you don't have to worry about changing out batteries while you're doing an interview that's the worst thing somebody gets into an emotional or really important part of their story I'm gonna cry I told you I was gonna cry then the battery dies you have to change a memory card you don't want any of that stuff to happen we're going to make sure that doesn't while we're here let's also grab this Panasonic XLR microphone adapter because we're going to be able to plug our mics directly into the camera and we won't have to worry about lugging around an extra audio recorder since we're a one-man band on this thing we don't want to have unnecessary gear if we can help it now if I'm getting these cameras I'm going to need some SD cards and again we want to get one with a lot of space on it because we don't want to run out of space while we're shooting a great take of our interview but let's just uh sort by SD cards and take a look at everything yeah I think 128 is going to be more than enough for what we're doing even shooting at 4k on one of these cameras that's going to give us hours of run time and we'll get two of those what else do we need we're gonna need the lenses right we sort by brand I'm going to just stick with the Panasonic brand lenses is the more important thing is our Mount type which is micro four thirds the Panasonic Lumix line so any of these are going to work great now generally with a two camera interview you're going to want two different focal lengths you're going to want something like a 50 millimeter lens and then something longer like maybe an 85 millimeter for your beat camera if you do two of the exact same lenses on your a camera and B camera it's gonna look almost like an awkward jump cut cutting from One camera to the other we were on a really separate visually these two cameras yet still make them feel like they were shot in the same room at the same time and from the same type of camera so we're talking about maybe a 50 millimeter maybe an 85 millimeter but since we're on a micro four thirds camera here the equivalent focal lengths you have to double it so there's a crop sensor going on so a 10 to 25 millimeter lens like this is going to give you the equivalent of a 20 to 50 millimeter zoom lens so you just gotta double all these numbers to get what you're really working with and I think what I want is this one this is the 2 12 to 35 millimeter lens this is going to give us a wide enough range that we can just use this lens for either the a camera or the B camera the other nice thing about this lens is it's an F 2.8 which means that it's pretty fast and what that's going to do for us is it's going to be able to let the background be soft and kind of out of focus like what I've got going on right here so the lower that number the more shallow your depth of field is to give you a more pleasant image that you can focus more on the subject instead of all the crap in the background we're actually going to get two of these lenses because we have two cameras I think soon we're gonna need to start looking into lighting but first let's get a tripod or two so if we go to production and we have tripods and heads now for an interview if you're not moving the camera like obviously we're not going to be we're a one-man band we don't really have time to be moving cameras around and panning and everything like that so we're going to get some very basic and affordable tripods manfrotto one looks nice let's get two of these and how tall does it get about 60 inches tall that's going to do the job now generally you want the camera to be about eye level with your subject unless you're going for a certain effect you know you can always look up on them a little bit if you want them to have more Authority you can look down on them a little bit if you want it to be like some kind of harrowing True Crime Story so let's get this tripod it's more than tall enough it's got enough payload limit add to rental and of course two all right I think we're good on camera let's get some lighting in the mix let's try the light that I use in my starter kit on this website amaran cob60x super affordable it can be battery powered it's pretty powerful bi-color lots of options in a really tiny package here so let's add one of those to the cart and we're going to want this soft box absolutely gonna want that really important to be able to soften your light now there would be other options we could bounce it off a wall bounce it off the ceiling bounce it through a shower curtain say and do a book light like I did in my cinematic Lighting on a budget video but we probably aren't going to have time to set up too much in this interview for doing it all by ourselves so we're just going to get a soft box put it right next to our subject and we're going to get a really strong key light that way you know what we're going to need a light stand this one will do the job impact 10 foot light stand let's just go ahead and throw in a reflector six bucks why not now it's time for audio this is a big one folks let's check out audio and try to figure this out question is do we want to do wireless mics or do we want to do a boom mic or do we want to do both those are really the three options when you're doing an interview setup and we already have this Panasonic XLR microphone adapter so we are going to be able to plug professional mics directly into our camera which is going to be really handy but you don't want to skimp out on audio folks it is the most important part of your interview you can have the most beautifully lit and shot interview but if it sounds like garbage it's completely useless and this is actually really nice if you want to keep it simple you can get this boom pole bundle and it's going to give you the microphone boom pole a boom pole holder and a stand for the boom Bowl holder so you're going to be able to set up this stand aim the microphone right over your subject just out of frame and you're just hands-free for the rest of the day so let's add that to the cart for now great benefit of a boom pole setup is that you're not going to have to worry about Wireless interference or a shirt rustling on a lapel mic for example it is definitely the safer way to record audio downside it's a bit more of a pain to set up and it takes