Shooting Redcarpet Interviews
by: Bill Pryor
Forward by Chris

Bad lighting, unfamiliar terrain, nervous talent and limited time to get it right.  Red carpet interviews present a challenge to even seasoned videographers.  Our camera forum moderator, Bill Pryor, takes the challenge of the two-minute interview drill.  

Shooting "Red Carpet" Interviews

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Even if you live in a place such as Kansas City, almost exactly halfway between Hollywood and New York, you may one day have a movie premiere in your town. Or actors and directors may visit for the purpose of plugging their films. This happened in KC recently when Billy Bob Thornton, Virginia Madsen and the Polish Brothers came to town to screen their new film, "Astronaut Farmer," presumably to see how it would play on Main Street. A film critic friend of mine asked if I would come along and shoot a "red carpet interview" for him.

A red carpet interview is critic-speak for those kinds of interviews they do outside the theater at the Academy Awards, Golden Globe awards, etc. The dignitaries walk up the red carpet and pause to answer questions and get their photos taken by the media. A critic doesn't get a lot of time to ask much in the way of meaningful questions, so short and shallow video interviews, TV news style, are actually more appropriate for this type of setting.

Because it was so cold here in February (a temperature of about 12 degrees, wind chill of zero ), nobody stood around on the edges of the red carpet outside the theater. Too bad, because the theater had run out the red carpet, lined it with hay bales and parked a shiny new John Deere tractor out at the end. "Astronaut Farmer," get it? There probably aren't that many people in Kansas City who even know what color a John Deere tractor is, much less what you do with a bale of hay...but we do have a farm town image to those who live near large bodies of salt water. Family films about honest hard working committed farmers don't really play that well here, so their PR efforts might have been wasted. We like action adventure films like "Batman Begins," and far out stuff like "Sin City." And funky films too--Christopher Guest's first fauxdoc, "Waiting for Blaine" had the longest run in the U.S. right here in KC, and some John Sayles films have hung around for months and months. Lars Von Trier's movies don't fare as well, as there are only about a half dozen of us who see them. However, we've got far out Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin lined up for the Kansas International Film Festival this September, and he's about as far away from a family farm tugging-at-the-heartstrings film as you can get.

But I digress. The issue here was how to shoot one-shot-only interviews, hand held, with no lights, and an amateur on-camera interviewer who, I was confident, would screw up the hand-held mic operation.

The actors and directors rushed on in over the red carpet out of the cold. The interviews were then conducted upstairs in the 2-level theater complex. Each interviewer had his own little area with name tag and organization taped to the floor. The local TV stations were grouped across the foyer on one side, the radio guys in the middle, and the web reviewers at the other end. My friend freelances for the newspaper but also writes for efilmcritic.com and others. The way it worked was that Billy Bob went to one group, Virginia to another, and the Polish brothers to the third. Then they'd rotate. Each interviewer got two or three minutes with each person and then their handler would move them down the line.

I wish I could have had a light. Just one little Caselight 2 would have been spectacular. It was dark outside, so the wall full of floor-to-ceiling windows did exactly nothing. All the lighting was overhead can lights. So it was dark, and the lights that were there were all in the wrong place. I had to shoot at a +6db gain. No big deal; we weren't after quality, only a web deal. Anything we shot would be better than the radio guys who were shooting with cell phones.

But no lights. Just the hand held camera. I used a 6db gain to give me a decent exposure, plus a little depth of field so I could move around a bit without getting out of focus. I ran the camera mic into channel 1, and the hand held mic into channel 2. I instructed the interviewer in how to hold the mic to his face and then position it correctly for the talent, and we even rehearsed numerous times. During the rehearsals, I decided (A) he would, no doubt, screw this up, (B) I should violate all the rules and shoot the audio on auto, and (C) I should position myself so the camera mic would pick up his questioning when he screwed up with the hand held mic.

On the very first interview, he stuck the mic into the faces of each of the Polish brothers just fine. But he neglected to point it back at himself. The camera mic got his audio, but it's noisier, in terms of background noise, than the hand held mic. No problem, I mixed the two together just a bit to fad the noise from the camera mic down and out under the hand held.

The link to the video is <

1. Be prepared to shoot on a high gain because they probably won't let you use lights.
2. Always leave the camera mic running.
3. If your hand held mic has an on/off switch, tape it securely ON.
4. Figure out your position and pre-focus on where you think the interviewer will walk in and stop. Make sure you have enough depth of field so you can do that.
5. If your interviewer is a first timer,
6. Be prepared to step in close or back off from the talent, depending on what your interviewer has done with the mic. If he had kept it pointed at his own face instead of the talent, I would have had to move in physically closer to the talent so the camera mic would pick up that audio without a lot of background noise.
7. Forget the rules, use auto for the audio. But check it out in advance to make sure your camera can do that without problems. The auto audio on the Canon XH A1 works surprisingly well. /li>
8. While you're standing around waiting, get a lot of grab shots of the crowds, etc. Cutaways are lifesavers.
9. Shoot the questions from the interviewer after it's over, if possible. There was one really dumb thing I had to cut out, and fortunately I had already got the interviewer to look at the camera and ask the questions, so I could use it as a POV shot from the talent if needed. It was needed one time. You'll notice in that cutaway that the mic position is different, so it's a bad action cut, but I can live with it.
10. Get the 2 shot to show the interviewer and then get in close to the talent. In this case I used more 2 shots than normal because the critic was trying to develop some street cred here since the site had never used any video before this. It's better if you can concentrate on talent closeups. People want to see the stars, not the interviewer.

If I had it to do again, I would have put a wireless on the interviewer. I sort of figured he might screw up the mic handling, but I also hoped he wouldn't and decided the camera mic was good enough if he did. It was, but a wireless would have been better.