Lighting for Interview Setups | Negative Films Productions

LIGHTING FOR INTERVIEWS: HOW WE MAKE SUBJECTS POP AND GLOW

A well-lit interview instantly sets the mood for how a story is felt and how a person is seen. Good lighting shapes faces, draws attention to what matters, and quietly tells the audience that care and intention went into the shot. When lighting is done right, viewers stay focused on the words, emotions, and little moments—rather than being distracted by harsh shadows, blown-out highlights, or a flat image.

A solid interview setup usually starts with a simple lighting structure. A key light to shape the face, a fill or negative fill to control contrast, and a back or hair light to help the subject stand out from the background. From there, it’s all about shaping—using softboxes, diffusion, flags, and reflectors to control how soft the light feels, where it falls, and what it avoids.

At Negative Films Productions, lighting interviews is really about respect. Respect for the person on camera, the story they’re sharing, and the people watching. Interviews are often the emotional core of a film—whether it’s a brand leader, a researcher, or someone from the community. Our goal is to make people look their best while still feeling natural, honest, and human.

So we're going to guide you through our lighting setup with a lighting diagram and how we achieve these three examples: an Indoor Setup, a Daylight Window Background Setup, and, a Night Setup.

SETUP #1: INDOOR SETUP

In all of the setups you'll see, there are a few common practices we adopt into our setup. No.1 is to always shoot on the shadow side. Going opposite to the key light, allows us to give contrast to the subject, giving a much more pleasing and cinematic look to the interview. Shooting on the shadow side also allows us to play with the contrast ratio that we want. We can either wrap the lights more around the shadow side, to give a cleaner corporate look. Or, less wrap around the shadow, to give a more moody look for those intimate and more dramatic effect.

In this Setup #1, understanding your content is key. As we're shooting for a corporate event, more wrap around the shadow side gives a cleaner corporate look while also still maintaining some contrast. If we didn't understand our audience and decided the place the light almost 90-degrees the left of the subject, the dramatic effect of the shadow would've just looked completely out of place.

One advice you've probably heard before is: Light for Spaces not Faces. I agree to a certain extent of that. My twist to that is: Light for Spaces AND Faces. My notion is that if we just focus on the background (spaces), and not paying enough attention to the face – which is the focal point – serves no purpose. To me, background is an added touch to the artwork.

So when I light for spaces, you can see that I love light splashes. It gives an added value to the background as opposed to just lighting up the background. This light splash, which I used Aputure 60X with its Fresnel, gives the background more texture.

As you'll see with most of my setup, a negative fill on the shadow side is always needed. For the Key, if I want the light to be much softer, I'll put a diffusion 4x4. Sometimes it's 216 or 250. I rarely go above 251 as I feel like it would be pointless to try to soften a subject if you're only using 251.

With this setup, it was straightforward and because the day was a bit gloomy (we had ceiling windows here), it allowed us enhance the warm and blue colours even more.

SETUP #2: FACING DAYLIGHT WINDOW SETUP

Shooting towards the window on a sunny day is challenging. What's even more challenging, is the unexpected changes in the weather which ultimately changes the lighting without much control. But when done with luck from the Weather Gods, it gives a more warm and welcoming feeling.

First step to achieve this, is to expose your camera's exposure first. Put your ND on! Whether it's variable or fixed, make sure it's exposed correctly. Use False Colour to get it right. Once it's exposed correctly, only then will you know how much light you need on the inside.

Because our talent is already sat in an area close to the window, the light spill from outside gave them some light. So, bringing in Aputure 300D for the inside was all that was needed. Oh yeah! We only had Daylight lights during this shoot! Always check with your lighting crew on their lighting setup. We missed out on this and ended up with fixed temperature lighting.

With our talent in the window area, I wanted the light from the outside to hit them, giving those tiny hair light effect. So we had two Aputure 300Ds, with one shooting straight to the talent and another blasting to the window, spilling just a bit to the talent's key side. Of course, in a real world, this doesn't make sense as sun's direction is one-way. But who cares?!

With daylight lighting fixed with Tungsten Gel, the temperature of camera was fixed at 4500K to give a warmer look while also having the background a bit more of a cooler colour. Because the shirt of the talent was Red, if everything was too warm, it would just look like we're shooting an interview for a Mexican cartel.

So, TL;DR: Always rent lighting with at least ONE main fixture having colour temperature feature in it!

SETUP #3: NIGHT TIME SETUP

Lighting for Night is one of my favourites and it's not the easiest! To expose dark areas that and making sure it makes sense is tough. A lot of cutters are needed to ensure light spill is carefully controlled.

For night interiors, I always opt for the typical teal and orange look. So, we blasted Aputure 300X on softbox to 3200K. A simple way to make blue is to simply drop the temperature to around 6000-7000K. However, what I've found is that changing your blue lights to HSI mode is far easier. The flexibility to choose your saturation makes the colour pop more and easier to achieve that orange and teal look.

As you can see for this, we wanted the light to be softer and used 216 in front of the key light. Although, the shadows were still strong, I would've like to distant the key light further back to eliminate the hard shadows and maybe put a poly on the fill side. But we didn't have much time and had to do with what we had.

Lighting spaces is strongly evident here because night interiors are so important for lighting the background. Without that, you're just going to have a subject that is incredibly bright as if he/she is being interrogated. So, we use HSI Modes for our tube lights to create that RGB effect. Again, knowing your content and audience is important. As this was an e-sports documentary, that RGB effect had its place and didn't feel too "colourful".

LIGHT FOR SPACES AND FACES

One filmmaker once said that lighting for interviews is the best way to practice your lighting setup skills. Understanding where your key light should be, how to increase or decrease the shadow on the fill side, how to make hair light prominent, and how background lighting works, is all part of the process of lighting for interviews.

This ability and experience has allowed me to light for commercial scenes, that are not interview based, with the knowledge of understand where my key light is at and how the rest of the setup in that scene should pan out.

Of course, in a scene setup, there are so much more to it than just key light, hair light and backlight. Especially, when blocking is done and movements have to be created, there can be multiple key lights based on where your talent is walking and what you want to highlight as the DP.

But interview lighting is the best place to start your journey in mastering lighting in cinematography. One thing to remember is that there is no right or wrong. You can setup shooting on the key side. No problem at all. As long as the visuals and the lighting serves the story, then by all means do so.