How to Make CHEAP Lights Look 100x More Cinematic

today we're going to try and find out if the thousands and thousands of dollars I've spent on film lights over the years have been worth it or if I can do the same job with the $15 work light from Home Depot it's a pretty dumb idea if I'm being honest cuz why would anyone do that but we've been filming a lot of interviews and high-end lighting setups for my documentary cinematography course and we have so many great modifiers and pieces of diffusion that the light looks so good we started to wonder if the lights itself were actually making a difference or if we could do the same thing with something much cheaper so instead of just finishing the tutorials like normal people we're going to hop in the car go over to Home Depot and get some of the cheapest work lights we can find and see if all my film lights were actually just a giant waste of money I don't know why I thought this was a good idea but here we are let's hope for the best so honestly none of these lights are going to be very ideal they're all bad color balance and not at all meant for this um but what I'm kind of looking for is a strong single Source light something that's going to do maximum output that we can push light through a bunch of modifiers standard construction one all right well I think this is our best option I think we're going to get two of these for maximum output and see what kind of effect we can get just for the record these lights are $18 Canadian so I don't even know what that is like 13 bucks or something us so not high-end it be really interesting to see what these can do if we put it through some really nice diffusion maybe rush hour is the best time to come to Home Depot there is nobody here this is amazing be freelance filmmakers then you can go to Home Depot any time a day you [Music] [Music] want all right successfully survived Home Depot guess I should probably explain what we're doing here we've been filming we rented this whole location to film updated videos for my documentary cinematography class which relaunches on March 4th and as part of that we wanted to try a bunch of bigger and bigger lighting setups because people really liked those the last time so I reached out to my friends at westcot to see if they would help us out with some bigger lighting modifiers to try if you don't know Westcott they're one of the best brands for like diffusion and uh light modifiers for filmmakers and photographers who travel like their stuff is really high quality anyways they sent me a bunch of stuff to play with like their book like kit and some 6x6 and 4x4 frames a bunch of neg fill and different diffusion fabrics and we started to get this stuff set up and play with it and we're like this looks amazing so being the idiots that we are we decided to actually test this Theory and now we're the owner of these two 600 W portable H hallogen work lights which I think are probably going to look really terrible out of the box but I want to try and run them through things like the book light and bigger diffusion panels and just see like is a $15 light up to the job of a professional interview so the first thing we're going to try is what these look like through a book light so I'm going to get the book light kit set up and then we'll pull these lights out and see just how bad it is okay so inside this case is the westcot book light if you don't know what a book light is it's basically like this wedge shape uh with diffusion on one side and bounce on another so you can sort of make light extra soft don't worry about it once it comes out and we get it set up it's going to be a lot more clear so if you don't know what I'm talking about don't stress anyways I'll open this up and show you quickly what's [Music] inside all right we've got the Fabrics attached and I think you can see what's going on you've got one side which is a super reflective white bounce the other side silver but I'm going to go with white to start and then on this side a half stop grid cloth diffusion so we're going to shine a bright light here it's going to bounce back through here and hopefully give us the softest most flattering interview light possible now with normal film lights this is super easy you just point your aperture whatever into here and bounces back we're going to try and do this with a $15 work light so let's see how our results are first thing we're going to do is bring in the 300D as a control light and we'll bring down all the house lights and then just see what it looks like like with a professional film light uh straight through the book light okay so all the house lights are down now and we're just going to roll in uh 300D Mark I on a combo stand and point it in the general direction of the book light and see what we get so we really what we really need now is a standin so we're going to get Hank to sit in that chair and keep filming me from the indomitable Hank huny in the chair so even this like it is right now is looking pretty nice actually I mean it's got nice soft light on his face it's wrapping around nicely we could experiment with moving it around in some different positions so now we'll take down the 300D and bring in the $19 Canadian work light so it's probably pretty dark in here but we've killed the 300D and uh turned all the house lights off again and now we're going to try the 600 W work light from the ground on its little built-in legs okay that's what we're dealing with all right Hank sit back in the chair again do you smell that like a chemical burn no was this a horrific idea are we going to burn down this Airbnb sure so anyways that is the work light I can immediately see two big problems with this it's not honestly as bad as I thought it was going to be but it is incredibly orange so incredibly warm temperatured and the angle is all wrong these little built-in legs it's got are just it's coming from the floor it's coming from the wrong angle everything's like him from the bottom up we want to get that up higher and shine down on him so I think we have a bit of a problem on our hands we're going to rush out to the camera store we've got an hour before it closes and hopefully we can pick up a pack of color correction gels cuz otherwise this whole looks going to be really weird we could color balance for 3200 and really change but then outside is going to look all blue I I think we need to cool this down all right so we just went to turn this off and we realized that like it's only been on for about three minutes and it is roasting hot this thing this is like a legitimate you know Hazard this is one reason why you don't want to use the $15 work light or the $19 work light you could burn down your location if you're not careful so we're going to turn this off and let it cool down and then run out and get some fire retardant filters uh ideally because anything else we put on there is going to melt and we only have 45 minutes before the store closes so let's get out of here ow Jesus oh it's all in Miles Hank your cursed American phone [Music] yeah okay we're back here with the gels uh I think these are going to help a lot in terms