Filming Interviews During COVID-19
The Importance of Pre-Production
Happy Thanksgiving! Before getting to our usual updates, I wanted to take a moment to talk about pre-production and some lessons we’ve learned as of late.
Any assistant director or producer could tell you just how important pre-production is. The amount of work, time, and planning needed before hitting ‘record’ is staggering. Coordinating cast, crew, scheduling locations, making sure the necessary gear is available and prepared, the list goes on and on and on. Under normal circumstances, pre-production can take up the majority of a production’s time. During a pandemic, the importance of pre-production increases exponentially.
Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been filming a series of interviews for the Center For Urban families here in Baltimore. COVID has worked hard to throw a wrench into every plan we make, but proper pre-production is the best defense we have. If you are filming any interviews soon, here are a couple of thoughts/tips after some lessons learned and mistakes avoided.
Nothing beats the studio for quality, and COVID precautions are easy to enforce. That said, it isn’t always an option.
Variations of Success
The biggest lesson that we learned is that we may not get the shot we want. Whether it’s an outdoor shot instead of an indoor one, or a dreaded Zoom recording instead of an in-person interview, your storyboard can get thrown out the window at any moment.
So if you want to be ready for that, come up with a few variations of a final product. One should be your dream video, every shot done exactly the way you want. The other two are a little more cynical. You can have a hybrid version that has some of what you want and some of what you got. The important version to have a strong storyboard and plan for is the one where every shot isn’t what you want. Include some Zoom interviews, some outdoor shots, a missing shot or two, and more B-Roll to fill those gaps.
Then the big step is to make sure your client has realistic expectations. They should know what the best-case and worst-case scenarios look like. Talk with them before you film anything and determine what they must have and what they’d like to have. Then you can build a plan that is accommodating for their needs and the safety of your cast and crew.
To share one of our mistakes as a lesson learned: we had a couple that we needed for an interview. They were older and considered at high risk. When we spoke with them ahead of time, they said that we could film inside so long as we only brought a skeleton crew and everyone wore masks and spaced apart. No issues at all there and we came with just two people. Upon arrival, they requested that we move the interview outside. This lead to a brief scramble to determine a good place for lighting, reduced wind noise (on a VERY windy fall day), and available outlets.
Luckily we found a good place and brought some extra gear that reduced wind noise, but we would’ve been better served to have a clear plan for an outdoor shoot.
Cold air and windy conditions limited our options for this interview. More planning would’ve bought us more time and a better final product.
Just make sure that you have a few plans that you can quickly switch between as filming plans change on you at the last minute.
Use Zoom If You Dare
Zoom went from a relatively obscure video call platform to one of the biggest household names overnight. It is a great, relatively easy to use tool that does its job acceptably, but when it comes to filming an interview… Well, let’s say it is lacking.
COVID has made Zoom interviews very common, but we cannot stress enough: Zoom should be your LAST RESORT for filming a quality interview. The terrible video quality is enough reason to find another option, but most importantly, there is a minefield of settings that must be perfect before you can get a reliable recording.
One of the interviews we were planning on doing in-person was moved at the last minute to a Zoom recording, which is where we hit two major issues.
First, even though they were the only person talking, Zoom kept cutting to other camera views during the recording. Over the course of a 12-minute interview, Zoom cut away from our subject to a silent speaker over 30 times. We obviously had to re-do that recording, wasting our subject’s time and our time. To avoid this, you should pin the subject’s screen and mute all other participants. Even after doing that we ran into our second major issue.
The audio feed (either outbound from their computer, or inbound to ours) would cut out every now and then. We lost 10-15 seconds of audio several times during the recording. Out of time to record a third pass, we walked away very much having to make do with what we got.
The solution ended up being taking an ax to portions of the interview and trying to splice together the parts that didn’t lose audio and cover the patches with some last-minute pictures. Not ideal at all. The final video is certainly passable, but not up to par with what we prefer to record.
Proper planning during pre-production would’ve given us time to set up and test a Zoom interview, ensure a stable internet connection, or even come up with a different way to film in person.
Some Fun Updates!
Wow, what a year… A lot of not great things happened, but in our little world of media production, Winston and I certainly have a lot to be thankful for! Most importantly, we are so thankful to finally have a space for FreeStyle Media to call home. We spent last weekend putting up the first batch of audio treatment panels on Winston’s half of the room. The echo reduction is fantastic! If you have any ideas for what color(s) we should paint these, leave a comment below!
We also wanted to thank our incredibly supportive spouses, both of whom tolerate more than a few working weekends in a row and longer days at work. As we’ve worked to grow FreeStyle over the years, they’ve been there to support us at every turn.
Winston and I want to wish everyone a very happy Thanksgiving and we hope you have nice small gatherings with your close family. Save the travel for next year.