The honest answer: it depends on how good you want it to look. A shot that looks effortless usually took real time to set up — the time isn't wasted, it's where the quality actually comes from.
Setup: 2-3 hours from arrival to talent-ready. This is lighting, camera positioning, and framing — the part that determines whether the finished piece looks professional or looks like someone pointed a camera at a person in a room. This is also where a lot of the "room transformation" work happens (see our piece on turning whatever space we're given into something that looks designed).
The interview itself: usually 30 minutes to an hour. Once the setup is right, the actual interview moves quickly — most of a shoot day isn't spent rolling camera, it's spent making sure what gets captured in that 30-60 minutes actually looks right.
Breakdown and load-out: 60-90 minutes.
So a straightforward interview-only day — setup, interview, breakdown — runs somewhere around
4-5.5 hours door to door.
B-roll adds another 2-3 hours, depending on how much ground it needs to cover. A few practical things that make B-roll time more effective, not just longer:
- Consolidate the shot list before the shoot day, and organize it by location. Bouncing between spots without a plan burns time that could go toward getting better coverage.
- More time for B-roll is almost always better, not a nice-to-have — rushed B-roll is the first thing that looks rushed in the final edit.
- If any of it involves windows or shooting outside, timing matters a lot. Light changes fast, and the wrong hour can undo an otherwise good plan. This is exactly why preplanning — knowing the space, the light, and the shot list before the day itself — makes the biggest difference in how the day actually goes.
