For decades, classic three-point lighting has been the conventional approach to lighting most sit-down interviews in film and TV. While this type of lighting looks nice, it can feel stale at times. By mixing up the lights you use and how you place them, you can shake up your cinematography game and shoot visually dynamic interviews that keep viewers engaged. In this article we’ll explore three unique ways to light your interview subjects, so they pop on-screen, allowing your videos to stand out even more.
1. Relying on Outside Lighting
Though it may sound counterintuitive, leaving your lights at home and relying on the sun–plus some inexpensive modifiers–is a surefire way to get creative. Be careful though, the sun is way more powerful than even the most expensive HMIs, so harsh shadows and blown-out backgrounds will be a constant concern. The key to natural lighting is to shoot early or later in the day, not at high noon when the sun is directly above and at its most powerful.
Keeping the sun behind the subject, ideally with objects like trees and buildings in between them, is the best way to organically diffuse its power. You’re basically getting a super strong back light to accentuate your subject. Yet, fire up a camera and you’ll find their face is way too dark. The fix? A reflector placed a few feet in front of the subject, on whichever side of the camera they’re facing, will bounce back enough sunlight to illuminate their face and create a small catch light in their eyes.
Having it to the side of the camera, not directly above or beneath it, gives the face dimensionality with a lighter and darker half. But the difference likely won’t be enough for a pleasing contrast ratio. To up the ratio, add in a similarly sized negative fill on the other side of the subject (the side they’re not looking toward). This will take away light from the darker half of their face and increase the contrast ratio. In conjunction with those trees and buildings in the background, this can give you a beautiful alternating light/dark checkerboard effect.
Both the bounce and the negative fill can be scaled up for a softer look using a Westcott Scrim Jim Bounce and a Matthews Floppy Flag on C-Stands. Or if you want to keep it small and simple, say if you’re operating solo, consider the ubiquitous Neewer 5-in-1 Reflector. Whichever you go with, be sure to secure them with weights, sandbags, or an assistant, so a gust of wind won’t turn them into rogue sailing vessels. Also, you can get similar lighting inside, so long as you have large windows that let in enough light while you're shooting.
2. Top-Down Butterfly Lighting
You might be more used to seeing this style of lighting in police interrogation scenes, but with true crime docu-series continuing to be all the rage, more and more interviews are employing hard key lights. For example, an Aputure Nova P300c rigged above the subject on a stand or truss for a moody, dramatic effect. Just one powerful light directly above your interviewee will likely look super flat, spilling all over the space and giving mugshot vibes, but some creative placement and modifiers can turn this set-up into a dynamic go-to.
Putting your top-down key at a slight angle will help you achieve a more multi-dimensional contrast ratio on the face. Even more important is shaping it with barndoors directly attached to the light or modifiers rigged around it. These modifiers can be as simple as gels or diffusion clipped with C47’s, or larger flags set up on additional stands. The goal is to keep the key shining only on the subject, not on the surrounding floor and walls. If you’re getting too much contrast on the face, add a bounce low to the ground, on the opposite side of the key, to send some light back up. This technique is sometimes called butterfly lighting because of the butterfly-like shape it creates under the subject’s nose and chin.
If you want to see a bit of the background, throw in a small backlight for separation. Skip it or face it toward the subject’s head and you can totally anonymize the location. Sure, your star might look like they’re floating in space, but that could be preferable to the cliché warehouse rental backdrop seen a thousand times before. You can even spray some Atmosphere Aerosol Haze to give texture, or add a small catch light like a Hobolite Micro or Zhiyun MOLUS X100 to reflect in the eyes and help viewers better connect to the subject.
3. Lighting with Practical Motivation
Having practical lights in the background of an interview is a classic technique for adding texture, but rarely do these fixtures get the spotlight. Our final technique moves these lights up to the foreground and uses them to inspire our key and fill, designing a whole look based around unique table or floor lamps that fit the mood of the piece. We’ll put them close to our subject and replace the bulbs with a cine-focused LED variety–think Nanlite PavoBulb 10C’s or Aputure Accent B7c’s–to have higher color accuracy, adjustable temperatures, and dimming abilities.
Even if you crank these bulbs to 100%, they won’t have enough output to replace your main sources, but they do add visual points of interest and justification for getting more creative with primary lights. Suddenly your key and fill can be warmer or cooler to match the vibe of the practicals, and there’s less of a need for a massive soft key, since any shadows visible on the face can be attributed to the lamps. Your key and fill can sit just off-screen, again with barndoors or flags to prevent them from spilling onto the background.
You can even mix this technique with the previous by having a visible skylight or hanging lamp to help the logic of dramatic overhead lighting. A true skylight might be too powerful and direct, so it’s best to black out any above the frame but show one in the background of the shot so the viewer intuits them as the source of the key. A stylish, hanging lamp can be added in to the top of the frame if you have trusses or beams above, again with the bulb swapped out for greater customization. These additions are all heavily location dependent, but good to keep in mind if you’re going for a more personalized feel.
No matter what technique you employ, interview lighting is all about accentuating the story and making the setting feel organic to what’s being discussed. What techniques do you use when you’re shooting a sit-down interview? Do you have advice for improving the setups we discussed today? Drop us a line below and we’ll do our best to answer your comments and questions.
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