Lighting for Mini-DV

by Lewis Fraga

MiniDV reacts to light pretty fast, so you don't really need to go that hog-wild in your lighting setups, but it will cost you some money up front for at least semi-realistic capabilities.

Smith-Victor makes a good line of inexpensive lighting equipment - from tungsten lamps (usually looking like oversized household bulbs in a black "bell" housing, and you can get "daylight" balanced blue bulbs, and tungsten balanced white bulbs) to quartz (smaller lamps, brighter lights, only tungsten indoor lighting balanced - and need to gel with blue color correction gels to match daylight).

A basic "bell housing" kit usually runs around $200, and you get 3-500w lampheads out of it in a big plastic case with wheels. You can buy them individually for something in the vicinity of $40 - but stands are separate, so picture at least another $30 for something that won't blow over in a stiff breeze.

The better version of "household bulb" style lampheads look like they're housed in an oversized can -you can mount barn doors to these, and they have swivel bases that you can mount directly onto a lightstand - bonus! The clamp bases of the "bell housing" type are a pain in the...

A little more ritzy, and you can spend around $400-ish for a quartz kit with more Umf and accessories, and accessory possibilities - and the prices go up from there...

If you're willing to spend more than $600 for a decent lighting setup, look into Lowel, Arri, and Mole Richardson lamps and kits.

If you want to try something with some kick, and on the cheap, go to your local hardware store and buy one of those twin-500w lamps on their own stand. You can set the 2 lamps individually, and the lamps are actually 3,200 kelvin (proper tungsten balance for the "indoor" setting on your camcorder).

Invest in as much cheap foamcore as you can afford - both white and black boards. Around $3-$4 at your local craft/grocery/art store for something in a 2'x3' size.

Get as many lightstands as you can afford, and as many .50 cent little plastic black clamps from the hardware store as you can afford.

Visit a camera store and find out if you can get/order something called "softspun" from them - or where you can get it. It's made by Rosco(? - could be Lee - for some reason I can't remember at this moment...), and it looks like a heavy duty dryer sheet. You clamp it onto the front of lights to break it up so it won't be as harsh - and you can layer more and more on top of each other to have a greater and greater effect. Since all forms of video can blow out their highlights rather quickly, you look for ways to break up the light as much as possible without it always looking like an average day in Seattle - overcast, low-contrast, and "dull"...

Wanna try something a bit visually interesting, like a shoot that looks like the scene takes place in late afternoon?

Here's a little recipe for ya:

Get a twin-500w on a stand from your hardware store, and put it outside a window blasting into the room where your scene takes place. Get a couple of bell housing lamps with daylight bulbs (the blue ones), and bounce them off foamcore (clamp them to extra lightstands) so you don't have harsh lighting on your subject's faces (if you didn't get a kit - which will hopefully come with umbrellas at least - soft boxes are too much to hope for when it comes to these). Face your subjects into the soft "daylight" source of light, and have the light from outside backlighting one of them, and raking across the face of the other (I'm picturing 2 people in a conversation here). You wanna break it up a bit, put some softspun on the lamps outside so they're not as harsh.

Now clamp some black foamcore to lightstands and position them in ways that will block the "daylight" sources from hitting walls and other objects that look "fake" on your monitor (or flip-out viewscreen - I know you don't have a budget from Dreamworks).

Keep the camera in neutral positions to both the window and the lighting on your subjects - so you don't see the source of the light coming through the window, and if you don't have a lamp on a desk, or table, to motivate your lighting on your subject, never show where it's coming from!!

Ever see Braveheart? Best example of this I can possibly think of - all the scenes between Robert the Bruce and his Father - because you never saw where the light in the room came from it is never questioned. Could be a window, but it's definitely not fire - and you never thought about it until now, have you? John Toll should be bronzed! (I know he wasn't the first to do this by any stretch of the imagination, but I love his work!)

Set your camcorder to "sunlight" and what you will now have is a balanced (relatively, but you can adjust color in post in even a basic NLE) daylight soft source on your subjects inside, with an orange evening light coming in from outside.

Works great for restaurants as well.

OR, you could have all tungsten/quartz lights, and just put an orange gel on the ones outside to warm them up.

Generally, I like to stand in the room for a while and figure out how to augment the already existing light - no use fighting it unless you're going for something with more kick. Realize that if you have light coming in from "this direction", and you put lights on your subject from an opposing direction, it's gonna look fake and people will see it immediately.

Get some lights, play around, and find out what works for you.

Start buying copies of "American Cinematographer" magazine - it's completely dedicated to the craft of moving image creation (Film, Video, HD, experimental image capture).

I know this was long - sorry...
Hope it helps, and happy shooting! -Lew

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