Chapter 19 — Exercises

The interview is a doing skill built on listening, and you cannot practice listening by reading. These exercises put you in the chair on both sides of the camera — as the person who builds the setup, and as the person who has to ask the question and then shut up. Do them with whatever you own; a phone, a window, and a friend willing to talk is a complete interview kit. Take the starred items seriously, because several of them build directly toward your Project 2 interview.

Exercises are graded by effort and depth:

• ⭐ Warm-up — a few minutes; locks in a concept.
• ⭐⭐ Core — the real practice; do as many of these as you can.
• ⭐⭐⭐ Stretch — deeper or more ambitious; where the biggest gains are.

Model solutions and critiques for the starred and odd-numbered exercises are collected in Answers to Selected Exercises at the back of the book. Attempt each one before reading its answer — a question you fumbled teaches more than an answer you only read.

A. Seeing and hearing the craft (Eye & Ear Training)

No camera required — just your attention, pointed at interviews you already watch.

1. ⭐ Find the eyeline. Watch any three documentary or news interviews. For each, decide in one word: is the subject looking into the lens (direct address) or just off it (off-axis, at an interviewer)? Note what that choice makes the interview feel like. (Answer provided.)

2. ⭐ Count the cameras. In the same three interviews, count the angles the subject is shown from. One camera or two (or more)? What tipped you off — did the shot size or angle change within a single continuous answer? (Answer provided.)

3. ⭐⭐ Where's the key? Pause on a talking-head and answer: which side is the key light on, and is it the side the subject is facing? Is the fill gentle (bright, even face) or crushed (deep shadow)? Guess the tone the makers were going for. Do this for five interviews.

4. ⭐⭐ Hear the interviewer. Listen to three interviews with your eyes closed. Can you hear the interviewer's questions in the final cut, or only the subject? Can you catch any "mm-hmm"s bleeding onto the subject's audio? Write one sentence on what a clean interview edit sounds like. (Answer provided.)

5. ⭐⭐⭐ The non-answer hunt. Watch a long-form interview (a podcast-style or press interview is perfect) and log three moments where the subject gives a non-answer — a yes/no, a fragment, an evasion, an echo. For each, rewrite the interviewer's question to be open, specific, and quiet so it would have forced a real answer. (Model answer provided.)

B. Reading Described Shots (Read the Sequence)

6. ⭐ Name the fields. Re-read FIGURE 19.3 ("A strong interview frame"). Without looking, list the seven fields of a Described Shot and, for each, name the one decision that figure made. (Answer provided.)

7. ⭐⭐ Diagnose the frame. In FIGURE 19.3, rewrite THE FRAME and THE EFFECT as if the interviewer had sat a full meter to the side of the lens instead of right beside it. What happens to the eyeline and the feeling? (Answer provided.)

8. ⭐⭐ The pause, dissected. Look again at FIGURE 19.8 ("The answer after the pause"). Explain, using THE SOUND and THE CUT, why the editor keeps the post-pause line and cuts the composed one. What would be lost if the interviewer had jumped in with the next question? (Answer provided.)

9. ⭐⭐⭐ Write your own. Watch a 30–60 second stretch of a documentary interview you admire and write a full Described Shot of it using all seven fields. Then add one line: what did the interviewer do (eyeline distance, question, or silence) that produced this moment? (Model answer provided.)

C. Building the setup (Shoot This)

The heart of the chapter. Seat a real person and make things.

10. ⭐ The eyeline dial. Seat a friend and shoot three 15-second clips of them talking, changing only your distance from the lens: (a) right beside it, (b) an arm's length to the side, (c) two meters to the side. Watch back on mute. Describe how the subject's eyeline and "presence" change as you move away. Keep clip (a) as your reference for what "close" looks like. (Model self-critique provided.)

11. ⭐⭐ Build FIGURE 19.2. Construct the full interview setup from the top-down map: subject on a third, eye-height camera, you beside the lens, a soft key on the looking side, a mic close and out of frame. Shoot two minutes of casual talk. Self-review against the Summary table's six setup rows — which did you nail, which did you miss?

12. ⭐⭐ Five Ways: one subject, five looks. Film the same person saying the same thing five times, changing exactly one setup variable each time: (a) eye-level vs (b) low angle vs (c) high angle; (d) key on the looking side vs (e) key on the opposite side. Watch all five. Which reads as most trustworthy, which as most "off," and can you say why in one sentence each? (Answer discusses the trade-offs.)

13. ⭐⭐ The window-key interview. With no artificial lights at all, seat your subject beside a large window on their looking side. Add a white bounce for fill. Shoot 30 seconds. Then move them so the window is behind them and shoot the same 30 seconds. Compare. This is the single most persuasive argument in the chapter — keep both clips. (Model answer provided.)

14. ⭐⭐⭐ Two-mic safety, for real. Record a two-minute interview on two independent recordings at once (lav + boom, or a wired lav + a second phone catching the room). Monitor on headphones. Afterward, deliberately imagine the lav failed on one sentence — can you cover that line from the safety track? Confirm both are clean and that you captured 30 seconds of room tone. (Model answer provided.)

D. Asking and listening (Shoot This / Fix the Shot)

15. ⭐ Open it up. Here are five closed or vague questions. Rewrite each as open, specific, and quiet: (a) "Do you like your job?" (b) "Was it hard?" (c) "Are you proud of it?" (d) "What does success mean to you?" (e) "You started in college, right?" (Answers provided.)

