Your Exec Is About to Freeze On Camera
Episode 4 of 10
How to prepare the person in front of the lens, and the one question that fixes most of it.
More on this: interview video production.
Transcript
The take where your exec was polished is usually the one we throw away. The one we keep is the take where they paused before a hard question, or corrected themselves, or laughed at their own answer. That’s worth knowing before the shoot, because most people prepare for exactly the wrong thing.
Which doesn’t mean don’t prepare. It means prepare the right things, and there are three.
First, who’s watching this?
An all-hands video for staff who already know you is a different performance from something going on social, and different again from a piece a grant committee will watch. The information doesn’t change but the register does, and if your speaker doesn’t know which one they’re in they’ll default to the stiffest, which is the corporate voice nobody trusts.
Second question. Is this live, or do we get takes?
Livestream means one pass and there’s no fixing it afterwards, so rehearsal matters. If we’ve got takes, the pressure comes off. The best thing a speaker can hear before we roll is that we’re doing this a few times and the first one doesn’t count. It almost never does.
Then the talking points. Not a script. Know the two or three things that have to land, and know how they connect to the bigger picture, because interviews wander and you want your speaker able to find their way back. Have them run it aloud until it stops sounding recited. Reading a memorised speech to camera reads exactly like what it is.
There’s a version of research that helps and a version that hurts. The one that helps is knowing how your two or three points connect to the bigger picture, so that when the question comes at an angle you weren’t expecting, you can still get there. The one that hurts is memorising phrasing. Memorised phrasing survives about one question before it falls apart, and then you’ve got someone trying to remember a sentence instead of answering.
The useful trick is to have them explain it once to somebody outside the company. A partner, a friend, anyone with no context. What survives that explanation is what should be in the interview, because it’s the version that doesn’t rely on shared jargon. What gets cut is usually the part they were most attached to.
On wardrobe, keep it simple and let them wear something they’ve worn before. New clothes make people sit differently.
And tell your speaker, out loud, that they’re allowed to stop and start again. Nobody believes it until someone says it. That permission is the difference between a person talking and a person presenting, and only one of those is watchable.
And if you can, do the hardest question second rather than last. People are nervous at the start and tired at the end, and the middle is where they’re loosest. Leaving the difficult one until everyone’s checking the clock gets you the guarded version of the answer, which is the one you can’t use.
Get that right and the crew’s job gets much easier. Get it wrong and no amount of lighting saves it.
One practical note on the room, since it changes the performance more than people expect. Get the interview subject away from their own desk. Somewhere they don’t run meetings, ideally without colleagues walking past the door. People perform their job title in the room where they do their job, and you want the version underneath that.
We’re Luma Creative, a video production company in San Francisco. If you’ve got something coming up and you want a straight answer on what it takes, we’re at lumacreative.com.