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Lighting a spoke person in a conf room
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The umbrella is too “fussy” for that tiny space, but I like the idea of using the other soft light as the “fill” in the room. If you can rent one of those, or buy one, with daylight-color-temp bulbs in it, it might be all you need. While it comes with a stand, in that tiny room, if the ceiling is a typical drop-ceiling with tiles suspended from a metal grid, you could buy or rent a “scissor clip” device to hang the softlight from overhead, and run the power cable across the ceiling and down the wall, enabling the floor around that table to be kept clear.
If the rental place has any Lowel lighting gear, you want to rent either a small Rifalight, or a single Lowel Omni-Light, with stand and a scissor clip, or a wall mount, with a folding gel frame and some diffusion (either some tough spun or opal tough frost), plus a square of daylight-correction gel.
Rental gear must NOT come out of your end: you pass it on to the client as part of the cost of business. This is fundamental. See; you’re charging them for the light, whether you own it, or not. Same for the audio guy with boom. These are costs you pass on, and this is why pro video costs more than it does when some kid uses the camera he got for his bar mitzva present and edits in his mom’s basement.
I’m confused by your statement about the TV. In the photo you show a flatscreen right behind the chair where the Big Guy is going to do his thing. So, is this going to be showing power points while he talks? If so, it’s right behind his head: you’d have to move the TV over to one side, or move him, and re-frame the shot so they share co-equal space. Really, I would advise a beginner against trying to shoot the power points AND the speaker, with limited gear and experience. The thing to do in that case, is to isolate the speaker only, and add back the slides during post-production, when you can alternate between full-screen shots of the slides, or just the speaker, or a nice 2-box setup of speaker AND slides.
The optimal backdrop for your speaker is blankness. A bare wall, or a flat curtain. Even a roll of photographer’s paper, suspended from a pipe on light stands, is better than having distracting junk behind his head and only a foot or two behind, where it will likely always be in focus.
As for practice, I recommend you go to this site and run thru all the relevant examples before shoot day.
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sorry I wasn’t clear about the TV. I was trying to explain exactly what you just wrote. I guess I am starting to get it right 🙂
as far as lighting, I’m not too clear on how you feel about my purchase/investment.
(I understood the rental advice. Makes sense)
Any of these low cost kits (except the umbrella one) would work to the shoot?
I called a few rental places and it’ll cost me around $200 to rent….And thanks for the awesome ling to Lowell.
I have my evening planned i guess 🙂 -
You can make the one with the umbrella work, too, and it actually is more flexible for more different uses in the hands of an expert, but it takes more skill than you have right now. The other one, the softbox, is pretty goof-proof, and fast to deploy. It will be useful for any future interview shoots you do, as well as for shooting small product shots. Those two were the only ons you showed me.
If your rental shop has a softbox like that, you could rent it one time. Or you could instead rent the Lowel Omni light with the other accessories… I would consider 50 bucks a fair rental for one day for that. For a 3- light Lowel kit complete with accessories, hundred seems a fair rental price to me. But you only need one light for this job, either the soft box, with a way to hang it from the ceiling, is possible, or the single Lowel with some diffusion and color gel on it.
For ether light, mount it on the non-window side and put it at a 45 degree angle above the subject and at 45 degrees to the left, opposite the window side, from a centerline down the table, as a starting point. Then adjust to taste. Proper distance to subject starts at about twice the diameter across the front of the soft box.
It doesn’t strictly have to be “Lowel” brand, though I’m the COW’s official number one fan club for Lowel products… Study well that site I showed you, it contains a brief synopsis of everything you need to start lighting right, plus, the sections on how to use the various Lowel accessories will inspire your creativity. I think of the Lowel suitcase as the James Bond Suitcase” of lighting. Full of clever tricks.
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alright Mike
Based on our conversations I decided to purchase a kit for $170.
The best rental I found was $150, which let me no time to practice.
For an extra $20 I have something I use for the shoot and then play with to learn.
I’ll also spend time reading the Lowel classes.
And you sold me on this brand for some reasons so as soon as I get more shoots booked, I’ll hit you up for more advices.
Thanks again for the time you spent on this. You really took the time to be specific and to answer my questions based on my needs/budget and not only on what I “should” do for a perfect shoot. Too many people trying to help by contributing to threads often forget that we don’t all have $5000 hanging around!Thanks
Xavier (I’ll send you a link once I’m done with the shoot and editing!)
