You can appear on ‘talking heads’ video clips looking just like a pro!
If you’ve ever tried talking straight to camera, you’ll know that it’s harder than it looks!
Actually it takes serious training to be able to be comfortable with talking into a camera lens and looking and sounding natural. Most people end up looking all round the room, and the results are totally amateurish.
Added to that, most of us find it really difficult to talk “into a vacuum”, and we forget what we were intending to say. Or even if we remember it, the delivery comes across as strained or wooden.
So we’ve created an assembly that takes all of the stress out of the situation. As you can see here:
The person being recorded looks at a small screen and holds a conversation with the interviewer. They make eye contact, and they get all the normal feedback cues which let them know whether they are being understood or not, whether they are going too fast or too slowly, and whether they are being interesting or boring.
We all hold conversations every day without effort or stress. The subject forgets that there is a camera there, and simply explains the information they want to share naturally and freely.
When a viewer watches the resulting video, they feel as though you are looking straight at them and talking directly to them!
How do we do it? Here is our shooting set-up:
And this is what it looks like without the daylight shroud on:
As you can see, the main camera looks at the subject through a half-silvered mirror. There’s a small video monitor mounted horizontally, and the image on that is reflected in the mirror, and this is what the subject sees. The monitor is fed from a second small video camera (on the far side of the main camera in this picture), which is right by the top edge of the main camera’s viewfinder, pointing towards the camera operator.
With this set-up you can really engage with your audience!