Video Production - Lighting your shots with cookies

Hi, folks! This is Tom Antion here in the kitchen. Today, I'm going to show you how to make cookies. Well not really the chocolate chip kind like I've got going here. These are called lighting cookies. These make your productions look really beautiful and you can do it on a dirt cheap budget. So let's go up into the studio and I'm going to show you how to make these things from scratch. Well, not like I made these cookies. I got them out of a box. But this is going to be a cheap way to make your video productions look great. Can I bite these things now? Boy, these are good! I bet you didn't know I was a good cook did you? Well, this is a real cookie. But also, this piece of cardboard is a real cookie. And what a cookie does is it's a lighting effect that you can do very inexpensively. I know a lot of you are going to be shooting in your homes and offices where you don't have a lot of space. And one of the big mistakes people make is they jam themselves up against the background, a bookcase or a stark wall, and it doesn't look that great. And for a little piece of money and a little extra effort, you can really do a great effect. Now, I'm going to show you an example of what I'm talking about and then I'll show you how we make them. Now this little effect is called a venetian blind effect. Watch when I turn the light on. Look at the beautiful shades of light that come up through and you wouldn't see the whole thing if you were actually doing this because you'd have it framed with the camera. And also I might add, we're using a green screen just to demonstrate this, but you wouldn't actually use a green screen unless you were really doing green screen. But you can see these channels of light that come up here and they just came from a piece of cardboard that I cut out. So I'm going to show you how to make a simple cookie with a piece of cardboard and a X-Acto knife and then I'll show you a little fancier one if you'd like to have a little fancier design back there. But this is certainly beautiful, considered dramatic, but it's a lovely thing and very easy to do. So, what we do is - you don't even have to lay this out. It doesn't have to be exact or lined up perfectly. But all I do is I come down and I cut a slit. Now make sure you don't cut your kitchen table, for God's sake. We put something under here to catch the knife, and make sure it's cut all the way through, but don't worry if it's not exact. I mean if it's a little fuzzy, it makes no difference for this particular purpose. So we go up here. I can take out one slit. That's it. None of this matters if it's perfect. And we can fix that with a little glue just to hold that down. And what we'll do is we'll make several of these. It doesn't really matter how many and it doesn't have to be prefect. Just line them up and you've created a cookie that makes this beautiful pattern. Now I'm going to show you how to make a little bit higher production value one that will give you a little different pattern on the wall to make it look like foliage outside of your window with the sun going through it. Alright, now this is the one I mentioned to you about how we have a bunch of abstract patterns that could look like foliage or they're just pretty, and this is the finished product. It's a piece of foamcore. It comes in black or white. We kind of like black a little bit because with a lot of lights around the studio, you don't want any extra reflections hitting, you know, causing you more trouble. So get black foamcore if you can get it but it's not critical by any means. And I'm going to show you where you can get these patterns and how you make something like this. Basically, you could go online and look for cookie patterns. But you'll probably get a lot of stuff for baking. So the actual word for this is cucoloris. I can't spell it, I can't remember how to spell it, and so we'll put it on the screen here for you the spelling of it. But if you put cucoloris patterns in, people online will be happy to give them to you. So what we did was we printed some out from online and then cut out a little pattern on the side of a manila folder and then got a white pencil and just laid it out and drew around the patterns. See how you can just draw. Again, it does not have to be perfect. Not even close because of the nature of the light going through there. If it's a little fuzzy, it won't make a darn bit of difference. So anyway, you just write all around them and then just pick it up and move it over and do it again until you cover the whole thing. And then one thing you need to know is when you try to cut this out, you don't put the X-Acto knife or a box cutter, don't try to go straight down through it because it will be hard to cut the curves. Like we drew a curve here, it's very hard to cut those curves. So what you do is you bevel the edges and cut on an angle and you can make those curve. I'm going to punch in the tip of this right on one of the lines here and then I use the handle and use it almost like a fulcrum or a lever to help make the cuts. And if you find your foamcore is pretty easy, just go ahead and pull on it a little bit. I'm getting a nice smooth cut here but my blade is on a bevel so I'm able to make the curves very nicely like this. And don't be afraid to switch around so it's just easy on you and your hand to get the proper effect that you're looking for. Again, not worrying if they're perfect. And you'll get a nice effect like this and we're going to come back and show you what it actually looks like on your background. As you can see, this is a nice soft pattern. It's kind of abstract. It really won't detract from you. You won't see this whole thing. You'll be in the shot and only see little flares of light coming out from the edges of it. So it's a lovely pattern. Now also, I want to tell you a little bit about the distance that the cookie is from the light. When you get closer to the light, the pattern gets more abstract and fuzzier. Let me unclip this. And as you get further from the light, it gets more stark and more sharp edges as you can see. So you can play with that. Also, get your camera set up and let it run a little bit if you're by yourself and see what you like best. Now you don't have to have all these fancy stands that we have. In fact, I have a stand I made out of PVC pipe and I got a – if we can look over here, I want to show you – this is an $8 halogen light, a work light, from Home Depot. It's got a glass protectant. It comes with the bulb, which is interesting because the bulb is $30-$40 at the video store and it comes with the $7 fixture. You can put colors over this. This is to keep you from getting burned or getting too close. But you can actually put gels to put colors if you had a white wall and you wanted a little splash of blue or red you can put the color over there. You can actually put colors over different parts of the cookie so that you get little splashes of red and green or blue. It doesn't show up on a green screen but it would on a white wall. So a really great effect. Now we're going to take you over to our library and show you this in action in real life and how it really for a little bit of money and a little bit of time, you can really up the production value of your videos. Here we are in the library where I shoot many of my YouTube videos. My older YouTube videos don't have anything but the books in the background; in other words, no lighting effects. The ones I shoot from now on are going to be enhanced with a much nicer background that I'm going to show you right now. You can see how beautiful this effect looks. It separates the background from the foreground chair. It becomes even more apparent when we turn the lighting effect off and then back on again. Let's do that again. We're going to turn the lighting effect off and then back on. Now here's our second example using the Venetian blind lighting cookie. This is the one I cut out of a piece of cardboard. This is a far more dramatic effect than the abstract lighting pattern. But nonetheless, it creates a wonderful effect for your next Internet video.