Interview in boardroom – any advice?

[Joseph W. bourke]

Since this is a talking head, the star of your video will be the audio, so you want to make sure that you’ve nailed your audio setup (which you may well have all planned out), as far as riding gain – do you have an audio person as part of your setup – and are there any problems in the room as far as ambient goes. Is the room “ringy”, are you using a lav mic, or a boom? Stuff like that.

As far as video goes, be very aware that there’s going to be a trade-off with the color temperature of the window, not to mention the brightness, versus the color temperature of your lights. Generally it’s a matter of matching one to the other – either gel the whole window with a warming gel (if you’re using tungsten lights), or gel your lights to match the window (in which case you lose a fair amount of brightness in your lights). If you’re using CFLs with a 5500k color temperature, you might be able to get away with matching it to the window background, but test it during your setup – you don’t want to have to mask and grade the footage in post.
Also take a look at what the stop range of your camera/lens combination is, so you don’t have your background blow out. I’ve sometimes had to put neutral density gel over several panels of windows because the brightness far outweighs anything I could get from my lights. One other thing to thik about is time of day. The color temperature is going to be changing, especially if your shoot involves multiple takes.

There are lots of things to think of here, but it mostly boils down to getting the skintones looking right, then making sure the talent stands out from the background, and that it’s not distracting. You also want to decide on whether you need a three light setup, and whether there’s room for the rim lights, as well as where they can be placed to not show in your shots. Then making sure the background isn’t too bright for your lights. Then matching the color temperature of your outside to your inside, no matter how you do it. You will most likely want to get at least a slight falloff of the background in terms of focus, not an extreme one, since then the background won’t be recognizable.

You should also think about camera movement during the interview. If you’ve got two minutes to cover, you may want to think about some pickup shots with over the shoulder reactions (if you want yourself in there as the interviewer – that depends on the style, and the client’s preference). If the context of the interview is the company, or its’ products, you may want to cut in some b-roll footage, because two minutes can be deadly boring, unless the speaker is really, really interesting, or a known celebrity in his/her industry. If this is pretty tightly outlined, you can plan in advance for where your cutaways will occur, and then add some camera movements (zooms in from maybe a waist shot to a head and shoulders shot, etc.), but don’t get yourself trapped by zooming in, and then having nothing to cut to, so you can get back to your medium shot. It’s all a matter of planning – and being ready for the unexpected. Good luck!

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thansk Joe, very helpful.

The mix of colour temp will be a problem as I can’t gel the windows… too many and too big. I don’t have that many gels for my lights either. Hmmmm… this will be interesting. I’ll continue my research.

Thanks again,
G

Gilles

[Joseph W. bourke]

Is there anywhere nearby you can rent HMIs cheaply? That would pretty much give you a daylight match.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Noah Kadner]

Or gel the windows with ND and CTO. Depends entirely on how large they are.

Noah

Call Box Training.
Featuring the Panasonic GH2 and GoPro HD Hero.

[Bill Davis]

If you can’t fight the light – use it. Position the subject so the window light is the key. Fill with reflector or active sources with CTB.

OR

Close the drapes.

Also, do NOT try to move the conference table. In modern boardrooms, these are typically “wired” with phone/data, etc and so are kinda “rooted” to their position.

Boardrooms are typically a pain in the ass location. since they’re seldom flexible to configure and almost always have a large fixed object in their center.

Here’s a still from a setup I did in a law firm in southern California recently. The idea is that you have to see what you have to work with, then use the room’s geometry and position subjects so they work with whatever you find on location.

This was lit with nothing more than 2 LED 600s – one to bring the background group up and one as a key on the “window side” for the partner to bring him up as the central subject. Given time and budgets of yesterday, I would have done something more interesting with the “black hole” side of the room, but today, we’re lucky if we’re given time to even light the main subject half-way decently.

Sigh.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Gilles Gagnon]

thank you all for your valuable input.

Yes, they are very large windows… a wall of them!

Good point about NOT moving the table Bill.

I like the idea of using the natural light that’s available.

1. Any tips on making the subject “stand out” from the background if using light from windows?
2. Have you guys ever used a green screen in this situation?
3. Any tips on making an interesting background?
4. Have you ever tried shooting something like this with the window/skyline in the background? I was always taught NOT to shoot with a window as a background. any thoughts?

Always learning,

cheers,
G

Gilles

[Mark Suszko]

For the head honcho, the aricraft-carrier-sized desk and big window view is a status symbol. They tend to insist on it, unless you can come up with eqwually cool-looking shots. If you have the right tools to keep those in the shot, you should. But a backlit window shot is one of the very hardest things to do right, when you don’t have adequate time, tools, or budget.

You already got great and detailed advice, so I’ll take another tack with suggestions for what to try if you can’t do it the “right” way, but they insist on the window anyhow.

Set up the window shot without the chair and person in it, expose so the view out the window is properly exposed (the interior will look too dark, that’s okay) and roll off several minutes of this shot, locked-down. Now, without moving the camera, add the chair and guest, adjust the iris setting to get a good exposure on the talent, and and do your shot. In post, you can composite these two layers and have a great amount of control of the window. You can even add in fake DOF effects. But a huge down-side of this is that it really only works with locked-off shots; shots with camera motion – zooms, pans, tilts, all the tricks that help make a shot “sexy” – you can’t do those and keep the composite working, not without a heck of a lot of tracking and rotoscope work. Which you can’t afford, or you’d have lit the room with HMI’s to begin with.

A variation on this technique would be to shoot an unblocked, straight-on high def still of that window view, then block the window with green paper and expose the room normally. Only composite the window back-in during post. The re-positioning and scaling of the window in this context will be much less challenging than doing that to an entire room.

As far as the DOF issue, boardrooms have to be relatively big or long, so placing the camera at an extreme opposite end and zooming-in should work pretty well, though it restricts your framing and motion a bit. I have done shots in hotel rooms where to get the DOF control I needed, I put the camera and tripod way out in the hall, and zoomed in thru the open doorway. The audience will never know.

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks Mark,

Great feedback. Very clever idea re: composite. Thanks for pointing out the drawbacks though. I think I’ll skip on using the window as a background.

With a 1/3″ CCD (HD), To get some DOF I understand I must move the camera far, Zoom in and keep the subject away from the background.

A. From your experience, how far should the camera be from the subject?
B. How far should the subject be from the background?

I know there is no exact answer to this but any guidance will help. 🙂

Gilles

[Mark Suszko]

https://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/detail.aspx?sid=48

[Aaron Cadieux]

Another trick to getting a shallow DOF, in addition to positioning the camera far away from the subject, is to blast the subject w/ enough light that you can throw on your darkest on-camera ND filter (if your camera has a built-in NDs) and shoot w/ you camera’s iris wide open. The more open the iris, the more shallow the DOF will be. In order to keep the 2nd ND/wide-open iris partnership in-tact, you can physically move your key light further away from or closer to the subject depending on your exposure needs. To help, set your camera’s zebra lines to 70. W/ 70, you should have a hint of zebra on the subject’s face, which is the ideal exposure for human skin. Hope this helps.

Aaron