Respect to the people at Beet.tv for their extensive coverage of the US online Video scene, well worth sticking them in your feed. But the odd composition of this interview framing really got me puzzled and then had me very amused. Hit play to see what I mean. You’ll need to wait 12 seconds to see things get interesting.

Newbie tips: Compose the shot so your subject is looking into the available space rather than out of the nearside of the frame, go for the long end of the zoom, shoot tighter on wide open aperture to throw a distracting background out of focus.

If you have two interviewees you should ideally pull in and pick up answers on single shots to make it cut together and give it more variety. Otherwise pan with the action which is a lot trickier if your tripod or handling isn’t up to scratch. Get noddies from the interviewer to help cut between the One and Two Shots and a listening shot of each interviewee listening to the other. The Direction to your subjects would be: Look at interviewer for a few secs, turn to listen to colleague, hold 5 secs then turn back to interviewer so it will cut with the Two shot.

If you have to see a microphone in shot with a hand attached (i.e when you don’t have a Radio mic or boom swinger) you need to establish the presence of the Reporter early on by seeing them in a Mid Shot with interviewee. Or pull the Mic just out of shot and shoot tighter to crop it out.

Finally, if you have to start a two headed interview with one person missing start tight on your first interviewee before the other one turns up. If you are Operating camera, flag up any problems to the interviewer (eg. related to make-up!)  at the earliest convenient point.