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Different Types of Interviews

So I think we wanna share some other examples now of, you know, ways we've done interviews, in terms of lighting and, you know, sometimes there are interviews that we do that are very formal, and the lighting is very formal. Other times, it's more in like true documentary style and we're on the move, we don't have time or the ability to control everything. Sometimes we try to do interviews, and this is something I know we strive to do more and more of, which is figuring out a way to do interviews on the fly, on the go. You know, because sometimes, maybe it's because after you do one thing a lot, you wanna find a different way of doing it, but, you know, this idea of having everybody sit down, "Hi, I'm Ed Kashi, I'm a photojournalist," blah, blah, blah. You know, it would be nice to just sort of get me as I'm maybe doing something, ask me the questions, and then, you know, to capture a much more natural way of speaking. And when a subject is in the moment, you know, you never know what ...

kinds of magic you'll get out of them. Emotion, or detail, or description. The problem with doing interviews on the fly or on the run is the audio background that, as an editor, even though I'm not an editor, but for editors it becomes such a problem with audio continuity. You know, you might have one great sound bite when there's a bus going by, which is fine, it's usable, but then the next sound bite it's completely quiet. So, there's a discontinuous nature in the background noise. I would say that's the biggest stumbling block with doing more informal, on the move interviews. Yeah, it makes the editing trickier for sure. So, these interviews, these have a combination of natural and artificial light, so these are not so dissimilar to what we did with David Goed. These were a series of artist interviews that we did for a project on a mural. And so, they all participated in the same mural, but what we wanted to do was to show them in their own studios, so it was really, really important to place them in their own context. It was an opportunity to show more of their work, because the mural is only one piece of, you know, a body of work. These were also done to be used on the Verse multimedia interactive platform. And so, when Verse runs Q&As, they need a field on one side where you can have the questions, you have a menu of questions that appear, so we were framing these up also knowing that we needed to have an area that you could have these bars, hot buttons, you know. That's another thing to think about when you're doing interviews is, you know, especially with the online, you know, digital platforms now that so often we're working with or for, is that, you know, we now can have graphics, you know, on the interview. And, as Julie said, sometimes you need to allow space for that. Also, Julie decided on these. You know, we did tight and wide, but on the wides, they were much wider than we would normally go. You know, and that was an interesting, certainly a variation for us. You know, often the tight is somewhere here and the wide is maybe here. Not a huge, huge difference, but in this case, we really wanted the wide to be wide because we were in these artists' spaces, and we wanted to give sort of breathing room to them. And it felt like, yeah, we knew they'd have visual environments, so I wanted more environment. The intimacy was less important than establishing them as creatives in what might have even been chaotic creative environments. So, this one in the upper corner, look at how much visual information. We cleared out all kinds of visual information to distill to that, but it's great because, you know, you look at it and you're there with them. These are pretty cool looking people in a cool setting. We used diva lights on these, so we used sort of pretty big light boxes, you know, light sources, light panels, excuse me. Something to think about too when you do an interview, in a number of different settings, we've done things where we'll have somebody walk in and sit down, and you just let your camera run because that could be useful. If you're going to, you know, to break that wall and show some of the production elements, we've done that too where there'll maybe be a third camera that's showing the big setup, because it's that kind of video that gives you that latitude. This fellow in the lower right corner was talking all about how he's inspired by this hybrid of martial art and dance, and so, at some point in the interview, I was like, "Could you show me what it looks like?" So you gotta be prepared, too, to shoot it where all of a sudden we just ratchet it out. He was like, "Oh, yeah, cool," and I didn't know if he would or he would. You know, it's like asking somebody to sing a song and they're like, "Really, now?" And he was like, "Okay, cool," and he picked his chair up and he moved it and then he started doing this tutting stuff, and you know. And so, we were there, and you gotta respond to it, 'cause it was this brilliant moment. And then when it was like, "Oh, could you do that again?" He's like, "Nah," and he sat back down, you know? Did I miss that? We got it, we got it. Okay. All right, so then, these are examples of natural light, and you know, tight and wide. This is from the work in Nicaragua, the kidney disease project. So, this is a case where I have brought no lighting with me, none whatsoever. Not even a small LED. Just, I'm going natural, whatever I have, whatever I confront, that's what I'm gonna work with. And you know, you can use that effectively. The trickiest thing about natural light, particularly if you're relying on more than sort of open shade is that, if clouds come and there are variations, it can create so much stress and just be super problematic. You know, because it's kind of funky. Yes, you can adjust your exposure, but ultimately it's going to look different in the course of the interview. So, that's something that, you know, even though that always happens, I still continue to do it because