Building a Studio at Home

If you are looking to give your video productions that professional edge or maybe turn your hobby into a small business, you had best be prepared. Without a Hollywood type budget, there will be a lot of circumstances that you will have to 'engineer' an inexpensive solution. The challenge will be to do so without compromising quality.

For example, you are inevitably going to need to shoot a talking face, actors for your film, the host of a program, an executive at an office desk or shoot a small object under controlled lighting conditions. Perhaps, you want to create some Hollywood magic at home by, replacing the blue background behind the host (chromakey) with footage relevant to the topic.

So what you are looking for is a 'controlled' space. Somewhere you can limit external sounds and also place your lighting whilst having adequate power to suit all your needs.

Studios can cost a fortune to hire, this leaves us with the final option: building an inexpensive little studio in your garage, or somewhere else in your house. Nothing fancy, just quiet place where you can control the lights and shoot without noise or distractions.

Building a studio involves mastery of sound and lighting. These are two very big subjects in filmmaking, so let's concentrate on just one of them, lighting.

Key light, fill light, back light, what does it all mean? It is important to understand the purpose of each light and how that relates to its positioning around the subject.

Key light - this is your main light and does the bulk of the work of illuminating your subject. It is positioned in front of your subject, away from the video camera lens. You will try to locate it approximately 40degrees above your subject and just slightly off centre. Up and at a slight angle, it will help to cast shadows on your subject giving the shot depth. With this light on alone the shadows can look a little harsh. The job of controlling these shadows is taken up by the…

Fill light - positioned further back than the key light at approximately 30 degrees, the fill light is also set more to the side of the subject for a couple of reasons. Being off to the side it casts a shadow from the subject that is off camera and secondly, it reduces (but doesn't remove) the shadows cast by the key light. As its name implies, it is used to fill and illuminate the remaining areas within the shoot, without dominating the picture.

Back light - also used to add dimension to your shoot, it is positioned above and behind the subject.

Here's a video sample of how a studio can look 'outside' the video frame: