David Schonauer
Stillmotion Wednesday January 28, 2015
From wedding videography to documentaries, shooting interviews is a integral part of modern filmmaking. Those getting into the business would do well to watch this tutorial from Stillmotion’s
Story & Heart Academy Of Storytellers. It shows you how to get an interview lighting set-up for strong results you can rely on again and again—because when you’re doing a post-nuptial
interview with the mother of the bride, you want to make her look great, not scary. Read the full Story >>
Stillmotion Wednesday December 4, 2013
Yesterday we featured Stillmotion’s tips for composing a documentary interview; today we have the
website’s advice on recording doc interview audio—which, after all, is really the most important element of the production: Without sound, all you’ve got is the talking head, without
the talking part! You’ll learn about your best mic and audio-recorder options and how to use both most effectively. Read the full Story >>
Lights Film School Wednesday October 9, 2013
Speaking of documentaries: If you’re making one, there is a good chance you’ll be shooting an interview, and if you’re shooting an interview, notes Lights Online Film School, you
will be using either natural light sources or studio lighting. Either way, you should know about the easy-to-set-up three-point lighting technique, which fully exposes the facial expression and
emotions of your subject while also isolating them from the background and hiding unwanted shadows. Read the full Story >>
nofilmschool Friday August 29, 2014
What happens when the main character in your documentary is a dud at giving an interview? “Getting a person’s story on camera is an elusive process, and since I just spent over five years
working on a short and a feature in which I conducted over 40 interviews, I thought I’d share a list of things that I picked up along the way that might help you,” writes Oakley
Anderson-Moore at NoFilmSchool. Step one: Decide whether you’re the best person to do the interview, and then decide what you want to get out of the interview. Read the full Story >>
PremiumBeat Tuesday May 24, 2016
If you’re making a documentary, there’s a good chance you’ll be including a sit-down interview, and when you go to do the interview there’s a good chance you’ll encounter
troublesome ambient noise. PremiumBeat offers nine little tricks to overcome the noise. Trick one: Before setting up your gear, turn the room’s AC on full blast. When it comes time to shoot the
interview, you can turn the AC off and the room will remain at a comfortable temp for a while. Read the full Story >>
FOLIO Wednesday May 23, 2018
Two very different magazines,
each with its own place in photography’s recent history, are leaving the scene — or at least the ink-on-paper scene. Legacy photography magazine Shutterbug is dropping its print edition
after 45 years of publishing and will focus on its website, reports Folio. Production costs and slipping ad revenue were cited as reasons for the move. Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper notes that Interview magazine, founded by
Andy Warhol nearly 50 years ago, is folding. Interview provided a launching platform for generations of photographers, including Matthew Rolston. Read the full Story >>
PremiumBeat Wednesday May 11, 2016
The way individual documentary filmmakers conduct interviews varies — Errol Morris interrogates people through a vastly different method than Werner Herzog, say. But there are some interview
essentials that every doc filmmaker should know, notes PremiumBeat. Among them: Prepare rigorously, but be ready to go off-script; and avoid “yes or no” questions. Read the full Story >>
The Huffington Post Monday July 2, 2012
From eye-level, the Rio de Janeiro studio of noted Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz seems to be filled with the detritus of modern life—cans, bottles, and trash of all sorts. Looked at from
above, however, the familiar landscape of Rio takes shape. The garbage is part of Muniz’s “Landscape Project,” a meditation on today’s consumer culture that he created to
coincide with the recent Rio+20 conference on sustainable development. Muniz talks about the work in a wide-ranging interview. You can also go here for an interview Muniz did with NPR in 2011. Read the full Story >>
Stillmotion Tuesday December 3, 2013
Yesterday we noted how doc filmmakers are using animation and graphics to enliven reporting, but the live-action interview remains the essential element of such work. If you’re shooting a
documentary, you’ll want to read Stillmotion’s explanation of the long-sided interview—the common off-center composition in which the interview subject is looking toward the larger
section of the frame. “Speaking towards the long side of the frame…allows for thoughts and ideas to be communicated in a way which does not block their transmission to the interviewer,
and thus the viewer,” notes SM. Meanwhile, DSLR Video Shooter features a guide to the best key
light gear for shooting interviews. Read the full Story >>
The Slanted Lens Tuesday March 31, 2015
For many filmmakers today, one of the constants is shooting interviews, notes NoFilmSchool, which features an illuminating conversation about interview lighting between documentary
filmmaker (and Scorpion Light founder) Billy Campbell and his
father, Douglas Campbell, a 40-year veteran of the film industry. The takeaway: Content is king, and style is secondary. Meanwhile, the Slanted Lens has a tutorial showing how to use inexpensive gear
for five different easy lighting setups for both one-person and two-person interviews. And Film Riot shows how to create
