Just to be clear, I don’t have any dating troubles, but when I got booked to go down to Houston to shoot a couple segments for The Meredith Vieira Show, I had no idea what I was in for. Especially when the two segments were titled “How to Train Your Husband” and “Dating Trouble”. However, the two days I spent shooting in Houston turned out to be a blast!
The first shoot was focused on a married couple where the wife was having issues with the husband, hence the title, “How to Train Your Husband”. This was a pretty easy day of shooting a couple interviews, on my HDX-900, with our talent and some family b-roll to be used as their intro story to the show.
For the interview with the wife, Brittany, I pulled some inspiration from my old Fixer Upper roots, by using the kitchen as a backdrop. I was really pleased with the way it turned out.
My view of the interview
For the interview with the husband, Ludger, we used their home office as a background, which had a lot of color to it. We did have to dress up the scene a little bit by adding some family photos borrowed from the mantle in the next room.
Day two in Houston started very similar to the previous day. A simple sit down interview with our talent, Amber, whose been having some dating trouble. We had plenty of options to choose from to shoot her interview but we settled on her living room.
I varied my framing for this interview, going wider and tighter.
Once the interview was done, I shot some quick b-roll of Amber around her house, walking with her dog and hanging out with her friends. After the b-roll, we did some on-the-fly interviews with Amber’s two friends about Amber and her dating life. This is where things got interesting…
We headed downtown to a local sports bar where we met with different talent, Justin, a reporter from the local news station along with three eligible bachelors that would be going on date’s with Amber. For this, it was all run-and-gun.
I mounted up my iKan on camera light and went to work getting various b-roll of the bar before doing three different man-on-the-street interviews with Justin and the three bachelors.
Justin interviewing one of the lucky guys.
If you’ve ever had a camera around a bunch of little kids, it’s the same experience as shooting in a sports bar on game night. The only issue we ran into was that it was loud, as is to be expected in a sports bar.
But hey, that’s where we were shooting, so it works. Hear a cow, see a cow. Hear a bunch of sports fans, see a bunch of sports fans. After the interviews, it was a quick wrap up with an intro and outro from Justin and we called it a night. I dumped all the footage from the past two days from my NanoFlash to a producers hard drive, packed it in, and hit the road home to Dallas.