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I don’t know who “Mike” is but thanks, and I DO want a full report with still frame grabs of how you tackled this. That is a really hard choice of room to light well, any pro would have to work at getting it right. Take a still shot of the entire room with the lighting gear and camera all set up, so we can see how you did it.
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are you sure you’re not Mike Suzsko? 🙂 Sorry about that!
I actually have another alternative in this room. Instead of the speaker in front of the TV with the windows on her left, she could be sitting camera left (based on the original pict posted), facing the windows…
Do you feel like it would help?
And by the way I bought shower curtains as you recommended.
BUt in this new setting this means I’d have to control the light on pretty much all windows. Which could be ok as these curtains are cheap. -
That could work better, though you won’t have much depth in the space, so your widest shot will not be very wide at all. But it does simplify the lighting a little bit, in that the key light from the windows is not behind the camera.
If you put a diffusion material, like white shower curtain material, on the windows, the softer, shadowless, flat light created will be flattering on the boss’s face. Soft, flat lighting flatters everyone, as it hides wrinkles and evens-out skin tone a bit.
A down-side is that she may be squinting a bit as she tries to look into the camera with the light right behind it. And if she wears glasses, they may pick up some glare. So what I think I would do is pull the blackout curtain down directly behind the camera, and then the soft, diffused window light coming in from the areas to either side, should fill in pretty well. If this session goes many hours, you’ll still need to add in the softlight you bought, to supplement things as the lighting moves around the room. And you’ll want to manually control the iris, making gradual adjustments thru the day. If there’s a TV in the shot and you light this way, you may need to tilt it downwards and/or angle it to one side a lot, to prevent reflections.
You might also play with blocking the side lights by varying amounts, in order to have a slight brightness difference from one side of her face to the other, simulating keylight and fill light – but really it’s all from one big source, cleverly modulated.
Think about some kind of flat, non-reflective backdrop on the glass(?) wall on that side, if you choose to turn the whole room 90 degrees as you suggest. You will want something relatively featureless, and dark, but not black. Matte fat photography paper rolls come in many shades, but I find a dove gray to be very versatile, because it can appear to be anything from nearly black to nearly white, and any color, depending on how you light it. A 50-foot roll is around 60 or bucks in my neck of the woods. You could also go with simple cloth from a sewing store, hung from a 2×4 clamped to two light stands.
One thing our shop has had for a long time is a roll-up photo-realistic backdrop of a law office bookshelf. We got ours from Denney’s online, comes in various widths. If you have a deep enough space to work in so that you can use depth of field to put that backdrop in soft focus, and you light your talent to match the same angles as the backdrop, the illusion becomes very convincing. In this way we have turned very ugly rooms and conference rooms into nice-looking “sets”.
One other trick I’ve used on a budget is to buy a single panel of 4×8 wall paneling, which is quite affordable, if ungainly to transport. A single panel is good enough as a background for a single speaker. If you pick a suitable pattern, you can turn the panel on its side and now you have room for two people in tight shots side-by side, like news anchors, or a single person in a head and shoulders shot, plus a large graphics space off to one side, if you frame things tightly.
Spend another $20 on some single rolls of wallpaper, and you can turn that wallboard around and use the back side as two different wallpaper backdrops, top or bottom. I once did a training video with this trick and the wall panel was the “set” for three distinct locations: A brick wall exterior, a kitchen telephone nook, and (flipped over) an office receptionist location. These were all close-ups, so I didn’t need a LOT of wall, just enough, framed properly, to suggest the location. A clock, some picture frames, and a thrift store wall sculpture, attached with screws or magnets, helped “sell” each location as real. Think creatively about what is INSIDE your frame, and never mind the rest because outside the frame exists nothing but what you’ve suggested to the audience they think should be there.
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Hi Mark
I love your ideas about the backdrop!!
I just need to invest now in some c-stands or strong light stands…. BUt i want to explore this idea.with the new set up, i have a new challenge: since the TV will now be 90 on the left of the speaker, I need to find a way to go from her to the tv when she shows slides… Originally i thought i’d just get the PP presentation (which I’ll still do) and insert in post but realized that it would make myself crazy trying to time it right. I’d need a visual reference to know what slide she’s showing as she speaks.
All this to say that I realize now that I’ll need to go to the TV when she’s show slides…. SO the camera will have to travel 90degres, which I don’t like…Great idea too as far as the rolling down the curtains right in front of the speaker
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This is how you frame your speaker in this case:
Do not try to capture the slides off the TV at all, insert them in that masked-off area in the editing phase.