there's that part of me that wants to just use the natural light, you know? But it's something you need to be aware of. And then these are more formal, you know, sort of studio, in the field, with a backdrop, probably three lights here, two in front, and then one behind to really light up the background. And this is client work now where we're, you know, for a foundation, where there's no hair and makeup, but you know, to address one of your questions, they do need to look good. They can't have things out of place. And in this instance too, we've got one or our lights on the floor shining up at the backdrop to create the halo. All right, and then one more example. This is from the film we did called Hijabi World. We'll play that, and then we can field some questions. The most ridiculous thing I've been asked is like, "Oh, what's the color of your hair?" Somebody will come up to me and be like, "Wait, do you speak English? "English?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I speak English." Or like, "Do you shower with that on?" And I'm like, "Yeah, totally, I shower with this on." And no, I'm not deprived or oppressed. No one forces me to wear hijab. There's nothing that really limits me just because I wear hijab. Hijab itself feels like a feminist movement because you're controlling what the world sees. Over the years, it's become part of my identity. It's become a part of my skin, it's become a part of who I am, and without it, I'm not me. I rock my Islam, I rock my blackness, I rock my femininity with all the pride that I can because I love it. It would be a lot easier if I just took off my hijab, but I feel like once you do that, you accept the idea that Muslim women who wear hijab aren't part of the American story, when in fact, we are. So, with this film, with this film, it was a completely different approach. I just had this kind of like, we'd been given this Newest Americans project where this handful of young Muslim women at Newark had done a kind of, they'd interviewed each other, and they'd done a pretty static version of, you know, asking, having themselves express what it's like to wear the hijab, the good, and the bad, and all that. And so, I had this idea that what I wanted to do, so I got a Ronin, I got a Steady Cam, and my vision was that, you know, I would have the camera just right here, sorta just right in front of them, and then have the mic, and let them just walk so that they could speak in a sort of prideful, strong way to the camera, and then also allow it to have kind of, you know, just sort of a sense of place, this sort of urban setting. And we, you know, we did a train station, we did downtown Newark, we had one woman on a bike. We tried to do a swimmer. That never worked out. We did, oh, so you didn't see her? On a track, we had one on a track. A Palestinian woman who was in the track and field team. Anyway, so that was the idea there, which was something we had never done before, and it was kind of cool. Very interesting way to try something different. And part of it was, again, sometimes there's something about a compressed energy when you get people to sit, and you've got the cameras on them, and you've got something up their shirt. That doesn't mean you can't do something great, but sometimes it's just nice to sort of break out of that, and this was an example of that. So, back to lighting just for one second. Do you tend to light differently for men and women? I know a lot of women kinda prefer that more direct flat light versus kind of the side light, or do you sort of have your own look with that? Yeah, well, I don't do what our subjects prefer. No, no. (laughing) No, simple answer is no, I don't. You know, I think I look at lighting based on what I'm trying to say and what's appropriate for the message or the story we're trying to tell. Yeah, I would say that's it. But in general, I think, you know, I sort of tend to set up lighting about 45 degrees, generally sort of off-center so there's a little bit of modeling. And then if we wanna do something more dramatic, then of course, put the light at a more dramatic angle. Pretty basic stuff. You know, and then whether I use fill light or some sort of a fill, you know, a light source, we'll do that as well. But it's really about what, you know, again, client work is different, 'cause often, you've either talked about or you know what is expected. It's very rare that they want very dramatic lighting. Sometimes, but it's pretty rare. In our own personal work, we can do whatever we want, you know? And so then it's really about using the lighting to tell the story you wanna tell and characterize the subjects the way you want them characterized. For both of you, do you like to shoot in a log profile, or you prefer just a built in? Log, yeah. So, we color correct on the back end everything, and so it's much better to work with the most flexibility possible. That said, the pre-shoot, the video we're gonna watch later that we did for CreativeLive, we did that in, it was an EOS setting in a Canon C100, and the reason was there was zero time for color correction, and that's also not my expertise. So, I could mess around with it, but what a waste of time, because I really don't know what I'm doing in color correction. So, we shot that in an EOS profile because it'll look beautiful just out of the camera without having to monkey around. But I'd recommend shooting log. You know, the drawback is that it doesn't look good, and sometimes is actually harder to focus, right? So, there are, I mean, I'm not a huge tech person, but on the cameras we use, there are viewfinder settings where you can adjust the viewfinder so that it looks a little, you know, there's a little more contrast. But it's sorta like shooting, in still photos, you shoot in raw. Why would you not shoot raw? You want the best, the most information and the best quality to work with. But back to budgeting, don't forget to add color correction into your budget, because if you are going to work in a flattened profile, then you better give time or money for that.