From the course: Lighting a Video Interview
Time of day
As you determine the mood for a shot, which is going to effect how you light the interview, there are several factors to consider. One of the first ones Jim, that I was think as important is time of day, and this could be the time of day that direction recording. It could be the time of day, you are trying to fake, because may be the interviews a four hour interview, and you don't want to see the time shift. Or maybe it's the time of day, you're trying to match. How do you sort of determine, initially the starting time of day, or what time of day the shot should be? >> Well, you can always divide these things into two categories, there's always the practical and sort of the creative story content side of things. In this case, time of day has both of those considerations. On the practical side is duration if the interviews going to run long and continuity is an issue you sort of want to make sure that its not distracting that, there are lighting changes, mood changes, not only in the middle of say sound bite but all, across the whole interview especially if something in the beginning of the interview may cut against something in the, in the end of the interview. For example, there's a, you know, window behind your subject and, at the beginning of the interview, started 5 o'clock it's lit, and then by the time you finish it's completely dark, well that's, that's a pretty big change. >> And you never know, as you enter editing you might need things that were recorded at the very beginning or the very end. Interviews are rarely shown in a linear fashion. And particularly with things like documentary projects, sometimes you could be sitting down for hours with a subject. Now, if it is, an indoor location and you don't have any windows or things coming into play, it's almost timeless. But you're shooting near sunrise or sunset, it can go from one lighting condition to something pretty different. Or clouds could come in and completely change the available light. So Jim, it makes sense from a technical point of view, that's often what drives it, but we like to move beyond Just lighting things from a technical point of view. There are some story purposes, right? >> Yeah, aside from the practical, there's the question of style. I mean, that can determine your approach to time of day or mood. I mean, is the, is the mood somber? Is it warm and fuzzy? And also, it, just in a style sense of how these interviews, if there's multiple ones, are going to stack up a, against each other. Did they all need to match? They all need to, to have a linearity to them in a similarity and style, although they, they all want to be divergent and be very different. I t depends on you know, what your creative and style choices are as well as practical and technical. So, lets say I'm shooting for a talk show, they may say, you know what, We're going to be shooting interviews all over the world at all different times of day, but we want everything to look like 2 o'clock so we can mix and match, and it all feels consistent. Do you ever get that simplistic a feedback or is there, you know, is it really sort of picking a time of day? And running with it, so things feel consistent. >> It just depends on how much, you want to stay true to the style that's been established hopefully by some sort of continuous creative force, whether it be a producer, or a lead DP, or whomever, because a lot of times there can be multiple people. Working on this thing. And if there wants to be a continuity of style there has to be, that guideline established by someone. Or, we're all agreeing it's going to be loosey, goosey and just take it as a comes. >> So, think about time of day as being an initial decision that needs to be made. Either by you, or for you. Because this is going to serve as the framework, either you're trying to maintain a particular look or create a particular look. But once that's out of the way, there's completely different ways to light things when you start looking at them emotionally. And, we'll talk about that next.
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