Camera Away First
Build the human relationship before you build the recording — don't even let them see the camera for the first half hour.
Before filming, put the camera away entirely — for 20 to 30 minutes — and just talk to the person: have a cup of tea, ask about the things on their desk. It disarms a subject who finds a camera nerve-wracking, and it routinely surfaces a better story than the one you came to film.
- A camera changes the person: rapport must precede the record button.
- Talk about their world first (the things on their desk), not the video you came to make.
- The pre-interview chat often re-routes you to the real, untold story.
- Lowering the subject's guard is the interviewer's job, not a nicety.
Haran calls this the single best piece of advice he ever received about making videos. He demonstrates it with the laser-cooling story: by chatting first instead of filming the planned topic, he noticed a steel contraption, asked what it was, and discovered it created "the coldest place in the universe" — a far better video than the one originally planned, which only existed because the camera was still in the bag.