of you know balancing this light out a little bit at least I hope they will uh but before we do that uh we need to find a way to get the light up higher so this is definitely not the safe correct way to do this but we're just going to make this big towering stack of stools don't do this yourself but uh I think it fits the nature of the challenge pretty nicely oo that is not secure how many people out there are triggered watching this okay let's get Hank back in the hot seat and see how that's looking so it took us so long to go out and get those gels and make our way back through traffic that uh we lost all the natural light it is now dark and it's completely changed the look of what we're shooting so I'm going to go into high base ISO which is one of the nice things that you can have um on a camera like the fx9 is there's two base isos anyways I'm going to bump up the iso and then compensate with the aperture maybe around F4 that's looking a lot better but it's still crazy orange so the next step is to try and gel it a little bit so now we're going to put a gel on this light these things if you're not sure um these are just heat resistant pieces of clear plastic that you can use to shift the colors of lights so if your picture or your light is too warm you're going to put blue on it and if it's too cool you're going to put orange on it so yeah this is a full stop blue and we'll put it in front of this light which I think it's at about 3200 is uh it should make a pretty big difference so look at the color of the light on my face and then as I move this gel in theoretically it's going to look a lot more balanced like neutral natural light so this stuff should be pretty heat resistant um but don't put tape on a light like this this kind of like in a weird way using old school film lights so I'm going to use some clamps and just sort of like everything else in the setup precariously clamp it on there um but I can already see that that looks a lot better than the blue that I buy that is natural light now so if there was a bit of sun coming in the background this would be more or less 5500 balanced I think it looks pretty good actually so get my clamps if there's any like g& e professionals out there watching I know this is ridiculous that's the point we're just going to see how far we can push this all right let's get Hank back in the hot seat so actually the light's looking a lot better to me we lost a bit of uh output because of the gel so we'll go back down to 28 that's looking pretty good to me and then what I see now is that the background looks super dark so first thing I'm going to try is turning on a practical and see if that helps um I think there's a little light over his right shoulder or camera right shoulder that might add a little pop to it so flip that on see if it makes a difference how do you oh boy oh boy here things got intense there for a sec okay HKS sit down all right so pretty successful so far actually I think this does not look too bad if I didn't know that that was a dirt cheap work light sitting on top of a stack of rickety stools I would I would kind of buy this we've got like a whole rembrand look going on not bad at all all right let's warm up the background and see what more we can come up with okay okay so as predicted it's pretty hot that does not look good at all and there's no way to turn that down so the only thing we can do is either bounce or modify it okay what we're going to do is take this cin foil which is basically just like hardcore jet black tin foil and I'm going to shape it into a kind of cone or hood and see if that makes a difference so already this has brought the light levels down way way way down in here I mean that's reflecting let me have a closer look at this monitor here so after getting the other work light set up down there it just does not look good it's way too overpowered and the light source just isn't believable bouncing up from the ground and because of how hot it is like it is scalding hot right now you can't touch any part of it it's impossible for me to mount it in a way convincingly to to simulate that light I ran through all sorts of scenarios of how to clamp it onto different places and stuff but it's just getting too crazy and honestly I think the look without the light is just fine this might not be the greatest interview frame of all time but from a lighting perspective not bad all right so just for fun we have the second work light also precariously positioned here uh we're going to fire it up and just see if doubling up the output helps so we'll get Hank back in the seat okay here we go and there there we go not bad I mean to be perfectly honest you guys can be the judge of which one you like more the one light was definitely a moodier look this is a much cleaner sort of brighter look but also with some contrast and modeling to his face and there's some okay ratios here I mean the book light is obviously doing all of the heavy lifting it's just pushing light through this giant soft source and that's responsible for all of the shape and the niceness of it but I could do either I think if I wanted a moodier look I'd only use one of these lights and if I wanted to get a much cleaner brighter setup you could do that you just have to put up with the fact that it's going to raise the temperature of the room by like 2° every minute that these things are turned on and that you might burn yourself at any moment unexpectedly if you touch any part of it so I definitely wouldn't recommend commend this but does it work yeah I think it does this looks like a okay key light for an interview okay this is very meta I'm sitting in the frame while also being filmed a lot of layers going on here uh but I think overall we can say that yes you could absolutely film a professional level interview with a Home Depot work light but you need the right uh diffusion and modifiers if you want to get a book light for yourself this is a really easy way to get a giant soft Source um there's a link in the description I'm not not being paid there's no sponsorship I did get this for free because I wanted to do this test but other than that me and Westcott just have a friendly professional relationship no sponsorships like I said we did this as we were setting up higher-end lighting tutorials for the update and the relaunch of the documentary cinematography course on March 4th normally the lessons in there aren't so ridiculous like I'm not going to give you a bunch of classes on how to use Home Depot lights on Set uh this was just a sort of fun project that we did while we were testing out diffusers and modifiers at the same time so if you're interested in the course last year it sold out in Just 4 days and almost 100% of those spaces went to people on the waiting list so if you want a space this year we're going to open twice as many but we've added a bunch more content so I guess it'll probably fill up as well see [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Luc Forsyth

Views: 27,625

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Id: aAuz9d5Km44

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 26 2024