Plan lighting for interviews

What this is about

The planning happens on two layers. Creatively: how soft is the key, how much contrast does the story tolerate, how far does the background fall away, does the speaker get separation or blend into the company wall. Practically: which corner has depth, what do the windows do at shoot time, which circuits carry the load, and how long the rig honestly takes. Consistency is the quiet requirement — when five executives are shot across two days, the frames must sit next to each other in one film without a visible change of weather. And every fixture is also a sound decision, because a fan hum in the key light lives inside every answer.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

Where this differs from the general case:

• The room outranks the fixtures: depth behind the subject, window position and wall color decide more than wattage.
• Consistency across multiple interviews is the professional tell — one look, many speakers, two shooting days.
• Every fixture is a sound source until proven silent; the boom operator co-signs the lighting plan.
• Pre-lighting protects the guest's time: executives arrive to a finished frame, not to ladder work.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Scout the room before planning any light: depth behind the chair, window positions, ceiling height, wall colors, and what the background says about the speaker.
2. Decide the look in advance — key softness, contrast ratio, background glow — and write it down, so interview two matches interview one.
3. Make the window decision early: block it out, or make it the key and accept that exposure follows the weather. Half-decisions here chase clouds all afternoon.
4. Sketch a small plot: key, fill or negative fill, backlight, background accent — with stand positions that leave a walking path and room for the boom.
5. Confirm power before arrival: which circuits, what headroom, where the fuse box hides. An interview that trips the floor's power is remembered longer than its content.
6. Choose fixtures for silence as much as output: no fan ramp in the key, no ballast hum near the microphone — sound signs off the plan.
7. Budget rig time honestly in the schedule and pre-light where the room allows, so the guest sits down into a finished frame.
8. Keep a consistency card — a photo of the frame, stand positions, settings — so day two or a reshoot reproduces the look instead of reinventing it.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Fighting a west-facing window at 15:00 instead of turning the frame around in the morning plan.
• Five interviews, five looks, one film that feels like five.
• Setup time budgeted as 'while the guest has coffee' — the coffee always wins.

With TillyGen

TillyGen plans interviews as setups with real rig time in the schedule and keeps look notes attached to the scenes, so a second interview day starts from the first day's answers.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.