Lights, Camera, Rokos – David Rokos Production Coordinator Blog
The Art of the Interview
Hey everyone, it’s been a busy few weeks. We have been all over the country from Long Beach to Charlotte to Orlando, shooting high end video productions for many of our great clients. The one constant with almost every one of our videos, no matter where we are, is interviews. More than half of our videos either use interviews to tell a story, sell a product, or just give a more personal touch to a service or organization. On screen it may look like it is just a person having a conversation, but it takes a lot of work to make it all look natural.
The first thing to keep in mind when setting up an interview is location. Now most of the audience’s focus is going to be on the subject and what they have to say, but in order to really make the subject pop and to add legitimacy you need to have a visually interesting background. One thing we really like to look for is depth of field. This means that we can have different layers in different levels of focus on the screen to add a more 3D look to the interview. Sometimes we will add an object out of focus in front of the subject and then have a few rows of things behind them. This just helps to establish that our subject is in a 3D world, not a 2D picture.
Filming an interview with a background that not only looks visually appealing, but supports the interview subject, is extremely important.
Once you have the location set up it’s time to make sure the talent is all ready to go and that the image works around them. This involves having the subject sitting into the frame and adjusting the shot. A lot of different things must be taken into account when finalizing a shot; how close should it be, how the audio sounds, and how this shot will work in the framework of other shots we have taken for the same project. Making sure you have a variety of shots that will all cut together well on production will help post-production run smoothly and give you the best product possible.
From this point all that’s left is to ask the right questions, and hopefully get the right answers. Interviews are really the corner stone of our high end video productions, and they can leave a strong impression when done correctly.
Check out the video we recently made for Rosecrance. We had to make a powerful story using just a couple interviews. To achieve this we used dramatic lighting, a steady camera move on our main camera, and 2 other cameras so we had plenty of shots to cut to.
DR
Copyright 2011 SolidLine Media, a division of KV Media Group, Inc.
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