SHINE ON ME

LET IT SHINE ON ME, YEAH!
(insert Red Velvet's Happiness)

After dabbling in film and photography stuff, you really realize what a big difference lighting makes. Brightness, color temperature, softness/harshness, positioning—they're all surprisingly important. With my interest in videography growing (or at least intent to try my hand and improve at it), I figured I need lights and hopefully some kind of flexibility with them.

For now, my first purpose requires soft, diffused, even, flat, skin tone-flattering, bright, [and cheap...........] light. Think soft, prettily lit K-pop idol MV. That's what I want to attempt.

So today, Fome and I did some shopping at the dollar store, Home Depot, and Staples
...then built softbox lights! ;u;
It works out because his band Phoenix Ash is looking to upload more videos in the future, which is why he's interested in building lights too. They're actually gonna upload a new cover soon (OF AN AWESOME SONG) so look out for that~

Materials are:
white foam board, aluminum foil, vellum paper, lamps, light bulbs, and a shit ton of duct tape.
(we ended up being SO happy with the white duct tape because it would've looked much uglier otherwise heheheh)

First version, we wanted to see what it'd look like just as a white foam box without foil and felt like there was wasted bounced light escaping from the sides? So we added foil after the box was assembled and that was comparatively messier than doing the second box.

I decided I wanted to be extra meticulous huehuehue and so the second version is slightly prettier.

HEH. can you tell which was the guinea pig and which is not? HEHHH. (he's jealous because I'm technically the owner of the second one)

Yehhhhh !!

(Bonus: Without the vellum paper as a diffuser, having the box open actually works to make the light more spotted because it's all concentrated in one direction without spilling on the sides. It's harsh and not what I want, but for certain purposes, it works!)

We tried duct tape as the lamp mount on one of the softboxes, but mmmmh we're still trying to figure out an alternative that would be sturdier and hopefully with less potential to melt off. For mine, it'll be extra tricky because I require the softbox to be collapsible so that I can more easily store it disassembled when at home.

(Upper) No softbox light! Light source is the fluorescent lights on the ceiling, which give off a bit of a green tone.

(Lower) One softbox light from above! We made the mistake of leaving the fluorescents still on, but oh well..

Definitely a huge difference, which is emphasized by the original green'ish tone of the room. But the effect of the light is noticeably less harsh, a bit more flattering on the skin, cleaner, clearer?

We put a lot of thought into choosing the color temperature of our bulbs (which btw are amazing in brightness output, especially for the wattage and price of 4 for $10) and yet I wonder if we settled too low. In particular, I was looking for color temperature ranging between 3500 and 4100 Kelvin because that's the spectrum of slightly warm to neutral white to slightly cool. Yellow disgusting ass household bulbs of 2700 Kelvin are out of the question. 5000 Kelvin looks too blue and inhuman.

But we couldn't find anything at Home Depot between 3000 and 5000 K, and so we got the 3000 K bulbs which didn't look too bad in the display.

It's a huge improvement compared to the yellowness of household bulbs, but still a tad too warm for my taste. I don't want to replace the bulbs because I am a frugal cheap ass who already thinks this shit was too expensive for a homemade project (those foam boards are fucking rip-offs I tell you ok) so I'm thinking about trying some kind of blue filter or fabric on top of the paper to counteract the yellow? Or just rectify it in post production color correction lololololol.

Well, we both had a lot of fun! We learned lots! And here's a song of the day which we found to be hella rockin'.

FTISLAND - Hold My Hand