Continuing work for Fordham Law School – more breakout videos to accompany their magazine. This go-round featuring Professor Zephyr Teachout on her book, Corruption in America, and on her recent run for New York State governor; and the staff of the Feerick Center on its inception and social justice mission.
Behind the scenes of Zephyr’s video:
Note the color meter in the lower left of the top image. The lights were gelled 1/2 cut CTO and 1/2 cut CTG which got me within 100k and a few points magenta of the room lights. This allowed us to the show the room (a plus for the client since it is a brand new building.) It also means we can travel light and adapt to the room as opposed to needing more lights to light the whole room or severely limiting how much we see of the room.
In this situation, with only one interview on tap, we were able to run all of the lights off of batteries (2x 1×1’s and a Sola 4; all Litepanels.)
Behind the scenes for the Feerick Center video:
On this day we had seven interviews to film so it made sense to go with AC power for the lights. Lighting setup was similar to what I diagrammed here:
The only change to the above was using the Sola 4 instead of a Sola ENG for the backlight.
You’ll see in the notes that I was at f/3.5 on the C300 + 24-70 lens. Many recommend more depth of field for interviews but I find that I prefer to stay between f/2.8 and f/4.0. If the lens is set within 50-70mm (75mm to 105mm – 35mm equivalent) then you still get a nice fall-off on the back shoulder of the interviewee. Stop down more and to me it looks less filmic, more video’esque, because you have full sharpness front to back on the subject.
I am told that in terms of depth of field any given aperture in Super35 is equivalent to 1.5 stops more for full-frame 35mm. That may be the case but to me, with the C300, it has always felt closer to 2 stops. So, an interview shot at f/4 on the C300 feels like f/8.