There are a lot of good, high quality church videos to be had out there. But sometimes there is no substitute for telling the stories of what God is doing in your home congregation. Video testimonies/interviews can be a great way to tell those stories. Here are some tips and things to think about to help you get the best results shooting interviews.

1. Don’t Use the Camera Mic. The Camera Mic is terrible. Forget about it. You should never use the camera mic for interview audio. Your first choice should be to use a lavalier microphone, wired or wireless is fine, whatever you can get your hands on. Secure the transmitter on your subjects pants or belt and run the mic cable up under your subjects shirt to hide it. Then clip the lav on their shirt, test and adjust your audio levels and your ready to rock. If you don’t have access to a lav mic, use a shotgun mic. Aim the shotgun mic at your subject, get it as close to them as possible and test and adjust your levels. As a last resort, you could set up a mic on a stand and place it on a table or something like that to interview your subject. It might look a little odd, but I promise looking odd is better than getting poor quality audio. And please don’t tell me you’ll fix it in Post. Lastly, always use headphones to make sure you’re getting good audio. Just looking at the levels isn’t enough, because the levels don’t tell the whole story. That loud air conditioning unit or bug chirping isn’t going to peg your levels, but it is going to be annoying on your audio track.

2. Lighting is important. A technique called Three Point Lighting is the foundation of all film and video lighting. If you don’t know what it is, check out this brief tutorial at mediacollege.com. You won’t always need or have all three lights, but knowing what they are and how they work will give you the foundation you need to think about and talk about proper lighting. Here are some quick tips to help you in the trenches:

• Avoid placing your subjects in front of window or sliding doors. Unless you have a Hollywood lighting package, it’s really hard to compete with the sun.
• Use soft light. Soft light makes everything look better. Your subjects will thank you. If you’re using a film video lighting kit, try putting some diffusion in front of the lens. You can buy diffusion in the form of gels (hit this link if you have no idea what gels are) from most photo/video stores. Diffusion spreads out hard light and softens it. For a great low cost soft light, you can use Chinese Lanterns or Paper Lanterns. They use household bulbs and you can find them for a few bucks at places like IKEA or order them online. Some Hollywood cinematographers actually prefer and use these low cost lanterns to light their films. Alternately, you can bounce film/video lights off a white surface to spread and soften the light. Point your lights at a wall or ceiling or pick up some white foam core at an arts and crafts store.
• Place a house or practical light in the background. This looks nice, creates a sense of 3D space and provides a backlight to give some added definition to your subject.

3. Focus and Exposure. Don’t trust the flip screen for focus and exposure. If you do, you’ll get burned, especially when you’re shooting in a particularly bright environment where the sun obliterates the image on the flip screen. Use the flip screen for framing, shoot with it open, but don’t trust it for focus and exposure. For focus and exposure, you would ideally use a properly calibrated professional video monitor located in a light controlled environment (read a black tent) and operated by a professional engineer. But this is the real world and you work for a church. Unless that church is Willowcreek, you probably don’t have a professional field monitor. So… Use the viewfinder. Close the flipscreen, zoom all the way in on your subjects face, preferably eyes, focus, adjust exposure and then zoom back out and find your frame. Then, open your flip screen, get comfortable and you’re ready to rock and roll.

4. Check your footage after the first take or two. It is a good practice to shoot a little and then check and make sure you’re getting good audio and video. I was just shooting an interview the other day and, after the first question was answered, I rolled back and checked the video. Much to my dismay, the image was completely pixelated and the audio sounded like an alien signal in a Sci-Fi flick. Luckily, we hadn’t shot the entire half hour interview and returned to edit it only to find it entirely unuseable. We made some adjustments, replugged some connections and tested it again. It worked the second time and it was smooth sailing from there. Check it. But, if you check takes after shooting for a while, always remember to que the tape back up to the end. Otherwise, you’re going to be surprised and upset to find some shots missing in the editing room.

So, with a little bit of care and some basic equipment, you can shoot great interviews in house. If you have any questions about any of this or ideas or thoughts, feel free to comment. I’d love to keep this conversation going.

Sound. Now I am a visual guy. A cinematographer. I’m all about writing with light. So you can imagine how hard this is to admit, but it’s true. I learned this early, through my mistakes, and it’s been confirmed to me over and over again (through others mistakes). Nothing will ruin your film or video faster than bad audio. People will suffer bad picture quality. In fact, much to my chagrin, people often don’t even notice what I think is bad cinematography. The image can be scratched, somewhat distorted, slightly over or underexposed, poorly lit, glaringly overlit, etc. But if the quality of the audio is bad, if it’s noisy or distorted. If there’s too much room noise or you can’t hear the actor over that airplane going overhead, your audience will notice it. And it won’t be easy for them to get past it. The lesson I’ve learned is don’t skimp on the audio. Do everything you can to get the best sound possible. Buy good mics. Always use headphones to monitor your audio. Keep a close eye on your levels. You can only fix it in Post if you got pretty good audio to begin with. Bad audio can’t be fixed. At best, if you really know what you’re doing, you can use tricks to distract from it or minimize it. But you can’t fix it.

(Stepping Off My Soapbox Now)

Why all this talk about audio? We got two new mics in yesterday and I’m really excited about them. I picked up a Rode NTG-2 shotgun mic to mount on our camera and a Sennheiser Evolution Wireless G2 lav mic. I love getting gear. Waiting for the FedEx guy. It’s like Christmas. If anyone’s interested in hearing more about different kinds of mics, what’s a shotgun mic?, what’s a good lav mic?, things like that, leave a comment or send me an email and I’ll post on it. In the meantime, mind the audio :).