Digital News Production: Interview Shoot

We chose to have our presenter talk to a UCA lecturer who discusses film, tv and games a lot in his lectures, and has a high interest in video games. He was perfect to give further information than a regular gamer due to his knowledge of the technical sides of game development and giving good points on legal issues such as consumer rights. This will be an important and stand out part of our package.

We used the same location to shoot as our green screen for the same reasons of being away from our workspace and it being a spacious area to create a set and move in furniture. Planning ahead, we decided to dress the set and turn it into a very relaxed seated area, filled with gaming accessories and video games. This fits the theme and atmosphere that our channel gives off.

Dressing the set involved bringing in...

• Two sofas
• A coffee table
• Two desk tables
• A book case
• Two work benches (on top of each other to pose as shelves)
• A monitor to display our logo in post production
• Decorative 'living room style' items including cushions, mugs and a gaming magazine
• Gaming items including a PS4 console, a Nintendo DS & DS Lite console, controllers (Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS2, PS3 & PS4), a Guitar Hero game guitar, a Rockband game drumset and a decorative game medal
• A mass of video games including Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, PC & Wii

Which you can see below...

On camera

We made sure to place and angle all items so that they would be heavily featured in both the establishing wide shot and the close-ups of our presenter and interviewee, as well as giving the frames a lot of depth and variety.

I had the idea to place a monitor between the two of them - but slightly in the background, so that we could place our channel's logo on it and give a much more professional vibe to the interview. I had to make the screen green however, due to our logo being unfinished. The green allows us to add the logo into the shots in post production.

Problems we ran into in the beginning

• We had a technical issue with sound. We planned on using two clip mics, however one mic was creating an usual beeping sound throughout testing. Neither we our our UCA technician could fix this issue. So we had to first use one mic for our interviewee as we filmed him, and then gave the mic to our presenter and filmed her segments. 

Problems we ran into during filming

• We had more issues with outside noise due to people in the building and unfortunately timed construction outside. But we had experience with this by now, so once again filmed only when it was silent, to make sure our sound was clean.

Positives

As filming was a shorter process to the previous day, sound interruptions didn't get in the way as much, and our mic problem was easily solved. Our planning of the shoot paid off and it flowed perfectly.

What I would change

While we got great coverage of Francesca asking questions both in a wide shot and close-up, and coverage of Matt answering in a close-up. We didn't film them asking and answering in a wide shot. I think if we had filmed that, we would have had more variety for editing.

Final result

Our interviewee gave brilliant answers and having both the presenter say her lines and the interviewee giving his answers a few times each, we got great coverage. We were also extremely pleased with our set and lighting. I think that the interview shoot looks very clean cut and professional.