Today my good friend Gloria Roheim is launching her new website and we used that occasion to also shoot a new video for her business because a lot of things have changed in the last year.

Gloria founded “Gloria Roheim Inc” as a Toronto-based social media strategy and training company in 2010 being inspired by our generation’s entrepreneurial spirit. The last year was a huge success and I was happy working together with Glo on several projects, like Angela Warburton’s promo video, Julia Moulden’s RIPE trailer and blog launch, the McLuhan100 events and more.

Changes happen quickly these days and so her business evolved and we needed a new video to reflect that. We wanted to emphasize how social media is the new way of communication and it is important to use it effectively. Especially if you have a small business and a small or non-existent marketing budget, social media can really help you promote your cause and reach your customers directly, on a personal level. And web video will play a bigger role in the future as a way to bring your message across.

Concept

Realizing the potential of a visually interesting video is I think the biggest problem for most people I work with, so I’ve decided to use this opportunity to create something more visual for Gloria’s video. My goal was to minimize the time we see a “talking head”, meaning her sitting in front of the camera, and instead shoot a lot of visuals that are connected to what Gloria is talking about: social media. So Gloria was basically just dong “her thing”: interacting with others on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn while I set up a variety of shots that could be edited together as sequences.

Lighting

I was very excited to shoot at the ING Direct Cafe in downtown Toronto after being there at several occasions. The corner room on the second floor has very large windows and even on a cloudy day it fills the room with very flattering soft light. So for the interview I’ve decided to place Gloria with a large window to her right and the big window front in the background. The result was that most of the background was blown out, which was exactly what I wanted to create a high-key look.

Lenses

The interview was shot with my Canon T2i and a 50mm f/1.4. I wanted to have a very shallow depth of field, so the background is very blurry, but shooting at f/1.4 I couldn’t make sure to keep Gloria’s eyes in focus. She was only sitting about 2 meters away from the camera, so the DOF would have been only 8cm. That is why I went with f/2.0 which gives me another few centimeters.

For almost all other shots I was shooting at f/1.4 with the Canon 50mm and at f/1.8 with the Canon 28mm, which is the widest aperture possible. Which means that sometimes I had to do several takes until I nailed the focus perfectly. A great free tool to calculate your DOF (if you have an iPhone) is an app called “iDoF Calc“. It lets you choose your camera, lens, f-stop and distance of your subject and will give you several details about your depth of field.

Manfrotto 561 BHDV Monopod

This was probably the best investment I have made in the last year! I use this monopod so much, that I’ve decided to not use a tripod at all for Gloria’s video. It’s a monopod, so it has only one leg as compared to a tripod which has three, but the Manfrotto 561 is a very special monopod because it has 3 tiny legs at the bottom. And it can stand by itself with a small, lightweight camera on top by just balancing it in the center. I would never leave the monopod alone and always have my hand close-by in case it will tip over, but in this case I used it for the whole interview and it gives you very steady images.

Audio

For the audio I simply used an Audio Technica lavalier mic that I attached to Gloria’s jacket and ran the cable into a Zoom H1 handy recorder. That is a good setup for shooting interviews with a DSLR because a lot of cameras don’t have good quality audio recording and only a few allow you to manually adjust sound levels or even monitor the sound. One way to get these features on the Canon T2i, 60D and some other cameras is by installing Magic Lantern, which I will go into more detail in a future post.

The problem is if you record sound separately from the camera means that you will have to sync it again later, so you do want to get good sound also on the camera. For an interview what I do is run a cable from the audio out on the Zoom H1 directly into my camera, then adjust the levels in Magic Lantern and most of the time that is the audio that I use. So I save one step in post of syncing the 2 audio tracks.

Colour Grading

Also for the Colour Grading I decided to be a bit more adventurous than just making it look realistic. At the ING Direct Cafe I used a custom white balance with a grey card and magic lanterns auto WB setting and changed my camera to a neutral picture style (Contrast -4, Saturation -2, Sharpness 0, Color Tone 0).

After I finished the edit in Adobe Premiere Pro I exported the single shots to After Effects with “Dymanic Link”. If you don’t know what that is, you should look it up. It’s definitely the main reason to get the Production Suite because it let’s you work easily between Premiere, After Effects, Photoshop and all other CS programs.

For the colour correction I just used the levels on an adjustment layer and for the actual grading I downloaded Magic Bullet’s Colorista Free. There is also a paid version which let’s you make more detailed adjustments, but for the basic grading I wanted to do it was good enough. It installs as an After Effects plugin and then you can add it easily to an adjustment layer. For the look I did what is called “split toning” in photography: make the highlight a bit warmer and the shadows a bit colder to get more contrast in the colour and a more interesting look.

Questions?

I am hoping to write more of these behind-the-scenes posts for my future projects, so let me know how I can improve. What else do you want to know? Please comment below for any feedback and I’ll promise to take more photos of the setup for future shoots.

Related posts:

1. Exciting things happening with RIPE this fall
2. Julia Moulden’s RIPE book trailer
3. 2-minute-food-porn – Glo & Rico’s Soiree