WINOL Bulletin - Lighting Plan

Since our bulletin of 21/3/12 it's been decided that we have to put more of a focus on our lighting set-up. we only really started using lighting properly as of a few weeks ago, before that we pretty much relied solely on the house lights and a couple of the overhead ones (I'm not great on technical terms).

More often than not we were left with something approaching this:

Notice the green halo around Tom

Myself, Henry, Ali and Graham got lighting training at that point which allowed us to book out various lighting kits, the ones we use are the Satchler and Arri kits. The Arris are the more powerful lights which we use to illuminate the green screen curtain. The Satchlers are smaller lights which we use to light the presenters.

Here is a very simple layout of how we try to set up the gallery:

(Redhead=Arri)

Needless to say, sometimes we may have to change the set-up for individuals for height etc, but only slightly.

In the first week we were still tinkering with how we were going to set them up. He had them in (roughly) the right kind of positions but we think the main light was to bright, as you can see here:

The left side of her face is noticeably brighter than the other

To remedy this next week we bought some diffusers from the loan counter to bring down the intensity of the main light.

This is probably the best lighting we've had. There are still some shadows but those are pretty unavoidable and if you look, you can see them on the BBC and ITV presenters etc.

The main problem we came across when filming 21/3/12 was the setup we'd settled on, wouldn't work, as Aarran would be talking to the in studio guest. This meant they would both be looking along the desk towards each other, resulting in them looking directly into the side satchlers. Effectively blinding them. To attempt to remedy this we moved the satchlers further away and added extra diffusers to them and several more of the lights. This worked from the point of the presenters, but not from the cameras POV:

Here, the side of Aarran's face is being shadowed by the guest's body.









The guest's face is almost fully in shadow as we couldn't point any lights into his face without blinding him.









Even when looking forward, Rachel is mostly in shadow, since the lights were still set up for the guest looking to the side.






It might be best if we keep experimenting with lights as we go, until we find a good solution, at which point I'll update my blog with a floor plan and description (perhaps, actively changing the lighting setup between during VTs. For the meantime, if we have a guest in the studio we should maybe have the house lights on, as well as some of our other overheads, and satchlers/arris etc. This may risk under-eye shadow but, hopefully it will provide more light than we could otherwise plan for.

One extra issue we've found with using lighting, is that sometimes the arris lighting the green screen reflects green light onto the desk. The desk being a shiny surface means this happens quite easily. We've found that using diffusers can help this, but we've also considered having some kind of, for all intents and purposes, tablecloth for the desk.

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Since writing this piece, one of our bulletins had the best lighting for the news presenter that we've had:

As you can see we have virtually no shadow. For this, we moved the Satchlers to eye level, and added a few diffusers to try and stop there being too much brightness. The only problem we had was once we moved to the sports presenter:

As you can see, the face is too brightly lit, yet she didn't complain of being at all blinded by the lights. We think that we had one of the overhead lights directly on her. This is easy to remedy by simply turning down the light slightly.