As you begin shooting your short docs and breaking news assignments, I wanted to dedicate a class to best practices when it comes to interviewing and audio.
In all of your camera kits, you have a wired lavalier microphone that clips onto your interview subject’s collar and plugs directly into the camera. This is a low-budget but pretty efficient option that is incredibly useful when you’re doing interviews on the fly: MOS (man on the street-style interviews) at protests, parades, other events that require you to be able to pack up and move around quickly. And because they feed directly into the camera, you don’t have to worry about syncing the audio later—although it does compress the audio as it feeds it in, meaning you won’t be getting a high-quality WAV file.
There are a couple more pitfalls of using these mics: you can’t monitor the audio as you’re recording. You have no idea what the levels are and you can’t adjust the gain. Is the mic hot? Does the person’s voice sounds off-mic? You’ll find out after the fact, when you upload your footage and watch it back. Not ideal, especially if you find out that you plugged it into the camera’s input only partway, which means that not only did the mic not feed into the camera, it deactivated the camera’s internal mic, meaning you don’t even have backup audio of the interview.
I have a limited number of Audio-Technica microphones that are a bit higher quality, which will allow you to plug in a pair of studio monitor headphones so that you can listen to the audio quality while you record, which allows you to adjust the mic’s location, direction, distance from subject’s mouth, etc. as needed to make sure the interview audio sounds as clean as possible.
Your in-class assignment today is to pair off with a classmate, head to a quiet location somewhere on campus, and take turns interviewing each other about what you will be doing over spring break. The interviews can be quite brief, only a few minutes. Start by asking the person’s name and how it’s spelled. Practice asking open-ended questions. Instead of “Are you looking forward to spring break?” which leads to a yes or no response, ask something like “So, can you tell me about what you’ll be doing over spring break?” This invites a more complete thought as a response, something you’re much more likely to be able to use as a sound bite.
Before class is over, come back to the classroom to upload your footage to the classroom computer and play it back to check how it looks, along with the audio quality. Pull out one short clip/soundbite in Premiere (no more than 30 seconds) and upload it to YouTube or Vimeo and post here on the class site.
This exercise requires you to think not just about audio quality, it demands that you think about how to frame the interview. Will you use the more classic broadcast news package framing, where the subject is on one of the thirds, angled slightly toward the negative space, looking past the camera, NOT directly at it?
Or will you choose the more confrontational, direct eye contact with the camera, centered framing that is popular with many docu-series these days?
What is in the background of your talking head shot? Are you filming the person in their element? Could an artful framing that includes these details tell us something about the person like the classroom shot above? What about filming the person in a way that shows us many telling details about their office or their home?
Are you allowing some negative space where you might later put a lower third identifying your subject?
Other things you’ll need to keep in mind:
Setting the height of the tripod/camera correctly so that it is basically eye level with the person.
Making sure their face is in focus during the interview. Remember that if you are going to be using a lower f-stop to achieve a dramatically shallow depth of field (common in low-light situations or if you’re framing the shot very cinematically) then if the person moves forward or backward AT ALL while they are speaking, they may suddenly move out of the focus you have carefully calibrated. If you are shooting them close-up, at a very low aperture you will see a difference in focus between their eyes and the tip of their nose. So it tends to be a safer bet to go for a more moderate aperture. A good way to make certain your focus is accurate is to zoom all the way in, set the focus, and then zoom back out to your desired framing.
If you have the Image Stabilization function on your lens turned on, the lens can make a quiet grinding sound that is audible on your camera’s internal mic. It shouldn’t affect the microphone audio, but it’s worth being aware.