Setting up a simple interview: room, mic, chair
Okay. New module. We've spent all this time on old footage and old photos, and now we're going to make some new footage on purpose. This is where you sit a grandparent, an aunt, whoever, in front of a camera and get them talking. It's my favorite part, honestly. It's also the part people get the most nervous about, so let's slow down and just talk logistics first. Room, mic, chair. That's it for today.
Pick the room like you mean it
You do not need a studio. You need a quiet room with a door that shuts.
Walk your house and listen. Not look, listen. A room can look calm and still have a fridge humming, a furnace kicking on, a clock ticking on the wall. Stand in the room for thirty seconds and just pay attention to sound. If it's got a fridge in it, that's your first strike against it.
Avoid rooms with hard, bare surfaces, too. A room with tile floors and no curtains and nothing on the walls is going to sound echoey on your recording, more than your ear notices in person. A bedroom with carpet, curtains, and a made bed usually sounds better than a kitchen, even though the kitchen feels more natural for a conversation. I like a room with some soft stuff in it to eat the echo. That's just my preference, but it's a strong one.
Turn off anything that hums. Fridge, if the room's near the kitchen. Furnace, if you can get to the thermostat and it's not going to make the room miserable in February. Ceiling fan. Dishwasher — don't start a load thirty seconds before you sit down. I've made that mistake.
Audio matters more than picture, so treat the mic like it's the whole project
Here's the thing I want you to actually absorb from this lesson: people forgive a shaky, slightly blurry video all the time. They do not forgive audio they can't hear. If you have to choose between spending your setup time on lighting or on sound, spend it on sound.
You don't need a fancy microphone. A phone works. What you need is the mic close to the person talking. If you're using your phone or camera's built-in mic and it's six feet away across the room, that's not going to cut it — you'll get room noise and a thin, distant voice. Get the mic close. If you've got a lapel mic or even just an external mic you can prop nearby, use it. If all you've got is your phone's built-in mic, move the whole phone closer, on a small stand or propped on a stack of books, rather than trying to zoom in from across the room.
Do a test recording before the real thing. Thirty seconds, ask them what they had for breakfast, play it back, listen with headphones if you've got them. Headphones catch problems your phone speaker will hide from you. I check every single time. It takes two minutes and it has saved me more than once.
The chair, and why it's not nothing
Put them in a chair with arms, if you've got one, and not a chair that swivels or rocks. People fidget when they're nervous, and a swivel chair turns nervous energy into a slow spin across your whole interview. A dining chair or an armchair that stays put is what you want.
Angle the chair slightly, not square to the camera. Straight-on can feel like an interrogation. A slight turn, like they're talking to a person next to the camera rather than the lens itself, reads as more natural. Which brings up the other thing: don't have them look at the camera. Have them look at you, sitting just off to the side of it. That's who they're actually talking to anyway.
Light matters some, but not as much as sound. Face them toward a window if you've got daylight, or toward a lamp if it's evening. Just don't put a bright window behind them, or they'll turn into a silhouette and you'll have wasted the whole setup.
A story about why I care about this so much
I finished the video I made about Michael's grandpa while Michael was on a work rotation out of state. I didn't plan it that way, it's just how the timing landed. I sat at my kitchen table at eleven at night, alone, and watched the whole thing for the first time since I'd finished it, and I cried through most of it. Then I texted him two lines, just something like "it's done, I think you'll like it." He called me from a hotel room in North Dakota that same night.
None of that would have happened if the audio from that interview had been bad. The video worked because his grandpa's voice came through clean, and you could hear him pause before certain memories, and you could hear his breath before he said the hard parts out loud. That pause doesn't land if the sound is muddy. That's the whole reason I keep drilling this. The picture is nice. The voice is the thing that gets people at the kitchen table.
Before next time
Find your room, do a thirty-second test recording with a mic positioned close, and listen back on headphones. Bring whatever mic setup you've got, even if it's just your phone.