The Cinematography Secret to Consistent Interview Styles

The Cinematography Secret to Consistent Interview Styles

Creating Variety and Consistency in Interview Setups

Filming multiple interviews for the same project is a balance: you need unique looks that still feel consistent and familiar. On a recent corporate film, I interviewed six people in one room using three distinct setups. Here’s how I planned composition, lighting, and exposure to deliver variety without losing cohesion.

Project Context

Instead of building six separate setups (time-consuming and inefficient), I designed three looks I could pivot between quickly. That kept the day moving while ensuring the final edit felt unified.

Composition: Depth and Familiarity

One of the simplest ways to add variety to interviews in the same room is through composition. Shooting flat against a wall tends to feel lifeless. Instead, I prefer to shoot into corners. Corners naturally create depth and texture, making a frame feel more dimensional. To keep shots feeling like they belong together, repeat subtle elements across frames—what I call visual anchors. In this project, a recognizable window, the same coffee table, and recurring decor (like a plant or flowers) appear in multiple setups. Viewers may not consciously spot them, but they feel the continuity.

Lighting: Ratios and Separation

Lighting interviews is all about ratios — the relationship between the key side and fill side of the subject’s face. Once I establish the ratio I want, I add an edge light or backlight to separate the subject from the background. For this project, the challenge wasn’t in designing one good lighting setup, but in keeping the look consistent across all three. Instead of constantly changing light levels, I locked in my ratios and used variable ND filters to control overall exposure. This allowed me to maintain the same shape of light from setup to setup, even as I pivoted around the room.

Exposure: Clean Shadows, Controlled Highlights

Exposure was the trickiest part of this project. My subjects were wearing dark clothing, while the room itself was bright with large windows. Exposing for the highlights meant risking noisy shadows; exposing for the shadows meant blowing out the windows. My solution was to shoot at a lower EI (sometimes called “negative ISO”). By rating the camera one stop below native, I effectively overexposed the image slightly, which gave me cleaner shadows. To avoid clipping the highlights, I relied on ND filters to bring the overall levels back down while maintaining the lighting ratios I had already established. The key principle here is this: expose for the uncontrollable. In this case, the windows were my uncontrollable element. I balanced them first, then protected the shadows with my exposure strategy.

The Key to Consistency

What made these three setups work wasn’t just clever composition or careful lighting — it was thinking about the final edit from the start. By shooting toward corners and including visual anchors, I created compositional continuity. By locking in lighting ratios and using ND filters, I kept a consistent look across setups. And by lowering my EI, I preserved detail in the shadows without sacrificing highlight control. The result was variety without chaos — three distinct looks that still felt familiar, all built within a single room.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re filming corporate interviews, documentaries, or narrative projects, the principle is the same: plan for both variety and cohesion. Your audience might not consciously notice the small choices you make, but they’ll feel the consistency in the final edit. Different looks. Same story.

by Chris Tinard ©️ cNOMADIC 2025
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