my (tiny but powerful) interview lighting kit

For me, as a filmmaker, I am always trying to look for the least amount of gear that I can travel with, but that still doesn't inhibit my storytelling. And for a lot of these documentary films, my B-roll, the scenes that I'm shooting, I don't wanna bring a light into that, but for the interviews, I do want it to look beautiful. So having one key light, like a 90 centimeter softbox being punched through diffusion, but then knowing that I have one more light that I can paint through the background gives me the confidence that I can walk into a room and with just two lights, I can set up the scene however I need to. So I wanna kind of give a few tips on how to travel with a lighting setup. We're talking about the MOLUS Zhiyun G300 and how I've been traveling with these and making a film about Seabum, Christopher Bumstead. It's a new doc series we've been working on. We've been filming all the top competitors in the classic physique division. And so I've had to travel with lights. I haven't wanted to compromise on this film and just use what's available or go through the hassle of having to rent a whole lighting package in every new city I travel to. I just wanna keep it in my checked luggage and be able to set it up whenever I need to. The first tip I've been learning this year when it comes to lighting is not just focusing on what light is landing directly on your character's face inside the room, but actually thinking about what is coming outside through the windows. You can actually light an entire scene without ever having to put a light in a space if you make it look like sunlight. And the quickest way to do this is to hide the light, but punch it through a window. So you can see this setup here of me in the kitchen. It's really simple. We just threw one of these G300s up outside the window and it just feels like hard lighting. It's amazing what our eyes will believe is actually sunlight, as long as it's coming through a window. And what's incredible with this G300 is just how powerful it is. I don't know if the stat means anything to you, but at one meter, it is about 56,000 lux. It's very bright. You can see here with the light on and off just how much it's lighting up the room. Another tip I wanna say is don't forget your reflectors. I haven't always used these in the past just because they're always just a big piece that takes up a lot of space. The hack is to put them in your luggage and stuff them full of your clothing. That's how I would travel with this. But look how much brighter this room got just by throwing the reflector on. And maybe this feels like a new move to you, but I wouldn't always use these all the time. Just by adding this reflector, I had to change my ND from one quarter to one 20th, which thanks to chatGBT, it let me know that that was 2.3 stops. Your welcome mark. It's added over two stops of light just by throwing this reflector on. Don't go without these when you're traveling, even though they're a pain. But like I said, they're a great place to stuff all your underwear. The balance with lighting a light from outdoors as well is actually not making it too bright because once it becomes too bright, you then have to stop down and everything outside looks like nighttime and then it starts looking like moonlight. It gets a bit confusing and then you would actually have to change the color temperature. So play with the balance with it. And sometimes it might just mean adding a little more light inside the room so that the light isn't so hard and harsh, but that you actually have a little bit of light on the fill side. But in this case, I just used the G300 straight through the window and it's actually a pretty dynamic look. This took maybe four minutes to set up. So talking about my travel lighting setup. In one half of my suitcase, I would line up two of these G300s plus their power packs. Then I would stack one of the reflectors. I didn't feel that I needed two just because I'm not gonna be punching two lights directly onto my character. I'm always gonna have one coming through a soft box and one through a window. And then that leaves the soft box. I would use the 90 centimeter parabolic soft box that Zhiyun provides. It could just fit on the one side of my suitcase. And in some cases, if I didn't wanna pack that in there, I would rent one of the soft boxes in country just because this has a standard bones mount. So it's very handy. You can use any other company's soft box. You just need the standard bones mount. For shots like this with Urs, I just used a very simple travel kit. And we even in fact traveled with our C stands. We got the cupo ones that can break down and we just threw them in an old hockey bag and taped it all up and threw some old towels around it. So we actually didn't need to rent any lighting gear when we were traveling through Europe. A quick tip, if you're ever gonna be using a bones mount, don't be a goof and put the light on the stand first and then try to fit the light on after. Put the light down on the ground first and then drop your fixture onto it and just simply twist and click. And then you pull it up and you have the light attached. Can't believe how many years I went not doing that. Wow. That's the quickest way to get your light up. And then coming back to that setup, that would be half of my suitcase. And then I can just throw some laundry around it. Then I have a full two light equivalency of 4,000 watts of tungsten power built into this little LED form. It's enough light to light any of these rooms. And in this case with this Urs interview, the extra thing that I brought was a reflector. And you can just see how soft the lighting was by punching it high powered in the middle of the day from this through a parabolic soft box and then through a diffusion out of the 5-in-1 bounce reflectors. That extra layer of diffusion gave me this beautiful soft look with Urs. One other key little thing we did is we lined up Urs at a 45 degree angle to the windows. So we got a little bit of a kick light on his cheek here. Now it was reflected off that mirror. And even with Wesley Vissers, we used the same setup and I'm very pleased with the lighting that we got in that just from this one G300. The size of this light is very handy. There's comparable lights that have just as much power made by other manufacturers, but they're often gonna be a lot bigger and a lot heavier. The G300 also has a TLCI of 97, which in one of my last lighting videos, I mentioned the CRI rating, which is the color rendition index. A lot of you told me that was no longer an accurate measure that you should be actually looking at the TLCI, which this actually scores very high. So you know that you're getting true color temperature. Essentially what that means is if you're shooting 5600, it's actually 5600 Kelvin. It isn't just a random number on the device. And the G300 has its max mode at 100%. It's about a 300 watt output. When you go to max mode, the fan kicks on and you get up to 500 watts and that's when it is its brightest. Now, when it does that, it's no longer 5600. So it's not true daylight. It's about 4400, I believe, kind of halfway between. But for me, that still is a bit more golden and so believable as sunlight. And you can just change your white balance if you really need to be wanting that perfect white sunlight coming through. Right now, I'm actually lighting myself with the Zhiyun light and the 90 centimeter softbox and I can control it right here. But there also is an app. So if you're a YouTuber like me and you need to be tweaking the lighting without getting access to the light, it's great. The Zhiyun has an app where you have full control of the actual light. Now, the light is very quiet. Here's the sound of the fan. But if I were to go to full power, oh my gosh, max mode's crazy. It's actually still pretty quiet. Oh, I gotta bring this back down. 70, 50, and there we go. Back down, we're at 15 right now. That feels right. Now, there is a bunch of different creative modes, which is how you can recreate some lighting setups like paparazzi or the flicker of a TV. I don't always need these. The TV one can come in handy if you're shooting live action sort of films. The one cool mode that it does have is where I think there's like a mic built in and it will actually pulse to music. So on the baseline, it can actually pulse light brighter. So if you're some crazy DJ and you need that, Zhiyun has you. Huge shout out to Zhiyun for providing these lights and helping with this video. I hope you've enjoyed this. Let me know if you have any questions. Let me know any specs that I've said wrong. And I will be talking more about the Seabum film very soon. It's been a long time coming. Been working on it, like I said, maybe not quite a year. We started shooting in March of 2024, but we also have seven years of archival footage that Calvin Newtonim, one of our AOD students, has provided. He's one of the producers on this film and he was the one who actually approached us to make it alongside Chris Bumstead. So can't wait to put this out. Thank you to all the athletes that participated in the film all around the world. And I'll be talking about that soon again on this channel. Hate goodbyes, but I love eight hours of sleep. I need to get more of it. I've been nailing that this week. How many hours of sleep do you get on average? The dumbest exit I've ever had. See you in the next one.