16. ⭐⭐ The silence drill. Interview a friend with five real questions. After every answer, force yourself to hold a full three seconds of silence before speaking, keeping your eyes on them. Afterward, ask them how the silence felt and note where it produced a better, truer second answer. Write down the single best thing the silence bought you. (Guidance provided.)

17. ⭐⭐ Full-sentence coaching. Ask a friend "How long have you lived here?" — they'll almost certainly answer with a fragment ("Six years"). Now brief them on the full-sentence rule and re-ask. Compare the two answers. Then run three more questions with the full-sentence brief in place. Note how much cleaner your raw footage is to imagine cutting. (Model answer provided.)

18. ⭐⭐⭐ Fix the interview. A described shoot: a subject is interviewed sitting in front of a bright window; the interviewer sits three meters to the side reading questions off a phone, says "right, right" after each answer, and asks things like "So you were nervous, weren't you?" One lav mic, not monitored, levels peaking near 0 dBFS. List every problem — framing, eyeline, light, audio, question design, listening — and prescribe the specific fix for each, sorted by the section of this chapter it belongs to. (Model answer provided.)

E. The two vs. one camera decision (Cut This / Settings Drill)

19. ⭐⭐ Shoot the same answer two ways. Record one good answer single-camera (one locked medium), then two-camera if you can (a medium and a close-up, same side of the line, ≥30° apart). Note which internal cuts you could hide in each and how. (Answer provided.)

20. ⭐⭐ Cut This: tighten by 20%. Take a two-minute interview answer you shot and edit it down by 20% (remove the "um"s, the false starts, the rambling middle). If single-camera, hide every internal cut with a placeholder B-roll card or a punch-in; if two-camera, hide them on the A↔B switch. Which felt easier, and why? (Guidance provided.)

21. ⭐⭐ Settings Drill: write the audio plan. For each scenario, write the interview audio setup you'd run (primary mic, safety mic, channels, target level, what you'd monitor): (a) a quiet office testimonial; (b) an outdoor interview by a busy road; (c) a subject who gestures a lot and wears a scarf. (Model answers provided.)

22. ⭐⭐⭐ Settings Drill: match two cameras. You're setting up a two-camera interview. List every setting you must match between A-cam and B-cam so the cut doesn't jar, and the two things you must do so the editor can sync and cut them. Explain what goes wrong in the edit if you skip each. (Model answer provided.)

F. Recreate It

23. ⭐⭐ Recreate the three-point look. Using FIGURE 19.5 as your target, light one subject with a key on the looking side, a gentle fill, a rim from behind, and a separated background — using lamps, a window, or one LED, whatever you own. Shoot a 20-second interview. Compare your result to the described look field by field. What's the biggest gap, and is it a gear problem or a placement problem? (It's almost always placement.)

24. ⭐⭐⭐ Recreate the direct-to-lens interview. After reading Case Study 1, shoot a short interview where the subject looks straight into the lens (rig a phone or a note right beside/over the lens for them to talk to). Compare the feeling to your off-axis clips from Exercise 10. When would you actually choose this, and what does it cost you? (Model answer provided.)

G. Interleaved (mixing prior chapters)

These deliberately braid Chapter 19 with earlier skills, because on a real shoot they all happen at once.

25. ⭐⭐ Interleave with Ch.7 (coverage). Your two-camera interview is coverage. Explain how the same 180-degree-line and 30-degree rules you learned for a dialogue scene apply to placing A-cam and B-cam — and what a "jump cut" between them would look like. (Answer provided.)

26. ⭐⭐ Interleave with Ch.10 (directing real people). List three things from Chapter 10's "getting a relaxed performance" that you'd use to settle a nervous interview subject in the first two minutes, before the questions that matter. (Answer provided.)

27. ⭐⭐ Interleave with Ch.13 (window light). Your interview location has one big north-facing window and a lamp. Sketch (in words or a quick top-down diagram) where you'd seat the subject, put the camera, and sit yourself, and what each light source is doing. (Model answer provided.)

28. ⭐⭐⭐ Interleave with Ch.16–18 (pre-pro & on set). Write the one-page pre-production plan for your Project 2 interview: location and time (for light and sound), gear checklist, a ten-question list, and the consent/release step. This is your Production Checkpoint prep. (Guidance provided.)

H. Synthesis

29. ⭐⭐⭐ Teach it back. In about 200 words, explain to a beginner why an interview answer has to be a full, self-contained sentence. Use the fact that the question disappears in the edit, one concrete fragment-vs-sentence example, and one thing the interviewer does on set to make it happen. (Model answer provided.)

30. ⭐⭐⭐ The self-audit. Do a full mock interview (setup, light, two-mic audio, ten designed questions, active listening) and then grade yourself honestly, 1–5, on each of the chapter's four pillars: framing/eyeline, lighting, audio safety, and question-and-listen. Which scored lowest? Write one sentence on the specific change you'll make before your real Project 2 interview. Keeping this baseline lets you measure the jump.

When you've done these — especially the ones with a real person in the chair — you've practiced the single most reusable skill in nonfiction video. Every documentary, testimonial, and brand film you ever make is some version of this chapter. Next, in Chapter 20, we shoot the B-roll that turns these answers into a film.