cinematic interviews, made simple

Back by popular demand, I'm going to be reviewing your cinematography, specifically your interview setups. So before we do that, I want to talk about that art of the interview, give you some core tips and some things I have been learning with my own interview cinematography. If you want details of how to send your footage in to get reviewed, you can look below. But let's talk about how to make your interview cinematography look the most, I won't say cinematic, beautiful. One thing right off the top, we're always talking about the background and what's behind our subject and frame. But I think something that's overlooked often is if you're the director, what is your background? If you're expecting someone to open up and to be vulnerable, you have to think about what is behind you. Is it a busy window? Is it a bunch of crew members on their phone? Is it really bright? Is it tough for them to see? You want to create an environment that makes the person on camera feel valued, comfortable, and also keeps them focused. But truly, the first thing that I'm doing is always, where is the natural light coming from? When I was doing this interview setup here, the first thing I'm realizing is there's all these lights on this side of the room. So of course, that is where I'm going to start setting up my key if I want this to feel the most natural, which is typically the cinematography style that I'm going for. The first thing when you're setting up your interview is the size of the light you're using will determine how wide of a shot you can actually get. If you are using smaller lights that have a smaller modifier, you will have to bring that light in very close in order to get a softer wrap on your subject's face, which in turn means the light is closer to them, so you will have to shoot a tighter shot. You can't shoot wide. But if you want to show the room and have what I would say is a more interesting interview, you will need a bigger light that has a bigger modifier to actually create that wrap. We love wrap because it's a slower gradient and like what's happening on my face right now, I have the shadow. Typically, this is what you're going for in interviews. It's not a principle. You can have hard light in interviews, but usually softer light will make people's skin texture and tone look its best. This is the push and pull of shooting interviews. A bigger light will allow you to get a wider shot because you can move that light further away and then turn your camera further away and have a larger field of view. But if you have smaller lights, you'll have to bring them in closer in order to get that wrap. Can you see that hack that I often do on set? I get a five and one bounce out, take the diffusion screen and put that a few feet in front of my light and then in turn makes my light bigger because it's now hitting a new source, which is creating an even bigger spread. This is also why we use grids because it focuses that light so that it's not spreading in a more larger area. So you'll see if I quickly add this, this is perhaps a little more dramatic. This is me maybe talking about something more intense in my life, or maybe I'm talking about being a documentary filmmaker, a cinematographer. There is some sort of a harmony. This can work. The higher the contrast ratio, how bright the brightest part is to the darkest part, especially on my character's face, will create more drama. You want less drama, make it feel more like a comedy. Get rid of that contrast. Look at this book. Shut up and shoot documentary guide. Producer, he has lights. Sound recording says roll sound. If you're about to do like an intimate interview and you have everyone yelling, rolling sound, roll camera, rolling, speed. Yeah, do that on a scripted show. Just never do that on a documentary. That's the quickest way to make someone feel completely nervous. And then you'll say, okay, let's have an intimate interview. My next point is consider getting closer. This shot that we set up on the 35 mil was really wide. We saw a lot of the room. And if I want to feel closer to my subject, I can option it to a 50 like we did here. But all that does is compress the depth. To me, it's not as intimate as a look. Sometimes we want to feel close to our subject and that closeness, that proximity again, add to the drama. Next time you're setting up an interview, instead of just optioning to go on a longer lens to compress in and get closer, why not move your camera in closer? Look at the difference between these shots. Here's the 50 and here's the 35 pushed in much closer to our subject. For me, that 35 is a much more dramatic frame. In a day and age where we've seen this 50 mil shot time and time again, pushing in closer can make your shot just a little more unique, but also give you more emphasis in terms of the depth of your room. We don't yell at people across the room and that's the kind of experience of a longer lens. But when you bring the camera in wide, like I am here with you, well, we feel like friends. It's almost making this interview shot something I could watch longer than perhaps just the typical 50 shot. I'm curious to know what you think. You can comment below. Are we friends? Another point I want to make, if you want to make your interviews go from kind of amateur to professional, protecting your highlights. I see this so often. People let windows blow out or highlights clip on people's face. Protect this. Look at that. That thing's floating. Don't you love Premiere? I'm in my footage. I'm always messing around, making sure that the LUT I'm using or my correction isn't blowing out. Like this is clipping a bit. Here's my footage. I have, this is the log. Yeah, that is clipping already in the footage as I can see in the log. So when I drop in my LUT and I'm using the chaos LUT here from Artlist, I might want to pull that back a bit. Let me just pull it back just a little bit. Not really doing much, but it's at least not drawing our eye to it as much. And this LUT, as I mentioned, is the chaos LUT, I believe. Yeah, from Artlist, which is a great segue into today's sponsor, Artlist. They have hundreds of LUTs on their website. They're a bit bloody, if you know what I mean. But this is the beautiful thing with your Artlist subscription is you have access to all of these LUTs and all the lower thirds you're seeing today are actually templates from Artlist. There's many of them like this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. And they've even included this new super cool feature called library extensions, which is a plugin directly inside Adobe Premiere. If you're still using Premiere like I am, and you can access their