As to getting the timing of the slides, several observations:
You can figure out 95 percent of the slides by just listening to the track and following along in a script. It really isn’t that hard. You’re going to alternate between a centered-up shot of just the speaker, a 2-shot of speaker and slide, and a full-screen shot of just the slide. A big mistake, in terms of effective communication, is to have the slide and speaker in that 2-shot the entire time. If anything, What you want is just the speaker’s face and body most of the time, and the slides come in only to underline a point or introduce the new point. If they are both up the whole time, it robs audience attention from the speaker and what they are saying, and it bores the viewer unless the text is always changing.
What I would be doing in this job if it were me, is smoothly panning back and forth from a centered single shot to a shot where the presenter is offset and there is room to add an on-screen graphics slide box. When I do these jobs, I shoot with two locked-down cameras side by side, one for a centered closeup, and one for a wider shot that allows for graphics. If I shoot against a very plain backdrop or green screen, I can turn a single-camera medium shot original footage into my choice of centered, side, and closeup, in post.
As far as tricks to getting a synched copy of the slides to go with your capture of the presenter. #1 is, any dirt-cheap home movie camera is going to be good enough to give you a “Scratch track” of the slides with the audio. Pawn shop used units or “flip cams” from a drugstore will be good enough for this, and in the realm of fifty dollars or so.
#2 is, if you really can’t beg, borrow, or steal even a home movie camcorder, if you start the slide show in “rehearse timing” or “record slideshow”mode, and do the presentation, you then have a perfectly timed version of these slides you can save and play back or export as a movie file. You then export the recording as a self-contained quicktime MOV, drop this into your editing software, and either use it as-is or as a scratch track for exact placement of the slides, in time with the original presentation. A variation of # 2 is to use two laptops running the same slides, and you put YOURS in “rehearse timings” mode, then tap the space bar to advance as the speaker advances their slides, generating your own “scratch track” in real time.
Trick #3 would be to put a small mirror in the bottom of your frame, angled so that it will see the TV screen 90 degrees off. You shoot so that you can crop that out in post, but it puts a tiny reference image of the slides in the same shot as the camera.
(ADDED)
Where the presenter looks is very important. You want them looking into the camera as much as possible, or at least, close to the lens. If the laptop in front of them is on the table, their eyes will spend too much time looking down. Placing their laptop screen near and just below your lens will help. Putting up the slides using a real teleprompter screen is even better, but not in your current budget. That TV on the wall uses a VESA mount, so it *could* be taken down and moved to be on stand of some kind, next to the speaker, or next to your lens, for a better eye line for the talent to use. Extra VESA mounts are cheap from outfits like Monoprice.com
Capturing off the TV screen directly isn’t just gauche from a broadcast professional point of view; it’s the wrong priority when capturing a presenter, because you can always get a better copy of the slides later. BUT. You can’t get the presenter to come back and do everything they did, exactly the same way, ever. Focus the recording on that person as the priority, with perfect audio, and worry about fixing the slides later.
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Another way to show the 2-shot is a diptych arrangement:
That’s a crude sketch of one, you can get it really fancy with shadows or reflection treatments and a better backdrop, but the point of this one is, it takes a single-camera shot of the speaker and puts it into a composition with the slides that fits the slides in at a readable scale. I just call these a “2-box”, but they come in great numbers of variations.
If you’re not handy creating this effect in the NLE, you can find free templates for making these online using MOTION or AfterEffects or whatever. if you spend an hour perfecting the setup, you can save and re-apply it over and over in seconds for all future such work. It doesn’t require time-consuming or finicky chromakeying, either.
Something helpful in post I forgot to mention is, shoot a “plate” shot of the empty set without the talent in it, either just before or immediately after they finish, and don’t change the camera until you have several seconds of that empty shot. Then shoot another couple of seconds of the shot, super-wide. These shots can be brought into photoshop and turned into static backdrops to help you re-position the speaker and slides in an emergency. Be sure to record audio “room tone” during this scene as well, which can help you fix audio problems later.
I just used this myself on a job like yours, last week. The shot included a large fixed desk, like your room does, and it had a lot of distracting junk on it, from the image projector handling the slides, with many ugly cables, to random items like plates and boxes of donuts in the frame. After the shoot, before I tore anything down, I shot more and wider shots of that desk in the room from the identical angle, though this time with the junk cleared off. Five minutes of photoshop and a distort tool in my timeline later, the entire video features a clean and clutter-free foreground. 🙂
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