Need cheap lights for low lit music vid with lots of Macro detail shot on Sony FS100

[Mark Suszko]

Mayalin, I don’t know if this is something you seek to do as a career. I can tell you that the combative ‘tude makes it harder for people to want to reach out and help you, and that this is, despite all the stats, still a business where everybody knows everyone, where reputation is the most prized currency. It is hard won and easily lost. Please take this into consideration when I tell you, you’re hurting your future prospects when you ask pros for help with one hand and slap them with the other.

That’s not lighting advice, that’s business advice. Maybe life coach advice. Take it, or don’t.

Good luck with the project, you are fighting an uphill battle when you spend about five grand on a camera and next to nothing on lighting or sound or grip gear. You’re approaching this thing all backwards, from what little I can see of it. At your stage of your artistic development, you really can’t afford to turn away advice from anybody, even when its hard to take. Lucas can ignore advice and make cr@p movies because he’s a billionaire. You’re not there yet, again, as business advice, I say, put your pride aside and just take everything in for due consideration with a “thanks for the insight”. Peace-out.

[Tom Prigge]

This is a little bit on topic ( I think). A few years ago I worked at a TV station in creative services. The boss’s son, a college student, interned with us one summer. I had given my notice and was encouraged to let him shoot and edit a commercial while I looked over his shoulder. It was an outdoor shoot on a lake, getting shots of a ginormous boat. After his first shot, I took a look and lo and behold, the footage had a nice blue cast to it. He had not white balanced the camera. No problem, he assured me, I can fix it when I edit with color correction. Which he could, since the boat was white and all he had to do was click on the eyedropper in his color correction filter. But I told him to shoot it again, this time correctly.

I noticed this same attitude from the kids fresh out of college. We can fix it in post they always said. Back in the day when we said that, our tongues were firmly planted in our cheeks. In fact, things can be fixed in post like never before. But that’s poor technique. In the days of machine to machine editing, if you came back with blue footage you were screwed.

Today’s NLEs and compositing programs have bred, in my humble, grumpy old man opinion, a generation that thinks video is easy, that the software will fix it. Or that just posessing the right gear is enough.

Now I’ll go back to sitting on my porch and frowning at the cars that go by–that’s what we gumpy old guys excel at.

[Dennis Size]

Wow, this has been quite a thread ….. providing some of the best advice to a novice I’ve seen collected in one string in a long time.
Tom — I too am annoyed by those damn cars!
Bill– Congratulations on telling it like it is …I knew you had it in you!
Mayalin, you owe Mark Suszko more than you could ever realize. Even though you missed the point, he essentially totally lit your video for you …. providing a step by step process of how to achieve the look that you want. Our company would charge several thousand dollars in consulting fees for what he’s given you for free. it would then cost several thousand more to actually execute the lighting. Excellent lighting design work Mark (and without mentioning Lowell once!)

I have one last piece of advice for you Mayalin:
If you’re REALLY interested in learning the basics of what lighting is all about. Look around you and observe it — then strive to recreate it so that your work has as naturalistic a quality as possible. That was the main point Mark was trying to get across to you.
I would also recommend you go on line to Focal Press and buy one of the many books they sell on television lighting. The best one for someone of your skill sets would be Des Lyver’s book, BASICS of VIDEO LIGHTING, 2nd Edition.

DS