From the course: Video Gear

Lighting a cyc wall

From the course: Video Gear

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Lighting a cyc wall

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- Let's continue our conversation with director of photography Kevin Bradley, and we're on a white cyc backdrop. Kevin, this is something I've wanted for a long time, we just actually finished building this one, and it's very exciting. Why do you like having a white cyc? - Well, because it's permanent. - Yeah, and it looks good, right? - And it's big, I mean, a white cyc is the ultimate version of what we've been talking about, paper, flex fill type things that are white and black. Those things are great, those things are not ideal. This is ideal. - Yeah, what we have here is a very large space, and it's deceptively large because, essentially, with the curved wall behind us, as long as this lighting is even, you can't tell that that wall is 10 feet away or 100 feet away, and this is great, it makes the space look larger. Now the way that this was all put together, we had affordablecycwall.com come in, we took measurements, we put the wall in, we've mudded it in with some plaster and painted it, and from time to time we'll have to re-paint this, but a cyc is great, and these are very common. You can find these in lots of photo studios and video studios, and if you really need that big, infinite space, go with the cyc wall, it's just a fantastic look, but Kevin, we had to do some lighting here to get this right, in fact, it was just yesterday that we were tweaking the lights, we're installing the lighting grid tomorrow in here, so you'll see a little bit of that cut in, so you can see what that looks like too, but, we went with these Ikan lights and we had to put a lot of them up there, it was important to get them evenly spaced, right? - Well, and depending on your light source, it determines what kind of light fixture you should use, like for example, for this, about a 30 by 25 foot cyc. We used LED panels, but the problem is, LED panels are this big, they're one by one sized, so we had to use one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine to make it pure white. But that's what you have to do when you're trying to make a cloud shaper. - And one of the reasons why we went with the LEDs is we wanted to have the bi-color nature, yeah, we've been able to actually change the color of these lights, so while it's a white wall, one of the great things is you hit it with colored light and it's any color backdrop that you need instantly, but it is essential that you have enough light, because the illusion of the cyc is destroyed if you have shadows, or it fades off to a grey on the edge, you need that nice, clean backdrop. Anything else, for advice, if you're going to be renting a studio and you're looking for a cyc? - Well, also, in the 21st century you just touched on something there, that when you're using bi-color LED lights you can switch between tungsten and daylight, which is a huge advantage because, you know, some DPs, some clients, want to shoot tungsten. Some DPs, some clients want to shoot daylight. - Do you have a preference? - Depends on the client. - Okay, depends on the client and the job, and that's one of the great advantages, and that's why we went with bi-color lights as well as RGB lights, so we can easily make changes, but if you are looking for that pure white backdrop, if you can afford it, and it might just be a rental job, go ahead and step up to using a cyc background.

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