[music]
Announcer: Adorama TV presents "How'd They Do That?" where we explore the world of professional
photographers and share their techniques with you. Here's your host, Mark Wallace.
Mark Wallace: Hey everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of "How'd They Do That?" I'm
Mark Wallace.
Every single week when we release a new episode of "How'd They Do That?" we get comments and
emails that ask the same question. We've seen it from a lot of different people and the
question is, how do you do "How'd They Do That?" So, that's what we are going to talk
about this week.
The most common question we get is, how do we do the interviews? Is it real time or do
we send out the questions in advance? How do I talk to these photographers that are
on location? The answer is we actually do everything in real time.
But before I get there, let me talk to you about the production process. We have a pre-production
process, a shoot process and a post production process. All of that is handled by our producer.
Her name is Kelsey Hazelwood. Without Kelsey, we'd be in a lot of trouble because she keeps
the trains running on schedule.
What she does is she calls every photographer when we have them scheduled, she walks through
what the interview is going to be like, she talks about the file formats they need to
have for their cameras and the lighting and all kinds of things. Before the shoot, we
always go through Kelsey and myself and we look at all of the photos that a photographer
has taken or the videos a videographer has shoot and we decide what kind of questions
we need to ask. We sort of prep ourselves before the interview.
She takes all that stuff and gets it to the photographer or videographer. Now once the
videographer is ready to go, we require all of those people to have their own video camera
and a camera operator. Most have a video camera but most are camera operators themselves and
so they turn the cameras onto themselves.
It's sort of funny seeing them get everything situated before we start. In fact, here's
a couple of those photographers turning the cameras on themselves. So, you can see what
we see but you don't see every week.
[begin segment]
Woman 1: OK. Ready when you are.
Man 1: OK. We're ready.
Man 2: And I'm ready. Here we go. Alright, I got that. I'm running external audio just
in case our cell phone walks over the camera a little bit.
Man 1: Perfect.
Man 2: It'll happen sometimes.
Man 1: Alright, very good. Alright, here we go. Everybody quiet on the set of "How'd They
Do That?" This week we...
Man 2: OK. Ready to roll.
[end segment]
Mark: OK. Now, that's a lot of fun.
Once they have their cameras set up, what we do is our audio is pretty low tech. We
actually just use a normal phone and put it on speaker phone and then I will put my phone
just out of the frame, usually on a ladder. I ask the photographers to do the same.
What happens is we just use that speakerphone, I talk pretty loud in the studio and the photographer
can hear me over their speakerphone. As soon as I'm done asking the question, they respond
and it's all in real time. Here's a quick look at an interview we did with David Bean.
This is what you normally see.
But before we start, let me tell you a little bit about David. David is a lifestyle and
celebrity photographer. He's shot people like Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley, of course LeAnn
Rimes, Ja Rule and supermodel Nikki Taylor. Welcome to the show, David.
David: Hey. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
Mark: Now here's that exact same clip from our point of view. What we're doing is I ask
the question and then I'm just listening and vice versa. So here's that exact same clip,
looking at it with the audio and video swapped.
[begin segment]
But before we start, let me tell you a little bit about David. David is a lifestyle and
celebrity photographer. He's shot people like Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley, of course LeAnn
Rimes, Ja Rule and supermodel Nikki Taylor. Welcome to the show, David.
David: Hey. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.
[end segment]
Mark: Now sometimes, the speakerphone doesn't work and the person I'm interviewing can't
hear what I have to say so they just pull the phone to the ear. Once I'm done talking,
they'll put it down out of the screen and respond. That's what Jason Wallace did.
In fact, here's a clip of Jason Wallace and here's something that happens a lot when we're
doing the interviews. Sometimes the person I'm interviewing cracks up, or I crack up
or we flub up our lines. Here's a scene of Jason Wallace when Taylor Robinson the videographer
made him laugh. It's sort of a funny clip. So, here's Jason Wallace.
[begin segment]
Jason: Hey. Thanks for having me on.
