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Lighting a spoke person in a conf room
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Then be sure to get enough good “room tone” recorded, and you’ll be able to dial out most of it in post with a noise reduction plug-in or a narrow EQ notch filter.
Very interested in seeing the stills behind the scenes of the final setup.
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today…so? Doc? 😉
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Next step is to try and simplify the setup. “First, make it work. THEN, make it pretty.”
Looks like you’re well on your way. Congratulations!
The biggest thing that still bugs me is her hiding behind the laptop. I have a desk I made a long time ago for training shoots, the desk top is a damaged hollow-core door that was scratched on one side, so I got it from Menard’s for about $15-$20. I used a router bit to cut thru the door skin, creating a “well” the size of the laptop’s footprint. All the cables for the laptop were routed thru the in-between spaces inside the door, so the final presentation on-camera was of just the laptop screen poking up out of the table, the rest of the laptop sunken into the surface. Very classy, I will say. And cheap.
The other thing you could do, is build a simple box teleprompter, using the large TV or another flatscreen TV, and a pane of glass, set inside a simple black box sitting on the long conference table. Shoot thru it, and the speaker can make perfect lens-eye contact while looking THRU her slides or other screen data.
I drew up the design for a giant prompter we call The Big Kahuna, and had it fabricated for me. It uses a 41-inch flat screen as the source, bouncing off of window glass with a mylar coating added. We can fit 2 full-size broadcast cameras side-by-side behind this bad boy, and prompt someone with text or their ppt slides from many feet away, so we have perfect eye contact while live-switching between the two cameras. But yours need not be that elaborate. Just mounting a flatscreen tv under the lens will greatly improve your shot.
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Loved Orson!!!!
Thanks for liking what I did… I had to say you came to my mind several times as I was setting up… “what would Mike say/do?…. What did he tell me to do”… I even remembered to shoot the talent w/o set up as I thought it was an awesome idea!!
I’ll look into the prompter TV idea… The laptop bugged me too…
Today at least I won the water bottle battle, thx to you again since you suggested to add a little table on the side… which I did!
It’s funny how simple solutions don’t always occur on set since we have so much to think about.Last question.
My client would like to have an empty office turned into a permanent “studio” with backdrop and lighting.
They do mainly standing “interviews” in front of a backdrop.
What Lowel kit would you suggest so it is versatile?In the meantime…. merci milles fois as they say back home.
Do you have an email address you could share by private message so I can thank you more materialistically 🙂 -
“non, non, j’ai eu l’honneur d’aider”.
Don’t spoil this with talk of remuneration. That’s not why we are all here.
Just pay it forward by helping someone else when you can.As to the permanent set room, a 3- light kit plus something to splash the wall with colors or patterns is the basic setup. Your 2 Softlights for key and fill are a good start, add a back/hair light, which could be a little LTM “Pepper”, or LED-based device, or a Lowel VIP light, or just a ten-dollar PAR scoop, what I call the “Chicken egg warmer”, you know, those spun-aluminum parabolic reflector lights, with the spring attachment to clamp them to ladders and such.
If you want to get adventurous, tube tape.com or the store at digital juice offer green screen backdrops for full-body shots, with a little extra piece that runs along the floor. What I would do for my own limbo backdrop would be either a roll of gray or white photographer’s paper, hung from ceiling brackets, or… a roll of cheap vinyl kitchen/bath flooring, reversed, so the back side, the “felt” side, faces the camera. This surface takes paint well. Prime it with KILZ brand latex-based white primer, then white or gray paint, and you will have en excellent and very sturdy limbo cove, great for close-up or full- body stand-up shots.
To get light stands out of the way and make the lights ready to use at a moment’s notice, I would employ a manfrotto auto-pole between the walls and hang my lights from that, running the cables along the pole, to the side wall. If the budget is low, you can make a faux auto-pole setup using electrical conduit, supported by wooden braces attached to the walls. Fill the conduit with wood lath or double-up the conduit to increase load-bearing strength and reduce the chance of bending. Do NOT use PVC pipe.
A permanent set should have a stand-up area with some kind of lectern/small product presentation table at elbow height, as well as a sit-down space with either informal couch lounging space, or room for a “news desk” like the one I mentioned, made from a hollow-core interior door.
What I started out with in our studio with a long time ago – and it still serves us well every week – is a collapsible, portable trade show booth wall from Nomadic Designs. It is a geodesic space frame that covers about 15 feet horizontally, by ten vertically, but the frame collapses into the volume of a golf bag for travel or storage. Magnetic-mounted roll-up “walls” of carpet-like cloth hang on the space frame and allow mounting items with velcro or magnets. These can also be custom-printed with logos and art. The travel case transforms into a matching desk/podium for sales literature or small product displays. Anyway, the trade show wall has served in the studio and on location for many years of faithful service, and maybe you can time-share the use of it with the company’s marketing staff as they go to actual trade shows with it. Nomadic Designs is just one maker of these – there are literally dozens of makers, they even have one that makes disposable versions out of high quality pressed paper board that are re-useable but also cheap enough to abandon after a trade show to save return shipping costs.
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I’ve just had a read through this thread and what a wonderful example of cow-ism it is. Brilliant work Mark! Some excellent tips in there that I don’t mind saying, I’ll be using in the future too. Splendid.
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