Talking Heads: Presenters and Interviews in Corporate and Training Video

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Talking Heads: Presenters, Interviews

Talking heads in corporate and training videos come in three types:

the professional presenter, who is linking the various scenes of the video and guiding the audience through the topic
the CEO or senior manager endorsing the video by adding his or her message
interviews with staff, customers, construction site operatives, the general public…

Why should you want talking heads?

Credibility and authority are the two elements that talking heads can add to a corporate video – provided that they are interesting and engaging. Take health and safety training in manufacturing or construction, for example.

Most people already know what they should be doing, what the risks are and how to avoid them. Building workers and contractors usually sit through a safety induction at every site they work on – perhaps a dozen or more in a year. But accidents still happen – in the UK 152 people were killed at work in 2009-2010, there were over 230,000 reportable injuries and 28.5 million working days lost due to work-related ill health or injury*.

Having actual building workers describing accidents they have witnessed or explaining how a health and safety reporting scheme has empowered them and made the workplace safer, this can carry far more weight than the same message from a disembodied, anonymous voiceover.

Having the Chief Executive do a piece to camera adds authority. The CEO can remind managers and supervisors of their responsibilities and can encourage operatives to be pro-active when it comes to health and safety.

Having characters in a sales training video drama talk to camera to explain their thoughts about a particular interaction can add a further dimension and act as a trigger for discussion between your trainer and the trainees.

presenter to camera against green screen background

Different styles

There are basically two styles of talking head – “to camera” and “off camera”.

"To camera” is when the person talks directly to the video camera, eye-balling the lens. The direct eye contact with the viewer can carry a lot of authority. This is what you will see when watching television news. Usually we fit a teleprompter (also known as an Autocue) over the front of the camera, so the talking head can read their words without losing eye contact with the audience. This is not an easy option and is why a trained tv presenter can earn a higher daily fee than, say, an actor.

"Off camera” is the normal style for interviews. The interviewee is answering questions from an interviewer standing beside the camera. Generally in our productions the interviewer is unseen and unheard.

People who have not had camera training will usually find the "off camera" interview technique easier and the result will seem more spontaneous and genuine.

How to do it

Avoid people sat behind desks. It works in a television news studio but rarely in a corporate or training video situation. You are creating a barrier between the talking head and the audience.
If shooting someone in a work situation, take them somewhere reasonably quiet and away from their colleagues. The more people hanging around, the more inhibited the interviewee will be.
Send your senior managers on a good media awareness training course, where they can practice the techniques needed to present “to camera”.
If you would like us to put your people or the presenter against a graphic background (possibly with inset shots of what they are describing), we can build a mini studio in a conference room. This needs to be quiet (beware traffic, aircraft, noisy air conditioning, busy corridors and banging doors), able to be blacked out and sufficiently large to allow us to put up the lights and the backdrop. We will shoot people against a green screen (some people use blue) and use the chroma key process in the edit suite to replace the green screen background with a graphic.

Simplified layout for a mobile green screen mini video studio

Too stiff?

We have lost count of the times when a client has told us “Our MD is very good on his feet. He won’t need teleprompt.” But then, on the day, the MD can’t remember the lines (which have probably been written for him by someone else and are far too long and full of “corporate speak” rather than Plain English). If we have not brought the teleprompter, we then have to resort to prompt cards, which are not ideal.

If the MD has not been on a media awareness course and is not relaxed in front of the camera, we can help by breaking the speech into chunks, shooting one sentence at a time, then reframing (going in to close-up or out to a wider shot) or allowing for a cutaway to a graphic or a shot of something they are describing.

Too dull?

If interviewees feel intimidated, they will often resort to saying the blindingly obvious or something they think their employer would like them to say. Immediately this loses credibility and interest. We resolve this by …

Keeping colleagues and others away
Having a large panel of interviewees – at least six, ideally a dozen or more – so that at least some of them contribute something interesting to your video. Usually we find a few who are very articulate and who carry the video, with short supporting remarks from everyone else.
Being flexible with the questions. Often we find an interviewee has something valuable to say that is not in the script.
Keeping answers short. You can always come back to an interviewee who has a lot of good stuff to say.

Languages

Multinational clients often need to distribute a training video in a number of languages. How we do this will depend on what the television audience is accustomed to in that country. Some are happy with subtitles. Some are used to a “lector”, a single voice who reads the script, regardless of who is talking on screen. Others expect a video that appears to have been produced in their own language.

A technique we have developed for one multinational client is to shoot a series of presenters of different nationalities in a green screen studio; in the video edit we put them against a standard background graphic and intersperse their scenes with the documentary footage to produce a complete version in English, French, Italian, Spanish …

More about producing foreign language versions

* Statistics from the Health and Safety Executive http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/

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