Corporate Video Interview Shoot from Home

February 18, 2016

We just finished a corporate video interview shoot in our living room. This may sound odd for anyone unfamiliar with San Francisco’s astronomical housing and office prices, but it’s a way to get the job done affordably for the client. Doing a video shoot from home is something we do on occasion; it’s one of the benefits of being a family business.

Of course it makes the most sense to do corporate video interviews at the client’s office. It’s the most convenient for the client and we’re happy to accommodate them. But office space is tight and finding a quiet spot that’s large enough to shoot in is often challenging. Throw in our common request of not doing interviews in small conference rooms that have large unmovable tables in the middle and it sometimes gets to be too much; the client just can’t find the space.

Shooting video from home can give professional results. Corporate video interviews aren’t the only thing we’ve shot this way. We’ve done a program on how to fill out financial aid forms for high school seniors. We’ve used our garden for a wine tasting program. Our garage can be turned into a studio and we’ve shot an entire series of financial lectures there, as well as a dozen more corporate video interviews, including many interviews in green screen.

Video shoot in our living room.

There are drawbacks to shooting in a residential neighborhood: you never know if a neighbor has something noisy scheduled for your shoot day: carpet cleaning, power washing, reroofing. But as long as we stay on good terms with them, we can find out what’s going on ahead of time.  That leaves one last point: our clients must always be considerate in terms of parking so that the neighbors never feel inconvenienced. We see to this every time.

In this particular project notice the camera setup. We shot this with two DSLRs mounted very close together. One had a close-up, the other a wide shot so we can cut between them. Even with the two cameras I was a one-man-band, handling cameras, lighting and audio. The client did her own interviewing. This project shows that we give even an inexpensive corporate video interview project a ton of value.