Lighting Corporate Interviews

Although most interviews go well, every now and then you'll encounter one that requires you to think on your feet. This was one of those situations. Even though the director and I discussed and pre-planned logistics such as kit and shooting schedule, one thing we overlooked was a picture of the interview location. It’s nobody's fault—sometimes it's incredibly hard to gather information about the location. In most cases, you'll be okay; the location will have a window and maybe a few plants that you can use to create a decent interview setup. However, in this instance, the room was surrounded by white walls, had no window, no plants, only chairs.

This is when you need to get creative. Don’t just shoot into a white wall. Yes, the light will bounce around like crazy (especially if you have a 600D with a massive diffuser), but why not make that bouncing light beautiful?

I spoke with the director and asked if the client had any special company colors. She said blue and orange (I know that’s not actually orange, but I’ll get to that). I thought, okay, in that case, forget the white walls. I’ll fill the room with my Amaran F22c and hopefully add a strip of orange to the background using my Aputure 300x. Technically, you could play around with shapes, but I didn’t bring the right equipment for that. You can see in the image that some of the blue spilled onto the left side of his face. I didn’t dislike it, but I did later fix it with some gaffer tape on the side of the Aputure F22c panel to stop the spill and give it a cleaner look.

Once I added the strip of orange and lowered the 300x all the way to 2700K, I noticed that it wasn’t giving me a proper orange. Lowering the intensity helped; don’t always blast it to 100%. Sometimes the color will come out better if you underexpose the light. Another problem was that the orange mixed with the blue, creating a slightly purplish orange. I believe the only way to fix this would have been to black out the area where the strip was with a floppy and shoot the 300x in that area. That way, there wouldn’t be any blue to mix with, hopefully giving me a more accurate orange.

For lighting the interview, I used the Aputure 600D and a massive 150cm Light Dome by Aputure with the honeycomb attached to prevent spill. The light fell nicely on his face. The only issue was that the white wall behind him was bouncing light back and reducing contrast, so I leaned a black flag against the wall where the hotspot was to stop the bounce. I didn’t have enough space to bring it closer, as it would have been in the frame for the wide shot. Once the lighting was set, all that was left was to set up the mic and sort out the cables, and "voila, cinema."

Last tip: always turn off the house lights if you can. If you can’t, it’s okay.