Location Ideas for Video Interviews

Video Transcript

"Now not every interview has to be a seated interview in someone's office or house or whatever. Sometimes you want to bring a little more motion into your interview. And there are different ways to do this. One technique that I really enjoy is actually conducting an interview in a car. If you sit in the passenger seat you can film the driver, if the driver is the interview subject. And that way, you get plenty of stuff going on because you can see the background constantly changing, you see the driver moving, you see that you're in a car instead of seated, but at the same time, the subject is still staying relatively still and you don't move around too much either. The one thing that you have to be careful of, of course is that you're doing this in a safe way, you have to wear a seatbelt and you'll probably find yourself pressed up against the edge of the car to make sure that you have a good shot. What I tend to do is zoom in all the way, to the other side of the car, get my focus there, then pull out, so that I don't have to worry about constantly changing my focus. And then find a position in the car that I can maintain where the subject is usually on the left hand side of my frame and that way they have some lead room to the right of them. Another thing that you can do, is interview someone while they're walking. You can do this with a tripod or you can do it hand-held. If you do it with a tripod, what you do is, you set up the tripod from a distance. You zoom in on the person and as they walk toward you speaking, you slowly zoom out. Another option is to go hand-held with the interview. Hand-held can be tricky, because you need to make sure that the movement is as smooth as possible and the movement is only going to be as smooth as your own personal movement. If you're doing hand-held, I recommend walking backwards slowly to have a consistent frame that you keep the whole time, where you know where your subject is going to be in the frame. And as the subject moves, move your body, but do it in a controlled way. You can anticipate the way someone's going to move and then you can move with them. And as you're walking backwards, try sliding with your feet rather than just stepping and stepping and stepping. It's almost like slip stepping, as you walk backwards, it's like Moon-walking."