Re: Shooting True First-Person Interviews

For it to work best, the interviewer and camera have to be in another room out of vision and preferably, out of earshot. Though you could just hang some black pipe and drape behind the prompter camera and set up the interviewer camera right behind. IFB is distracting to an inexperienced person, so you would probably want to hang a speaker with a mix-minus instead and just work hard at not stepping on the responses.


One of the side projects I'm developing for our studio is a "Super-Skype" option, using our custom giant 40-inch teleprompter as the screen for a skype hookup where the person being remotely interviewed can make perfect camera/eye contact, in pretty much the same way as the "interrotron". When you see skypecasts used on live broadcast, too often the eyeline looks funky because the feed comes from a webcam way off-axis on the scrren, and the guest is staring at themselves or a feed on the screen, and not the camera.

Using the super-skype thing, the interviewer can then be in the next room, or, anywhere on the planet with an internet connection, but we have perfect eye contact.