"Five Questions" Interview Project

My "Advanced Television Production and Editing" students are shooting and editing a little assignment I call "Five Questions." In teams, the students take turns interviewing, being interviewed and shooting the brief Q&A segments.


The production involves three camera positions: the beginning/intro two shot, the close-up of the guest answering the questions, then the camera is put on the host who repeats the questions. The sections are then edited together in a smooth way that looks as if there are two cameras recording the interview. The production brings in the techniques of reverse questions- the interviewer/host/reporter repeats the questions with the camera on him or her in order for them to be edited into the piece.
Here's an example of "Five Questions" featuring Devante Williams interviewing Shay Stiney:

I then asked the students to do something else with their interviews. Since they are shot in the studio with the green walls, still shots or video can be "chromakeyed" into the background. This can be done in iMovie, Adobe Premiere and other video editors. Here's the version I first produced using video I had previously shot for a studio set up video. 

Here's another version, this time with an "On Air" light video playing in the background:

For the latter two videos iMovie's green screen tool was used to bring in the background videos. The first video was inserted with Blogger's video tool. When I went to add the second video, I got a prompt saying 100 megabytes had been exceeded. To get around that I first posted that video and the third one to my YouTube site. This actually seems the better way to do it, since it's faster and gives three options for the icon image.