library from there and they're going to be adding the footage library to this very soon. So you can pull your sound effects over. So you're essentially licensing them as you're dropping them into your timeline without you having to ever leave your edit software and just maintain your focus on this. They have subscriptions as low as $9.99 a month. And they also have big team enterprise solutions. So if you're working in an agency or with multiple people on your team, you can get one that's tailored for your purpose, your purpose in life, what you need. It's really quite nice when they have this many LUTs. You know, I sell my own LUTs, but I do still come to the Artlist library sometimes to get that nice tweak. You can see I'm only applying this LUT here at 88%. But I do think it looks nice. They have other ones. But sometimes it's just not right for the footage. This is a bit warmer. This is the Alfred LUT. Actually, that is kind of nice. Yeah, I'm a sucker for dark, moody shots. Which one do you guys like? No, definitely this. This is the Chaos LUT. I might boost it up the exposure. Let me come back in here. That's nice. Very nice. And I put a little discount code below in the description if you're interested in checking out Artlist. We love them, we use them. I actually really do like this Chaos LUT. It's really nice in the shadows. Gives just a little bit of blue in there. Now back to our video. The next point is something I started recently, and that's dividing my shot in two thirds. I'm not talking about the rule of thirds, but simply just analyzing it in three vertical columns. You can do this by literally putting a book on your frame or your hands or just looking at it in three individual chunks. Now I was excited about these new anamorphic lenses I was using, so I wasn't so concerned about this. But had I actually done this process, I would have changed things because looking at this section, the frame is very dark on this right side. There's not much visual interest. There's not a lot of dynamic light. There's not high contrast ratios or something coming in there. I should have at least broken it up with a new color, perhaps a plant, or think about bringing a slash of light in there. Even right here, if we were to just look at this section of the frame, the screen is interesting, but this big black chair starts to be a bit ugly. If this was just a portrait that half the time is going to be out of focus, do I find it appealing? Do I find it distracting? Or does it play into the story that I'm telling? You always have to approach these things as though you're an artist. It doesn't matter if you're shooting a corporate interview. Look at each section of the frame. You can't analyze every pixel, but you can look at big chunks, and this will help you determine if the overall balance, style, aesthetic, and lighting is making the best overall image. Lastly, you've heard me say this before, but it's all about the light you're removing as much as it is about the light you're adding. There's essentially just two ways you can really add shadow, and that's by either bringing in a negative fill or increasing your key light and lowering your overall exposure. I'll show you this. Right now, I have a pretty bright light. This is the brightest thing in the room, and that's why I'm able to create shadow on this side of my face because I'm lowering the exposure. I'll put this into practice. I'm going to brighten this light right now. You can see how much brighter it is, but I'm really going to lower my exposure here on the FX9. You can see just how much shadow I've created by only simply adding in more ND filter onto my camera and increasing this light. This light's now probably at about 100%. I can go back to where I was before. I was at 128 ND, and now I'm back down to 118. There you go. A lot less shadow, a lot less dramatic. To show you with a negative fill, because I already have this room all blocked out, let me hop over there. Landon has a negative fill. Here's my shot. You can see I'm getting some bounce off the room. You can bring that in. There you go. There's shadow being created just by adding a little black on the side there. You know this already. I've spoken about this extensively on this channel about using negative fill, but I want you to think about it that way. Shadows are your friends. There's two ways you can create shadows. That's either by increasing your key, like I mentioned, and lowering the overall exposure, or by bringing in that negative fill. One simple light. It's all I did with those shots with Lauren, and that's all you need. If you have a big soft light, I mean, half the time, that's all I do. I just usually increase the light bright enough that I can create the shadows. We tried all day to do the negative fill on that side, but it was too big. I would have needed huge 12 by 12s, so I just increased the brightness of my light and brought the exposure down a little more. This helped me too with those windows in the background. Understanding exposure will help you be able to fight big bright windows in the background, and having a light that is a bit brighter, that's obviously bigger, helps you send more light into the room, and then you have kind of complete control. If you want more information about interview lighting and documentary filmmaking, we have some free PDF guides down below, different lighting setups, single camera lighting interviews, going all the way up to more advanced lighting setups. We have a guide about questions for interviews. We even have one about matching your cameras when you have different color profiles or different lenses. Like in this Chris Williamson interview, we had an Alexa and a bunch of FX6s, and we had to match that in post. These are for free, but if you want to go more in depth into your filmmaking, your storytelling, your cinematography, you can check out Art of Documentary. Our doors are open permanently now, and we've also put a huge discount for our Foundations course, putting it up to 40% off right now. We just really want to help filmmakers who are starting off in their career or deep into their filmmaking get the best information, get community, and take ground in their careers. Awesome. Thank you for watching this one. Have you seen The Brutalist? I did. That was three and a half hours. There's nothing like watching a movie with sex scenes in it while you're sitting beside your parents. Anyways, go check out AOD if you haven't, or download those free PDFs below. I really appreciate you guys. You're so kind in the comments, but you can be mean as well. It's okay. If you need to rage on me and you're having a bad day, let me know. Alright, see you in the next one.