Director of Photography for a New York Times Interview Segment

Recently, I traveled to Alabama to film a segment for The New York Times. I was the Director of Photography on this project, and we were filming for a show and podcast called The Ezra Klein Show. For this episode, we filmed inside a civil rights museum. It was a really visually interesting location, and I went above and beyond to make it look as interesting as possible.

The New York Times reached out to me looking for a Director of Photography who could assemble a camera crew in Atlanta that would be willing to travel. So I reached out to some talented people I work with and was able to hire a Gaffer and Camera Operator who were both willing to travel to Montgomery, Alabama.

I had a pre-production call with The New York Times, and they gave me a good idea of what they were looking for. I saw an opportunity to go the extra mile and make this interview look really interesting, so I pitched them some of my creative lighting ideas and they loved them. They gave me the creative license to do what I had in mind, so I got to work.

I drew up lighting diagrams and planned everything out so that I knew exactly what to do when we showed up on location. My plan was to turn off all the lights in the room and light it all myself, which can be a challenge in a room of this size. The room we planned to shoot in had graphics all over the walls, and I wanted to use the lighting to accentuate them. Since the subject matter was civil rights, I wanted the interview to have a more dramatic and darker look. My plan was to turn off the room lights and then create pools and slashes of light on the walls.

Once we got there, I made the decision to place our host and interview subject against completely different backgrounds. The host’s background was made up of old newspaper clippings, which had a brighter look. This contrasted with the darker background for the interview subject. Then, in the wide shot, we could see both the white wall and the black wall, which gave the interview setup a much more dynamic look.

The main lighting setup was fairly straightforward. We had two subjects talking, and they were lit with cross-key lighting. In order to do this, we needed the key lights to be up in the air behind each subject. This required large combo stands with menace arms. The Gaffer I brought on supplied all the gear we needed for that setup.

We used Aputure lights with spotlight mounts attached to light the background. For each subject, I created a slash of light moving away from them. This gave each shot a section of light and a section of darkness. Then, in between them on the wide shot, we placed a small pool of light. The end result looked really amazing and gave the interview a much more dynamic and dramatic look that fit the content really well.

We also filmed an intro segment with Ezra against a different wall. I again placed a slash of light on the background behind him. I am really happy with the way this turned out as well. One thing that would have improved is the guests shot. If I had a bit more setup time with the actual subjects it would have been perfect. We lit the entire interview using crew members as stand-ins, and once our subjects were seated, we had very little time to make adjustments. One of the subjects reflected more light than expected under the key light, which created a small hotspot that I did not have enough time to fully correct. It was not a major issue, but with a little more time, I would have been able to fine-tune the lighting even more.

Everything went smoothly on this production. It was an exciting and creative project for me, and the producers I worked with at The New York Times were very happy with the footage. I love working on high-production-value interviews like this, and I can’t wait until I get the chance to do it again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSn5zdg9-t4