up more real estate in your location too now for doing a two-person interview it's going to get a lot more complicated because a boom pole is not going to be able to point at both people and get great audio you're probably going to need two shotgun mics at that point so at that point I would say let's get the DJI mic maybe the rode Wireless go to mic probably better option because it includes the wired lapel mic too but since we're doing a one-person interview let's get this Sennheiser AVX MKE 2 lav wireless mic set now the reason I'm going with this even though it's a little more expensive is that this is a much more safe reliable and high quality mic setup for wireless mic you're only going to get one mic but you're getting this mke2 lav mic from Sennheiser very nice laugh Mike it's going to sound really good and give you that professional sound the only thing I have to be careful about is how I wire up this lapel mic if I wire it up wrong I'm going to introduce a lot of shirt rustling a lot of interference so we're going to cover that when we get on set all right I think we have everything let's take a look at the card here got the gh5 that's our B cam got the power for the a cam we got our memory cards for both cameras tripods for both cameras lenses for both cameras there's that a cam what else do we got we got the power for the B cam okay so we're good on power we have our key light we have the soft box for the key light we have the stand for the key light we have a reflector that can be our fill we have this boom pole microphone bundle and we have the Sennheiser wireless set now they also offer this gear guard which is kind of a damage waiver if something happens to it you can protect yourself but since I'm doing just a very simple interview set up and I'm going to be very extra careful I'm going to get rid of that and save myself a little bit of money alright so without the gear guard we've now knocked our price down to under 550 dollars we do the math here because we're going to get 20 off your first order with code SSC 20 at checkout that gives us 440 dollars for this kit for a three day shoot and for this kind of a thing a three-day rental is really nice so for example if I wanted to get it from the 7th to the 10th that's going to cover us for three days on the seventh it arrives so the eighth I like to give myself a buffer day for shipping just in case it gets hung up of UPS or something happens I just want to be safe but I'm not even going to shoot on the eighth I just want to have a day to play with all the gear get comfortable with the cameras set up the lenses make sure everything was included that I don't need to make some last minute run for an emergency you know over preparation is the key for these kinds of things and then the ninth I would do the actual shoot and then the 10th shift the gear back but we're under 500 with the coupon we'll be good and shipping is free on rental over 149 bucks so you'll be covered there all right so here's my card again I'll put this all in the description in case you want to copy this for your own interview shoot okay so our borrow lenses order is on the way but we have to figure out where we're gonna shoot this video now if you're shooting an interview with the client might make a lot of sense to shoot it where that client's work takes place it's great to just find a location that says something about the interview subject so that's why the office makes sense this is where the subject works you might also shoot it in their home and find a background in their home that makes sense for the subject for example if they're a writer having their bookshelf in the background makes a lot of sense but if the locations that are already available for your client or interview subjects just look horrible and you can always just go out and find a great location and that's going to do so much to add to the production value of your interview setup so if you've seen my video about how to find big budget locations on a small budget here's one of the tips go to a website like gigster.com or peerspace.com and you can search their directory of locations and find something that's going to look great now these websites appears spacing gangster they're going to give you the most results if you live in Los Angeles New York Miami Chicago any big city like that you're going to do well other areas it might be pretty Hit or Miss but there's other you know you can always just go to personal connections to find a good location to film in so here we are at gigster.com and as you can see just type in what are you planning a production where Los Angeles let's find locations let's narrow it down though obviously I don't want to be spending a ton of money let's say up to a hundred dollars an hour 10 D's it's only going to be a few of us there minimum hours sometimes they say you have to book the place for 10 hours minimum that's going to cost a lot of money you really only need to be there for like three hours let's say up to three and my interview subject is going to be a fine artist so a loft type space like one of these places might make sense so let's take a look at some of these this is nice it's clean white neutral those are all good things the only thing I don't like so much about this location is there's not a lot of room for depth if you can create depth in your setup for your interview it's going to be very visually pleasing you're going to get more of that separation of the background from the subject it's going to draw more attention to your subject this is just kind of a small Square Room these windows are nice it might make lighting more difficult because we might be getting light from outside coming in and if we're shooting all day the lighting is going to change throughout the day which could be a problem let's try some of these other places I've pinned this place looks great actually it's also white neutral light flowing Airy audio is going to be rough because look at these high ceilings the concrete floors there's not a lot in this room so all the sound is going to be bouncing around in here which could be a bit of an issue windows are big but you know we might figure out where the windows are facing if they're facing East or West for example and the time our shoot