DIY Lighting Help, Please

[Raditude]

I'm starting a film club in my town, and our initial budget is really low. We wish to improvise and make our own equipment as much as possible, until we can bring in money through festivals.

One of the ideas I have is to purchase a cheap construction/shop light, with a metal hood, and use it for lighting. The problem with this, is the metal will get really hot. I've thought of using a truck bed liner or undercoat to help keep the outside cool to the touch, but am unsure if it will work, as I'm unfamiliar with the properties of the material used. Would this hold up to the heat the light produces? Would it make the surface cool to the touch?

The light I'm looking at is similar to this:

And the bedliner could be any one of these:

http://www.autozone.com/autozone/accessories/Fluids-and-Chemicals/Truck-Bed-Coating/_/N-257b


From there, we can use diffusers and maybe a dimmer switch to get the lighting correct.

 

[knightly]

It's a good light (note the joint where the light attaches to the clamp... it's a bolt rather than a friction knuckle (knob held between to pieces of metal by nothing but pressure)... those will last much longer than the knuckles

Lights get hot... anything you try to do to keep heat inside the light will end up damaging the light. It's ability to vent heat is important (note the holes at the small end of the reflector -- these are specifically vent holes. Spraying the outside with dark high heat spray paint for engines or for barbecues, however, has a different intent... to stop light from reflecting around set where you don't want it to do so... keep in mind the max wattage the fixture says... higher than that could melt the socket on these as they tend to be plastic rather than ceramic or metal.

Lights are hot. I once made the mistake of adjusting a barndoor on a 1k without leather gloves. I thought if I was just going to tap it quickly, it would be fine. I got an immediate 2nd degree contact burn from less than a half a second of contact with the edge of the barndoor.

Leather work gloves are cheap, get a bunch of those for your lighting grips... they'll need them. I don't go on set without my gloves.

 

[movingon]

What do you guys think of CFL bulbs? You can get a variety of wattages and color temperatures from Home Depot, and they don't get as hot.

 

[knightly]

I do like them, although cheaper ones will pulse in color and do some weird things with your image... they also have a bit of a sickly yellowish thing to them.

If you don't have a decent audio setup, they throw a ton of RF interference that will mess up your audio (non-XLR cables are basically giant radio antennas waiting to intercept the spark gap transmission that the fluorescent light uses to glow). Test before you're on set or you'll hate yourself later. They also have a very soft light that cannot be made to be sharper at all, so you're limited to soft light only and have no options.

Lights are hot. everyone on set should just accept that it's a fact... my last shoot, we blasted 7350 watts of light into the frame to get the look we were going for (had to match a shot from a bright summer day on an overcast winter day). 2x2000w lights are really warm. Your actors, if experienced on set, will expect that the lighting will be hot... if not, they're going to learn.

We actually used a craftsman worklight in our green room on "Death Bed" as a heater for the actors as we didn't have access to heat in the disused hospital.

The CFLs are cheap, buy some and test them, if they look good to you, go with it... make sure you record audio with your full setup as well to make sure they play nice together... mine didn't: http://yafiunderground.com/Video/Reel-5.300.mov That buzzing is full spectrum and can't be removed without killing the actor's dialog. Everything I did here needed to be ADR'd... wasn't, but the on set dialog is unusable... specifically the result of the CFLs we used for all of our lighting in the shoot. This shoot resulted in just shy of $1000 in audio upgrades to prevent the problem.

 

[movingon]

Yikes! Good info! Thanks!

 

[Raditude]

It's a good light (note the joint where the light attaches to the clamp... it's a bolt rather than a friction knuckle (knob held between to pieces of metal by nothing but pressure)... those will last much longer than the knuckles

Thanks for pointing that out. The one I was looking at actually has that knuckle, and was kind of flimsy. I'll have to look around some more.

Lights get hot... anything you try to do to keep heat inside the light will end up damaging the light. It's ability to vent heat is important (note the holes at the small end of the reflector -- these are specifically vent holes. Spraying the outside with dark high heat spray paint for engines or for barbecues, however, has a different intent... to stop light from reflecting around set where you don't want it to do so... keep in mind the max wattage the fixture says... higher than that could melt the socket on these as they tend to be plastic rather than ceramic or metal.

Never really thought of stopping light reflecting.

Lights are hot. I once made the mistake of adjusting a barndoor on a 1k without leather gloves. I thought if I was just going to tap it quickly, it would be fine. I got an immediate 2nd degree contact burn from less than a half a second of contact with the edge of the barndoor.

Leather work gloves are cheap, get a bunch of those for your lighting grips... they'll need them. I don't go on set without my gloves.

Oww, Leather Gloves. Hmm, who woulda thought the solution was that simple?

 

[knightly]

These are all hard won pieces of little knowledge that I can share and help you out