How to Film Cinematic Interviews | 4 Lighting Setups

What's up guys? Welcome to 4 Minute Film School. I'm Nares from The A-Team. Today I'm here with Casey Macbeth. Casey Macbeth is a super talented cinematographer who has shot commercials for Disney, he's shot music videos, he's shot a feature film, he's done it all. Today Casey is going to be taking us through four corporate interview setups and how you can light them. So the first corporate setup we did was a pretty standard three-point lighting system to try and take advantage of the space that we're in. A lot of times we're going to be shooting in a corporate setting, you're going to have lots of windows to take advantage of and lots of space that you can use to your advantage. So we set our subject up, then we brought in a 120D just in front of them. We used a light dome to help soften that light. Once we started looking at it, it wasn't quite what we wanted, so we brought in a 6x6 frame of half grid just to soften that up a little bit more. So we actually brought in a lot of lighting to make it look and feel like settings that you guys will probably be shooting in. We actually set up three 120Ds along the wall here. Two of them were just shooting into the wall, giving a nice bounce back into the room just to add a soft feel to it. We also set up another one with a china ball attachment just to give a nice 360 bloom of light to the background. We used two 300Ds just outside these windows to act as our sunlight streaming in. Of course that meant that we could augment the direction of them and that was a huge help. So Casey, what kind of interviews would you use this kind of lighting setup for? This kind of lighting setup is really good for companies that want to appear approachable and share information with their audience base. The soft lighting definitely helps make them not only more attractive but feel more polished. Unfortunately a lot of people will gauge their thoughts of a company based off any images they see from them. So it's really good for anybody that's trying to do something informative for social media or just getting the information of the company out there. What was the next interview setup? This one is a much lower key feeling, a little bit more dramatic, a little bit moodier. Added half CTB to both of our outside 300Ds as well as our background lights. And we also added some no color straw gel to our key light just to kind of help warm that up and help add some color separation between the character and the rest of the environment. I noticed that there was a lot of use of negative fill. Why did you use that? When things are a little contrastier, when you have deeper shadows, it does feel a bit more menacing and that's something we wanted to go for here. What kind of interviews would you ever use menacing lighting for? So this would be great for corporate PSAs that deal with heavier subjects. It'd also be very good for dramatic retellings of darker stories either from a company's history or maybe something they want to avoid in the future. You made a lot of changes to this lighting setup. Why didn't you just drop the fill from the first one and call it a day? We really tried to finesse the scene and that's what I think a lot of people will start to falter on. You'll get your three-point lighting set up really well and it'll work, but the longer you look at a frame before you start, you can start to find things that you don't really care for. One of the things that we noticed is because of the shape and the layout of the land, we ended up having to put our key light right next to this piece of cubicle wall and that made it a little too bright and I felt like it was distracting from the town. So what we did is we ended up flagging that off just to kind of lower those levels and to help draw the eye closer to the subject. It's just as important to take light away as it is to add it. So tell us about the third setup. One of the things that we did is we put one of the 120Ds with a light dome directly above the camera. This gave us great reflectance on the skin for anything that was facing us, but anything like the sides of the nose and the cheek would kind of fall off into a little bit deeper shadow. Then we went through and we added two 120Ds with the mini light domes and the 8 crates just as nice controlled softer back lights on each side just to again help bring out the character from the background. We wanted the subject to stand out, so we went through and adjusted the amount of light coming through our windows and again our fill lights inside just to make sure that everything was at a level that felt homogenous with the scene, but also definitely direct the eye back towards the subject. We had lined our camera directly down the barrel of this hallway. Even though we love the look of the painting back there, the plastic covering was showing a big reflection of our key light. So in order to kill that, my gaffer set up that flag to go between the light and the picture just to kind of help cut that down. One of the things we do with the 300Ds outside, just because they are pushing so much light and shadow into the room, we actually cut those lights down by diffusing them rather than just dialing them down. So by diffusing those lights, we were able to spread the shadows that they made, otherwise they were a bit too crisp and clean and it really distracted from what we wanted the audience to be looking at. And so what would you use this type of interview like for? So I think it's definitely companies that are a little edgier, a little bit more self-aware in the fact that they are directly trying to speak to their audience and they're not going to shy away from that. Then you did a variation, sort of a bonus fourth interview. What was that one like? So that one was just something that I've been wanting to do for a long time and it's really just trying to take advantage of the inverse square law. So what I did is I found a strip box to add to our 120D and I put that directly above the actor's head. But by doing so and dialing that light in to where the exposure was where I wanted it for the face, we had a much more interesting fall-off in the light across the body. So I noticed that you also threw another Mini20 way back there as an accent light. We definitely wanted to mix up the look between the two, so we added another Mini20 in the background. On the third one, we were trying to reduce attention to the painting. On this one, we're trying to accent it. So this type of interview lighting would definitely be for a company that's trying to look a little bit more polished, come off with a stronger message, and definitely somebody who's self-aware of the fact that they are talking to their audiences directly. So there's the episode of 4 Minute Film School with Casey McBeth. I'm Nerys from the A-Team. Go ahead and leave a comment below with your favorite tip or technique for lighting interviews. The best comment is going to win an Aputure M9. Follow Casey McBeth on Instagram. Follow Aputure on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Hit the notification bell. I'm Nerys from the A-Team. We'll catch you guys next time.