dramatic and moody interview lighting in a cost-effective way, using one light to create multiple light sources. Read the full Story >>
Vimeo Monday April 25, 2016
The noted motion designer GMUNK recently lectured at Hyper Island, the digital learning institute in Karlskrona, Sweden, and afterward he sat
down to record an interview in which he talked about the future of motion creation and collaboration styles. “The next generation of motion students should take into consideration getting their
motion graphics off the screen and applied to other surfaces, other mediums, other platforms,” he says. See the interview at Vimeo. Read the full Story >>
STILL MOTION Thursday January 10, 2013
The filmmakers at Still Motion spent 2012 leading workshops in cities across the US, and then awesomely made their knowledge widely available via their SMAPP iPhone app … for free. (An
Android version is on the way!) They’ve also created a new tutorial about how to light a film interview with only $26 worth of equipment. If you’ve ever lost you’re your
luggage—and gear—while traveling to a shoot, you’ll appreciate knowing how to turn a metal laundry basket into a softbox. Read the full Story >>
BLOUIN ARTINFO Tuesday March 26, 2013
Australian director P.J. Hogan’s new comedy Mental, opening in theaters and on VOD this Friday, sounds on paper like a great piece of Hollywood fiction: A mother is checked into a mental
hospital by her husband because she’s had a nervous breakdown over his infidelities; he then abandons his children—after picking up a hitchhiker to look after them. The children grow up
pretending all is normal. But as Hogan tells Artinfo, the story is far from fabricated. “All of it really happened,” he says in a revealing interview. Read the full Story >>
MY MODERN MET Tuesday May 20, 2025
In 1994, Phil Borges, who had left a career in orthodontics to be a photographer, traveled to Tibet, northern India and Nepal to interview and photograph Tibetans and Tibetan refugees in an effort to understand what had happened to them and their culture. The result was a landmark photo book, The Power of Compassion. “It was very humbling to meet refugees, immigrants, and people who had to escape their country for fear of their life, and yet they seemed to be living in the moment,” he told My Modern Met in a recent interview.
Read the full Story >>
KEN WEINGART Tuesday January 20, 2015
With his recent book Portraits retrospective exhibition at NYC’s Hasted Kraeutler gallery, photographer Martin Schoeller has cemented his place at the top of the editorial photography
world. Photographer and blogger Ken Weingart now features an illuminating interview with Schoeller, in which the photographer talks about his career arc and his working process. “I always tell
young photographers, ‘Don’t think you have a Vanity Fair cover and you’re done; you’re only as good as your last photograph,’” he says. Read the full Story >>
PDN Wednesday April 12, 2017
In a recent interview with
PDN, photography consultant and former VII Photo CEO Stephen Mayes shared his ideas about how photojournalists can stay relevant in the 21st century. (Go here to read the interview.) Writer
David Walker also adds more of Mayes’s provocative ideas about current photojournalism practices in a follow-up post. “[T]he point we need to be aware of is not how clever we are as
photojournalists, we need to be aware of what are people looking at and what are they responding to,” he says. Read the full Story >>
CBS Sunday Morning Friday September 10, 2021
One of the iconic images of 9/11 was photographer Richard Drew’s “Falling Man,” a shot of a man who had either jumped or fallen from the North Tower as the intense fires pushed those trapped in the upper floors to make a desperate decision. (The man has never been identified with certainty, notes, Fstoppers.) In an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, Drew recalled the day 20 years when he made the photo, which would become controversial for its graphic display of the man’s death. Read the full Story >>
KEN WEINGART Monday January 10, 2022
Photographer and journalist Ken Weingart continues his interview series with famous photographers—now in podcast form—with Albert Watson, the renowned portrait and commercial photographer “known," notes Weingart, "for his fluency with light.” Watson talks about how he got started in photography and goes into detail about the cameras he uses. “I find inspiration from hundreds of photographers,” he says. Read the full Story >>
KEN WEINGART Tuesday June 20, 2023
Photographer and podcaster Ken Weingart’s latest episode features an interview with Soo Kim, a Korean-American artist who currently works and teaches in Los Angeles. Her innovative art pieces have generated acclaim nationwide and have been on view at the LA’s Getty museum, the Julie Saul gallery in New York and other museums and galleries. She discusses her background and the labor-intensive process she uses to create one-of-kind photo artworks and installations. Read the full Story >>
http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2108496_2113332_2121014,00.html Friday August 3, 2012
In his new HBO documentary About Face: Supermodels Then & Now, photographer and filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders managed to convince a number of the world’s most famously
beautiful women—such as Cheryl Tiegs and Beverly Johnson—to open up about the vagaries of aging. How did he do it? “It wasn't easy but that's what I do for a living—I put
people in front of a camera and make them feel comfortable,” he tells TIME Style & Design in an insightful interview. Read the full Story >>
