Interviews - 02 - Yarnton
Yarnton Manor, Yarnton, UK
Sony FX6 - Thypoch Simera-C 24mm
It wouldn’t be a trip to the UK without shooting in a old manor house, right? Yarnton Manor was an excellent spot to conduct another of of our interviews, in a setting that still felt authoritative, yet less imposing than the Christ Church Library. We thought we knew the room that we were going to shoot in, but that changed once we actually arrived on set…
Location
Since we wanted to carry over our center framing for all our interviews, and from the photos we received of the space, we were locked in on a space that seemed to have great depth, symmetry, and motivating windows for our light.
Yarnton Manor - The room we’d planned to film in.
However, when we got to the room, something just felt… off. Maybe it was that the room was slightly more compressed than the website photo made it look, maybe it was that the wood felt a bit too monochromatic, but we knew it wouldn’t be right for our frame.
Luckily, the folks at Yarnton were extremely helpful, and showed us a couple other spaces that might work out well. One of them was a library that was smaller than our initial room, but had a much better background. It retained the air of authority we were looking for through it’s library, but felt a little bit more approachable and warm. Sconce lights built into the book shelves added even more depth to the image!
Yarnton Manor - The room we eventually shot in.
The Shot
I always prefer to motivate my light with a window in frame if I can, so we chose the corner that let us catch both the book shelf and the window. From there, we had to do a decent bit of rearranging: we pushed the couch out from the middle of the room to underneath the window to back it off of our subject, removed two other armchairs from the shot, and placed a coffee table with a chess set on it in the background.
This is why set dressing is so important, but also counterintuitive. While the table with the chessboard would never be placed there in real life, it does a phenomenal job of balancing out the couch on the right side, and making the room feel just the right amount of full. Without it, the left side of the frame would feel distant and empty. With it, it your eyes are naturally drawn to the speaker.
Next was lighting. We used a Godox F600 as a key light pushing through quarter grid. Since we were backed into a corner trying to get enough space, a 600X wouldn’t fit. This was my first time using the F600, and I was happy with it. These lights pack a lot of punch!
A 1200X outside the window created our sun slash across the background (with a net to knock down some of the level on the couch), and a B7C gave us control of the lamp. We did sneak in a tube light behind our subject to light up the darker wall directly behind him, and another one for a hair light to mimic the sconces. If I had to do it again, I’d ditch our bounce on the fill side: it did a little too much in my opinion.
Final Thoughts
Flexibility is incredibly important on set, and this frame shows why. Rather than sticking with our plan for the sake of sticking to a plan, we adapted to a better option, and got another awesome shot.
