Shooting Interviews in boring environment

[Jon Zanone]

Lose the window unless you plan on putting some CTO w/ ND up knock down some of the light. If you don’t, you won’t even see the boring trees in post – just a boring white blob that will truly look bad. In my experience, it’s not the interviewee that’s boring – it’s the interviewER. Your job (if you are the one asking the questions) is to extract whatever passion these people have for whatever subject your trying to get across…

Jon

“So you want to throw out the old you – but the old you is old enough to know it won’t make it better”
Del Amitri – “Make it Better”

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

Ditto to Jon’s answers!

[Charley King]

I totally agree, you aren’t interviewing the setting. The interest should be in the interviewee, not the set.

Charlie

ProductionKing Video Services
Unmarked Door Productions
Flamingo Las Vegas Hotel
Las Vegas, Nevada

[Dave Boampong]

Thanks guys

[Mike Cohen]

get a piece of black muslin and throw some light with colored gels on it, and cover the windows with a blanket or something.

What are the other 4 walls of the room?

Mike

[Mark Suszko]

These guys are right: there is no reason the interview MUSt be boring, no matter the subject, if your interviewer asks the right questions. Now, there are simple and easy and inexpensive things to do to spice up a setting for the interview. It depends a lot on what kind of message you’re trting to out out and etc.

Some people hate white-walled rooms, but to me, they are a blank canvas for me to play on with shadows cast by cookies and gobos. One of my favorite things is to shoot into a corver of a white-walled room and sublty gel each wall a different color wash. If it’s a corver that also has a column in it, that’s even better, as the different planes and angles take the shadows differently and add some depth without being distracting.

You can get fancier, obviously: if you shoot everything greenscreen, your options are infinite. But you can also do stuff like bring a slide or video/data projector along and throw images and type on the walls and floor and etc. You can bring in muslin or photog’s paper backdrops and throw slashes of light across them, etc. It’s up to your budget and imagination. I have shot in regular motel rooms and gotten nice blurred BG behind the interviewees that looked great.

And there are variations like shooting walk and talk or drive and talk, etc. There really isn’t such a thing as a boring interview shot that you can’t make better. If you WANT to.