Re: Shooting Interviews in boring environment

These guys are right: there is no reason the interview MUSt be boring, no matter the subject, if your interviewer asks the right questions. Now, there are simple and easy and inexpensive things to do to spice up a setting for the interview. It depends a lot on what kind of message you're trting to out out and etc.

Some people hate white-walled rooms, but to me, they are a blank canvas for me to play on with shadows cast by cookies and gobos. One of my favorite things is to shoot into a corver of a white-walled room and sublty gel each wall a different color wash. If it's a corver that also has a column in it, that's even better, as the different planes and angles take the shadows differently and add some depth without being distracting.

You can get fancier, obviously: if you shoot everything greenscreen, your options are infinite. But you can also do stuff like bring a slide or video/data projector along and throw images and type on the walls and floor and etc. You can bring in muslin or photog's paper backdrops and throw slashes of light across them, etc. It's up to your budget and imagination. I have shot in regular motel rooms and gotten nice blurred BG behind the interviewees that looked great.

And there are variations like shooting walk and talk or drive and talk, etc. There really isn't such a thing as a boring interview shot that you can't make better. If you WANT to.