Quick Video Lighting Breakdown

One of the things I do outside of this site is serve as the visual director at my church, which affords me plenty opportunities to experiment with different aspects of video production. I recently made a change to our video set that we use for announcement videos and created a diagram to answer some questions I’ve received about what the set looks like.

We have a pretty basic lighting kit with a few $100-$150 lights we’ve collected over the years. While I would love to have some Kino Flo lights, they aren’t necessarily in the budget for most churches.

This is a simple seamless gray background that costs $45 shipped from B&H. I used a single Lowel 250w Pro Light for the background light, which I’ll probably move a little further away from the background next time because the fall off in the corners is a little too steep for my taste.

Key/fill lights were two Lowel Tota floods into umbrellas, with a silver side of a 5-in-1 reflector underneath for for a hint of a clamshell effect. The Totas are floods so light goes everywhere and the only modifiers the church has are umbrellas. Again, Kinos would be great here or even a Rifa softbox would be better for controlling the light, but you take the lemons you’ve got and make the best lemonade you can.

Backlights consist of a Lowel Omni 500 and a very cheap Qualite 300, both of which are focusing floods. Here’s the diagram for the setup that I mocked up over at lightingdiagram.com.