Taylor: [laughter]
Jason: Sorry. Taylor laughed in my shot.
Taylor: I can't be here! [laughs]
Jason: Hold up. Hold on. Let me try it one more time. OK?
[end segment]
Mark: Alright. Now once we get through all of that fun stuff, we've done our pre-interview,
we've talked to the photographer or videographer, we've got all of our clips ready to go then
we normally just edit stuff. But sometimes when we think the cameras are off or right
before we start doing the interview, we get little bits or nuggets of wisdom that don't
always make it to the show.
In fact, we didn't know about one of the limitations of the 5D Mark two and right before we started
filming David Bean, he talked to us about it. Here's something we learned from David
Bean that was left out of the episode.
[begin segment]
David: The only thing I've noticed... I mean, I haven't shot video with this thing a lot
but I know that it only lets you shoot in four gig chunks which is approximately 12
minutes. So, we should probably make sure that at like a 10-minute mark we stop and
I record it.
Mark: OK. No problem. We've got a timer going.
David: OK.
[end segment]
Mark: Sometimes, we also get pretty funny nuggets of wisdom. In fact, we learned about
DSLR slate from Ab Sesay when he started going off on Photoshop and photography not being
real and he just bought this app and wanted to show it to us. So, here's a really funny
clip of Ab Sesay. It was something we learned from and we laughed at as well.
[begin segment]
Ab: That was going to be short answer but then I decided to add that piece at the end.
I hope you can cut that part out. This is not reality. This is photography. That's why
we take pictures because it's not real. The Photoshop makes it not real. It is real but
then you use Photoshop and makes it not real.
And Mark, you should also talk about this app. I'll email you what it's called but it's
a really cool app. It may actually work for something you guys are doing right now. I
haven't found a reason to use it so I'm justifying my purchase for using it for this. It's still
slightly inappropriate but it's working.
[end segment]
Mark: OK. So that's Ab and I love him.
Once we have all of the interviews finished, we have to get all of the files. We have to
get the files of the actually still photos and we have to get the video footage. The
way we do that is we ask our photographers to send those to use via their FTP site or
if they don't have an FTP site, we have a service called Media Fire that we really love.
It allows people to upload files up to two gigabytes and so those come to use.
And then if the interview is a little bit longer, or we have a lot of file footage or
the Internet connection isn't very good, all those photographers will just send us their
files on a DVD and we'll take that.
Now the photographers that we interview, some of them have high end Panasonic cameras, some
of them have 5D Mark 2s, some of them have Flip videos and some even have webcams. So,
we have all kinds of file footage that we work with. The way that we convert that footage
to something that we can use is using Final Cut Pro's compressor. We take anything that
we get and we convert that to Apple ProRes 422 and that allows us to seamlessly integrate
footage that we get from anybody to the footage that we shoot here on location.
Now once that's done, Leon Trueheel who's our videographer and editor takes all of our
footage, both ours and that which we got from the photographer or videographer, and puts
that into a timeline in Final Cut Studio and then edits everything. Once the final edit
is finished and we have all the graphics and everything loaded up, he compresses the final
video and gets it ready for YouTube and iTunes, Vimeo and all the places that we put "How'd
They Do That?"
He does that using a compressor and an H.264 compression format and then it goes out to
the world. That's how we do "How'd They Do That?."
Remember if you'd like to see somebody who's a favorite photographer of yours on "How'd
They Do That?" you can send your suggestions to me at askmark@adorama.com. And as always,
we have all of our past episodes of "How'd They Do That?" at the Adorama Learning Center,
including tons of articles that relate to the videos you see. So please check out the
Learning Center, it's well worth your time.
Well, thanks for joining me this week and I'll see you next week.
Announcer: This episode is brought to you by Adorama TV. Visit the Adorama Learning
Center where you'll find photography tips and techniques, links to the gear used in
this episode and related videos. For all the latest photography, video and computer gear
visit adorama.com and the next time you're in New York City, visit our store located
on 18th Street between 5th and 6th Avenue.