Framing a Video Interview

Video Transcript

"My name is Owen Roth and in this clip I'll be talking about framing for a video interview. When framing you want to have a couple of things in mind. One, what are you going to be using the video for, or the interview for, in the video, whether it's going to stand by itself, be inter-cut with other interviews, be roll footage, or maybe even other, how many cameras you have for the interview. Because if you have multiple cameras, you can have one that's tight on the face and another master shot which is a wide shot, and you can inter-cut back and forth between the cameras when one doesn't work. So that can dictate how you frame. But if you only have one camera and no camera operator, so it's just you, you might want to just get a nice medium frame where you've got their whole face and maybe part of their body, and just leave it there on the tripod, hit "Record", and then you can start your interview session. That way if the person being interviewed moves around, you've got a lot of room to play with, so they don't go in and out of frame, and it doesn't lose focus. Or, if you want to add a little bit more energy to it, you could take the camera off a tripod, and add a little bit of shake to it. And if you're inter-cutting this with other things for specific subjects like maybe extreme sports or BMX, in the interview of a BMX rider or something like that, and you're inter-cutting it with that footage of someone riding a BMX, and then go back to the interview and it's a static shot it might be boring, so then having a little bit of shake in the interview and coming in for a close shot and whatnot, that might add the energy that you're looking for. So you really want to play around with it. And the other thing is you might want to think about what's behind the person you're interviewing, and how you can hide that or show that, because that might add to what they're talking about."