Shooting Interviews with a Black Background or at a Booth

You’ve likely seen it often where a person is on camera and the background is totally black. We often shoot interviews for clients who come to tradeshows. Last month we did probably half a dozen of these shoots. Often we shoot right at the booth but prefer to shoot in a small conference room if possible where we can set up a black background. Our ideal setup for this is to set up a Black Background on a stand or attached to a wall at least 10 feet or more behind our subject and light the subject with a diffused high 300 watt hair light on a C-stand, a 300 watt diffused key light at about 45 degrees to the subject and a reflector as a fill light catching reflection from both the key and hair light opposite the key light.  We adjust the fill reflector until the light is correct. We lower the room lights so that the black is totally black and because of the low wattage of the lights, there isn’t much spill onto it. This is a quick, easy to build studio setup that gives a great look.

When shooting at a booth we use basically a similar setup but instead of using a black background we look for an area of the booth that has an interesting background, we clean it up for extra articles that look messy and then if necessary light the background with another diffused light.   Instead of the large reflector for fill, we may use a small diffued 200 watt light.  We use gels to match the light in the room. Because we are using tungsten lights, that might mean putting yellow color correction gel on any blue lights to match our lights or blue gel on our lights to match the blue light of the booth.

We do a lot of shoots like this and have become pretty proficient at setting it up almost anywhere.

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