On the video above videographer Bart Johnson takes us onto a two days shoot that he had made for a client. It is especially interesting to see how some of the lights were set up both inside and outdoors.
Shooting both indoors and outdoors present unique challenges for interviews. On indoors shoot you need to either work with existing illumination (it isn’t always possible to turn off lighting in every location that you shoot in) or provide your own. In some situations, like the one Johnson shows in the first part of the video most of the illumination was brought on by the team however there was still some light from the windows (which can be good if it works for you but can also be a big problem and a reason why having blankets on hand can be a good idea).
On the first scene (indoors) you can see some of the lighting placements, at first it might seem like some of the lights are doing very little (especially the accent lights) but if you think about shooting like painting, small brush strokes can go a long way and adding just a bit of hair light or a streak of light in the background can turn a rather blend shoot into much more interesting (and in some cases give the people you interview more depth).
Shooting outdoor brings a whole host of other challenges. When shooting a full day outside you have to consider where the sun will be throughout the day (there are all sorts of apps for that; this one for Android is free). You might also need to overpower the sun which isn’t easy in some cases for video shooting (and in Johnson’s case they eventually realized they didn’t bring enough batteries to last for a full day with the lights at full power which is another issue – outdoors you need to bring all the power with you).
Of course, you can try and use the sun to your own advantage by using large diffusers. This is what Johnson ended up doing, but this has it’s challenging as well (if there is a wind you need to make sure you put enough weight on the diffuser so it won’t move or fall for example). Wind can also be a problem for sound recording outdoors (Johnson didn’t talk about audio recording in this video but from the BTS you can see that he had a dedicated sound person on set – which is always a great idea if you have the budget for that).
As always, you can find many more behind the scenes videos on the BTS section here on LensVid.
Iddo Genuth 
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