Regardless if it’s video projects or stills, the goal is to light the area as even as possible. The goal is to achieve an infinite white effect and to minimize shadows. Our studio features a 30’x32′ white cyc with a lighting grid. The best solution for even lighting is to use space lights. When space lights aren’t available, a very reliable and viable solution is to use Kino Flo fluorescents to get even coverage. The soft light produced by Kinos is flattering and won’t create harsh unattractive shadows.
When we were approached by the San Francisco band Notorious to shoot video snippets of their cover songs for their website, we knew from the onset that Kino Flos were our go to. Not only do we have a complete arsenal of them in house, we wanted to use daylight balanced fixtures since much of our lighting gear we use often are HMIs and LEDs. Using tungsten balanced spacelights would require for us to gel our supplementary daylight fixtures with CTB and reduce the light transmission substantially.
Lighting The Cyc
Taking advantage of our cyc’s depth diagonally, our overhead lighting setup was easily mirrored on each side. The diagram above illustrates the positioning of all the lighting fixtures. Five Kinos, three Image 40s and two 4Banks, were dedicated to solely light the walls. The combination of these five lights provided more than enough illumination.
Two 4Banks lit the band from the front. Two more for backlights. Since we predominantly lit from above, the lighting became a little bit too “toppy” creating minor shading of the eyes. To fill in these shadows we shined an ArriSun 1.2K HMI through a 12’x12′ polysilk.
The final result were shots that had a white brilliance and a sole focus on the band’s performance.
