Interviews - 00 - Intro
Location is King
I once heard that being a good DP is about 5% skill, 50% crew, and 45% location.
Man, if that’s not true.
On a job I shot back in January, we needed to shoot seven interviews across 4 different countries. We wanted the overall piece to feel friendly, yet authoritative. It’s a blend of characteristics that visual storytelling often runs, but this time it was with an academic twist.
The film we shot is about a research program running out of Oxford University, and so we wanted to extend the authority of the school into the visuals while also creating a welcoming and exciting tone to the piece. In a word, we wanted our target audience (the grant steering committee) to be intrigued.
What Did We Look For?
Often, it’s very easy to simply try and shoot an interview in the most convenient place available. I really advocated trying to find locations for our interviews that really matched the feel of the video, as well as the specific location that each scholar we were interviewing was in.
For Oxford, that was something older and authoritative. For Amsterdam, we wanted modern yet smart. Jerusalem is famous for Jerusalem Stone, and so we wanted to have a shot that captured that.
Ultimately, it was about trying to create interview frames that lended more authority to the subject matter in the video. We wanted the client and steering committee to not only know we were taking this seriously, but that we truly believed in the project itself, and that intentional cinematography could really elevate it.
What is this Series?
In these posts, I’ll go through some of our locations, why we chose them, how we chose our frame, and how we lit the shot. Interviews form the backbone of documentary and corporate videos alike, and so I’d like to walk through we we shot them how we did.
