Want a Cookie?
I spent my first couple of years of college as a music major.
It’s no wonder I ended up in TV instead of a getting a real job, but
that’s for another day. A really great music instructor told me,
“many times, the space between the notes is much more important than
the notes themselves.” Well, not to make you go waay around the block
for the payoff, the same can be said of lighting. Many times, where the light is not,
makes a scene much more interesting. One way to make light not be in certain spots, is by using light modifiers. One of these commonly used light modifiers, is called a “cookie,” which is short for coocoloris. Who knows where coocoloris came from…we all just call it a cookie. This same device can also be referred to as a gobo. In most cases, however, a gobo would be used in a light with a focusable lens called a ellipsoidal.
These are the lights that you may see projecting a logo or very defined pattern on a wall or background of a trade show or television show.
A “cookie” is more commonly used to break up a light source into a less defined texture or pattern to add interest or depth to a camera shot. A cookie is simply a flat piece of wood or foam core with a pattern cut into it, through which you can shine a light. So much for not taking you the long way around the block.
Anyway, it’s really easy to make a cookie, and you will find it essential to making your lighting more interesting.
Get yourself a piece of foam core from any number of places. Craft stores, office supply stores, or sometimes even the corner drugstore carry it for last minute school projects. Black is the best color as it does not reflect much light back into the light fixture or into the room.
Now, draw some irregular shapes on your foam core. You can make any pattern you like. You can create venetian blinds, circles, diamonds, anything that you can cut out with an
exacto knife.
Now let’s stop here a second. This is where we can go from “clever” to “that was stupid” in just a few seconds. Please don’t cut yourself or someone else. Don’t cut the patterns out on the couch or the dining room table. And trust me on this, the ER doctor, that has to pull all night shifts, can sew you up, but there’s a good chance your finger will heal looking a lot like the seams on a football.
Now that you’ve created your cookie, you can start creating patterns with your background light. Experiment with the distance between the light source and the cookie. The closer you are to the light, the larger and more out of focus the pattern becomes. The farther you are from the light, the smaller and more defined the pattern.
The Magic of shooting “Interview Style”
It has always amazed me how a small electronic device like a video camera
can transform highly intelligent men and women into babbling, cold sweating,
can’t complete a single sentence, wierdo, just by pointing the lens at them.
Well let me tell you my video making brothers and sisters this is a problem!
As you delve further into this business, you are going to be asked on frequent occasions to videotape messages from company presidents, marketing directors, important clients, testimonials, and other similar scenarios. There will be cases where on-camera subjects will do well in front of the camera, but in more cases you are going to have to help them out. The people that you are trying to videotape are usually the best and brightest an organization has to offer. They know their business or topic better than anyone. We, as directors just have to get the words out of their heads and on to a videotape. If you set the camera up and say to one of these poor victims “okay, tell me what makes your company better than your competition”, the ensuing freak-out will usually be immediate. However, if you have the subject look at you, not at the camera, and you ask something like, “you know I spent some time on your web-site this morning, and it seems like customer service is really important to your company. Can you tell me a few specific things your company really focuses on, in regards to customer service”. Suddenly the subject is a power-house of great stuff.
You have just experienced the magic of the interview.
Here’s how to set this up. Place the interview subject in the setting of your choice and then have the interviewee positioned about a foot to one side of the camera. This works both sitting and standing, but we always suggest sitting. Subjects that are not use to being on camera can tend to sway and figgett. Besides you are trying to create a Barbara Walters style environment where everyone feels relaxed. 
Now have the interviewee conduct a conversation with the interviewer. Instruct the interviewee to ignore the camera and maintain eye contact with the interviewer. You may have to be both the cameraman and the interviewer. Just frame your shot, and step to the side of the camera.
Now, something you can do to make this go even better, is come up with good questions.
Do a little research on the company or organization before you get on location.
Try and write questions that will evoke the responses you need for your video.
Let’s say you are interviewing a product manager of a product that has a new feature that the competition doesn’t have. You may ask, “the other products in your market do A, and B, well but seem to have difficulty with C. Tell me about your new feature and how it is better”.
If the subject is coachable enough, you may ask if they can put part of the question in the answer, like “ Our new feature is better because…”.
If you don’t get the answer you were looking for on a particular question, don’t worry.
Move on, and while they are answering the next questions, you can think about how to rephrase the skipped question in a way that may get a different response. Tell the interviewee before you start that you may ask the same question more than once, and not to worry, it’s just part of “doing tv”.
Try this on your next project where you need make smart people really look and sound smart on camera. And as an aside…it can make not so smart people look and sound pretty good too.
The Color of Light
Okay, it’s time to go back to school for a few minutes. Yeah, I know we all wanted to do video so we could stay out of real school, but alas, this really is a craft and knowing this stuff does make a difference and seperates you from your uncle Eddie and his home movies. Let’s talk a little bit about different colors of light, which measured on a degree scale, and how that translates into our world of creating video.
This is our buddy Lord Kelvin. In the mid 1800’s, he wanted to come up with a scale to measure the absolute tempurature of things. Lord Kelvin used black iron or steel as his reference as it was heated by a blacksmith. As steel is heated to a red color it is not hot enough to be shaped. As the metal continues to get hotter, it begins to turn a white hot and then goes further to even produce a blue-ish glow, which means it’s really hot. I know you’re reading a Blog about video but….stay with me Jimbo, stay with me!
The color of the black metal as it is heated is where we get our scale for the color tempurature of light, measured in degrees Kelvin. Go figure!
Red light is cooler than blue light? Before I knew the heated metal thing, my walnut sized thinker thought, “In my world something red …fire, is hotter than something blue … water.” Now aren’t you glad I’m not teaching your kids physics.
Here is a color tempurature spectrum and some common bench marks of light that we all use when working with video. Most lights used in video lighting are color balanced at 3200ºK. You can see further down the scale, towards red, is a 100 watt bulb that is in the lamp on your desk. When you are shooting a video scene with a lamp in it, the lamp usually looks more yellow or amber than your video lights, and now you know why. You may have noticed if you are trying to shoot video in a room with lots of sunlight from nearby windows, the light hitting your subject appears to be more blue. You can especially see the difference if you try and supplement the window light with your video lights. Your video lights will seem really yellow compared to the sunlight. The diagram further shows why subjects may seem a little washed out when you are shooting them in direct noonday sun and why a candle flame has that nice redish glow. Ain’t science cool!
Okay, how do we use this to make our buddy Lord Kelvin proud? Well, that’s for another entry.