How to Light Interviews and Documentaries

Home Applications How to Light Interviews and Documentaries

Garrett Sammons Garrett is the Creative Director at Nice Shirt Media and part-time film professor. With a primary focus on commercial cinematography, he also creates narrative and documentary films.

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Written by Garrett Sammons

Filmmakers shoot interviews constantly, whether it's for documentary, commercial, or corporate work. As such, an essential part of every filmmaker's toolkit is understanding how to light people attractively. A good setup can be the difference between a dimly lit subject and one whose features and skin tone are well-balanced. In this blog, we're going to look at how to light interviews and documentaries.

Whether you're filming an interview or documentary, lighting in a way that services the story is as important as the location of your shoot. For this tutorial, we filmed an interview with a model in a theatre environment to demonstrate the importance of telling your story through lighting.

Choosing the Right Location One of the first things to consider when filming interviews is how the environment that we're shooting in affects the story we're telling. How we set up our lights and cameras is then entirely dependent on the filming location.

At the beginning of your filmmaking career, you're likely to come across corporate clients who want to cram you into a conference room or another small space. These types of spaces are often too tiny to do any real lighting, which means the location doesn't serve the story.

So, it's crucial to make sure that the location you are filming in contributes to the narrative and story you are telling. This makes a location scout a super important part of your filming and production team. Your location scout will go to your intended filming location ahead of time to determine where you want the interview to be set up.

The larger the environment you're in, the better it will be for your story. A larger environment allows you to add depth and detail to your narrative. So, don't settle for tiny conference rooms. Lean into finding large environments that service the narrative you're going for.

The larger environment can be off-site too. A lot of clients will want you to be in their location, but there might be other spaces that make more sense. So, before you even set up a single light, you need to identify the most suitable location for your narrative.

Filming your interviews in a big space also ensures that there's minimal to zero spill from the subject lights into the background. The more depth we have within our space, the more forgiving our lighting can be from foreground and background.

For this tutorial, our filming location was a theatre stage. However, your location will depend on the profession of your subject and the story you're hoping to tell with your project.

Using Light to Tell a Story Once we found the ideal location for our shoot, we then decided on how we would light the set. Now, there are two sets of lights in a theatre environment - stage lights and house lights. And we wanted to lean on that in our lighting setup.

When approaching lighting interviews, your first focus should be on how to set up your background light because it's not enough to light the subject. For this, we used the Gemini 2 1 Soft fixture. We set it up high with barn doors around it to shape the light. We put the fixture on a combo stand about 15 feet in the air and slightly pointed it down into the seating behind our subject.

We ensured that this was not enough to light the space because we wanted it to feel like the house lights would be dimmed down, whereas the stage lights where our subject is were turned on. We used this lighting to just barely illuminate to give context to our background.

Although lighting for a stage is a slightly extreme example, illuminating your background, even in a corporate environment gives placement to your subject.

I always light the background first when setting up lighting. Setting the background before lighting the foreground allows me to match those contrast ratios accordingly. That way, the background isn't too blown out in the highlights or shadows. You don't need to follow the same setup order, but starting with the background adjustments is especially important in environments where you don't have a lot of control.

Hair Light Setup

The purpose of a hair light, also known as a backlight, is to separate the foreground from the background. This can be done in a couple of ways. For this tutorial, we put a Gemini 1 1 Soft into a softbox. We didn't put any front diffusion on it, just a 40-degree DoPchoice egg crate on the front of it to eliminate spill from the foreground to the background.

We placed the light up and over from behind the subject and used it as a stage light. We also adjusted the CCT value to be a really warm tungsten-style light and then adjusted the intensity as needed.

Using a super bright light to separate the foreground from the background is a very extreme example of a background light. You generally don't need that bright of a light. A hair light generally needs to be bright enough to add a bit of a rim across your subject, but not so much that it draws attention to itself.

Everything in our lighting is dictated by the story. For this interview, we wanted the hair light to feel like an intense bright spotlight coming down on the subject as if they were on the stage.

Key Light Setup

Many filmmakers don't completely understand light behavior when they're starting. Light behavior refers to the hardness and/or softness of light, which is entirely determined by the relative surface area of the light compared to your subject.

A relatively small surface area of light results in super hard shadows. A much larg

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