accordingly so that the light isn't pouring into the room while we're shooting get it for three hours we're looking at 273 bucks and I'm not including this in the 500 thing because again most likely you're going to be filming this at your last place and it's not going to cost you anything for a location but I want this to look nice and I've already used my house for too many videos so you know all right I think this location works great for interviewing a fine artist I'm going to go ahead and book it for three hours it's going to be a very short interview so I think that's going to give us enough time to set up do the interview and break it down again so in the meantime let's wait for that borrow lenses gear to arrive we'll set that up and then I'll show you how I'm going to shoot this interview foreign and here's our gear time to bring this in start setting it up get ready for the shoot tomorrow lenses rentals and spend a couple hours testing out the gear especially with the gh6 which I'd never shot with before and the important thing was I made sure to match the camera settings like the white balance resolution frame rate shutter speed and picture profile to my gh5 here's the exact settings that I use for those white balance was Daylight resolution was 4K 8-bit frame rate was 23.98 frames per second picture profile was natural shutter speed was 50. after testing out the gear everything was looking good all right so we're here at the location as you can see nice big open very well lit one problem is it's really noisy on this street tons of traffic going on down there so we'll do what we can there I can already tell I'm gonna definitely want to get the windows in the frame somewhere maybe off to the side that's just going to give us a motivated light source so we can kind of get our bearings when I put a light near there and also if I can see the city it might help justify any traffic noise that leaks into the video so yeah we'll populate this side of the room with some more objects so let's try one of these chairs these are just already in the location okay so we have a temporary setup for our a camera it's not looking bad but we have a couple of questions we have to ask ourselves one are we going to position our subject in the center of the frame or are we going to position her off about a third to the side of the frame and leave some negative space on the other side of the frame both good ways to do it typically if you're going to have her centered in the frame you might also have her looking directly into the lens if you watch a lot of Netflix True Crime shows you'll see them talking directly into camera but in a lot of traditional corporate interview setups are going to be off a third to the side of the frame looking just off camera at the interviewer the other thing to think about is is your interview subject comfortable talking directly to a camera lens or would they rather talk to a person usually they're going to want to talk to a person would you rather talk to a person or the camera lens probably a purse and then we got to start thinking about our B camera too so let's get into that okay so I want to get more of that window and frame maybe I go off to the side a little bit we're getting some of the set in on the sides right here this set dressing is looking nice the window in the background is doing a lot of work it's very blown out but we're going to help that and if we stop down the image and actually expose a little more for the window like that it's not too bad then I also don't like how bare the back corner of the wall is so I'm going to move some set dressing back into that corner to fill out the frame this thing I think should be more in the foreground that's going to give us a cool little extra depth in the frame that's actually quite nice so that's good but this chair looks insane too much seating right next to each other let's get this off frame maybe we'll mix it up and we'll put a ladder back there and this is one of the tough Parts about doing this by yourself you have to keep running back and forth to make sure that your framing is looking okay you know what I think I need to do to bring the couch further forward ladder further back one of these two objects needs to go here okay now it's starting to actually make sense this ladder is actually giving us some leading lines into the subject space here just going to draw our eye more to the subject this thing we'll just get this kind of out of the way somewhere a couple more tweaks foreign love that that's how you do the camera right there hey cameras looking great let's move on to the B camera we're going to be sort of close to our camera but the important thing to think about is that we're not going to break the 180 degree line which means our camera here is on the left side of our subject that means our B camera needs to also be on the left side that way she's going to be looking the same direction and frame if we were to put the camera over here she's now going to be looking left when we're on the B Cam and she'll be looking right when we're on the acam it's going to look insane it's going to look like she's talking to herself when we cut from A to B can all right so our framing is 90 there in these two cameras now it's time to start thinking about our lighting and the biggest thing we got to do is set up our key light so our key light is going to be from the same side as the windows so that it makes sense to the viewer it looks natural looks like there is no lighting we're going to go from a 45 degree angle onto her face so that it sort of wraps around the side a little bit but we still get kind of a darker Shadow side on the left of her face we're going to get this as close as we can to our subject while staying out of frame got it on daylight color temperature 5600k all right so I'm going to roll on the a camera and see how it looks with the lighting on versus off let's take a look at the B camera so this light's doing some work on the B camera too but the Shadows on the B camera are much more pronounced so we're definitely going to want to use our reflector to give her some fill light on this side all right so our background is a little bit blown out here the white buildings are getting blown out but the curtains are kind of softening