Our Favorite Portrait Documentary Shots #Cinematography
Top Film director kenya grace
Our Favorite Portrait Documentary Shots
The following is short write up that lets you into the minds of the team at Insignia Productions. Today we’ll focus on Documentaries especially interviews, we’ll show you the styles and shot formations that we prefer. Most of these documentaries were shot in Nairobi, Kenya unless specially stated otherwise.
Top Film director Kenya Grace
The thing about documentary film making is it can get monotonous if the director and the director of photography are not creative in the way they want to tell the story.
P.s click on the title links to WATCH THE VIDEOS
Here are a few shots from some of the documentaries we’ve filmed over the years. Lets explore the thought process behind each frame.
CIAT DOCUMENTARY
Wide shots with accentuated headroom.We love wide’s that have a lot of headroom, especially when the background tells you large part about the subject.
I wanted to capture the interviewee and his family but also include his house in the background. I love the asymmetry of how they are off-center plus it makes the hut in the background stand out.
This is the interviewee’s close up below. Usually during editing we cut-to close ups after establishing our subject in the wide shot with his family and surrounding. But as the Director of photography/Director, I used more of his takes on the wide because i felt like that best expressed his story, especially how important the environment was to him.. Hehehe (creative license hopefully)
During the same documentary we also got to speak to a farmer with fascinating story. Grace (the Director) and I loved the cowshed with the house in the background and felt we could tell his story in one shot. And to give it a touch of special, the clouds helped us to paint an amazing picture.
SAFARICOM CORPORATE VIDEO
The cool thing about this corporate video is I did a lot of research into other videos that had been shot of Bob Collymore in them. Most if not all were pretty old school -in the sense they had used set ups with Mr Collymore looking very formal behind an office desk.
So I insisted to shoot in their lounge area placing Mr Collymore in the middle of the room with Safaricom staff in the background. Good thing Bob was easy about it all and went with my crazy idea which turned out pretty cool, the shot portrayed him as a laid back, professional 21st century CEO.
Below is a close up from the same interview.
WALDORF PREP SCHOOL
I must say this documentary had some very memorable interviews. In this documentary I used a very candid style of sitting the subjects where it almost looks like you caught the person doing something else and casually started interviewing them, here’s are two examples of such portraits.
On the same documentary we got to explore side profile shots, We had two cameras on set. This gave us a lot of flexibility.
Here’s a sample portrait with a side profile angle.
