Commission Documentary Unit 3: Peter Lloyd-Williams

Today we had a workshop with Peter Lloyd-Williams whom is a director of photography. Peter is from the BBC and has a high knowledge of experience of the TV industry and was extremely helpful throughout the day.

Peter taught us tips on how to film an interview which included making sure we had three main shots. The first shot is a shot of a close up of the interviewee talking by themselves, the second shot is of the interviewer talking, and the third shot is a shot of the interviewee in shot with the interviewer in the corner of the screen with their shoulder in shot (basically an over the shoulder shot). Peter also taught us about tips on what to do when we need to either trim footage and it not be choppy or have audio added in that wasn’t in the original clip. To do this you would film the interviewee, and then film a wide shot of them with something in the corner of the screen and them blurred out so that the audience can’t see that the interviewee’s out of sync or not talking at all.

Another tip we was given was how to get a good panning shot so that you could get three shots from it. The idea was that you record for 5-10 seconds, do your pan and then record for another 5-10 seconds so that you could take three separate shots from a simple pan.

Throughout the day we filmed some short interviews and followed some other tips that Peter had given us including how to make an interview less boring – especially if the person doesn’t want to be identified. What we each did in our group was shoot an interview and then film close ups of their hands playing with an object and also film them from far away with an object in focus and them blurred out in the background. Another tip Peter gave us was to record nodding shots of the interviewer so their reactions look better – all these tips and shots made the interview much more interesting to watch instead of seeing someone just sat there for 5 minutes.

We also had to create a short interview outside which used a variety of shots including wide shots, medium shots and close up shots. I worked with Vittorio Falcucci and Sam Babington, Vic was cameraman, Sam was interviewer and I was interviewee. We had half an hour to film the interview and pick a subject to talk about, throughout the task we tried to find an interesting background for the interview and then tried to pick some interesting shots of us walking towards the spot we was going to stop to talk. We then had 5 minutes to sit in our group in front of Peter, Fergus and the class and edit our short interview together. As there was one computer and three of us it was stressful to each have a turn to edit, so only one of us edited and we tried to give opinions and eventually we produced our short interview.

Here is our finished video.