that overexposure and I really like the leading lines we're getting from the window frame we'll get our reflector up here giving her some fill and then I think we're going to be in a pretty good spot as far as lighting goes we have two sources of sound here one's going to be the boom pole which is going to be hanging off of this thing just over her head the other one's going to be a lapel Michael Wireless lav so even though this location is absolutely horrible for sounds hopefully we'll be able to make it work between these two microphones when you're using these uh c-stand joints make sure that the big hand crank is on the right side righty tighty that way when it you have weight in front of it it doesn't just loosen itself slowly it's on the right side it's only going to get tighter as the weight pushes it down safety first so we're going to put our microphone away from the key lights on the opposite side of the key light so we don't get any shadows and we want this thing pointed if you do like a unicorn horn over your head that's a good place to point it now we don't want it pointed directly at our mouth because if she moves around too much it might mess up the audio so it's good to aim more for the chest kind of the sternum area then you're going to get that sound even if there is some movement from the subject we have our XLR adapter for Panasonic so that means we don't need a sound recorder to record out of this phantom-powered microphone we just plug this into the top and we can plug our mic directly into here we want to sync up audio later all right so we don't have another light stand so we got to get crafty we found this and I think we can hang our reflector off of this guy there we go great doing a couple little tweaks here first off on the B camera I think it's a little too tight here because if our subject sits up straight totally she comes up a little too high in the frame so I'm going to widen it up a little bit and we have that ability because we're shooting in 4k we can punch in quite a bit and also I really want the B camera to be brighter because if I stop down for the window to not be too blown out for a subject to not be too blown out aperture is like 7.1 and our background is just too sharp I want it to be a little out of focus so I'm going to cheat a little bit and use a variable ND filter for my own kit so we could have rented one of these two they don't cost much and that'll let us open up the aperture a lot get a nice soft pleasing background okay so we got our exposure dialed in and a frame down just a hair and we're a little wider than we were it's going to give us room to punch in just a bit last thing we got to do is get our wireless mic on her too and then we're ready to start interviewing we have our Sennheiser wireless AVX my kid here so easy use you turn them both on they pair automatically then you just got to plug this thing in and hook this up to our subject and we're good to go Tony you're going to have to put this behind your back and usually with the female subject you're going to want to let them kind of do this themselves and maybe turn around a little bit but in this case it's my girlfriend so you know with these uh Wireless lapel mics you got to think about placement again very important the ideal location is generally going to be right at the sternum here and you can kind of clip it just if you're wearing a button-down shirt right here you know we're doing an interview so you don't really need to worry about hiding the mic unless that's aesthetically what you want to do with your interview so we'll just clip it here and then run the cord through our shirt hiding it as it goes out to the transmitter on our back so we've set up our location we've set up our acam our B cam we've set up our light we set up our boom pole we've set up our lav mic that means we're finally ready to start doing the interview the only thing that we have to do now is to talk to the gentleman doing construction down the hall and see if they'll give us a break for 15 minutes to actually do the interview let's see who says all right so everything's looking good we're rolling on both of our cameras I'm gonna set up right next to the a camera closer to the key lights we just want to make sure again that our subject is looking the same direction from both our cameras we do that by making sure that they're both pointing at the same side of her face part of your job as an interviewer is to make your subject feel comfortable in front of the camera if you're doing like a corporate talking head video a lot of these people aren't going to be that used to being in front of the camera so try to make them comfortable part of that comes down to your Rapport as you're setting up the shoe try to talk just small talk get them comfortable get them loose get them talking and then when you're actually doing the interview ask the question and then don't say anything else don't throw in it oh really oh tell me more all that stuff's just going to make it harder for you in the edit if you also want to make it easier in the edit ask your subject to repeat the question in their answer and that might take some getting used to for them they might forget so don't be afraid to also interrupt the beginning of the response if they didn't repeat the question and their answer good afternoon how you doing I'm good how are you I'm doing great why don't you tell me your name and uh what you do foreign [Music] so we finished our interview went really well although it was very loud outside so in next week's video I'm going to show you how to actually edit a two-camera interview fixing the sound problems that we had making it sound great and also cutting from a camera to B camera with a multi-camera workflow stay tuned for that and I'll see you all next week I've always been inspired by my family whether it's in the materials I'm using or what I'm actually creating my family is always at the Forefront where I come from is always at the Forefront the history the heritage [Music]

Channel: Standard Story Company

Views: 129,055

Keywords: how to shoot an interview, how to shoot an interview with two camera, how to shoot an interview as a one man band

Id: n-REYta_P9E

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 20 2023