There is a 800w tungsten halogen light called a http://www.vistek.ca/details/details.aspx?WebCode=116507Redhead[/link]

Fitted with barndoors and can be focussed between spot and broad. You can soften it with a diffuser or by bouncing off a card , white wall or ceiling. Will certainly light the scene but its direct light is hard. If that room is "the room" (or much like it) I'd put the subject to be lit by daylight coming through the window with a white card to provide some fill (no other light needed). If you have to mix tungsten (3200K) with daylight (>5600K) you'll need a blue lighting filter on the lamp (full C.T. Blue, Lee 201, or there-abouts).
Really you need Victor Milt's DVD "Light It Right". If you're just shooting an interview head shot then go for the window and forget the Redhead. If you have to light the room, one light will be a challenge.

edit: see http://www.victormilt.com/Victor Milt[/link] and also VASST.

Thanks for that.

I've found a dealer in Bangkok who sell these lights:

REDHEAD:
ianiro : varibeam 800w USD611 (+ tripod manfrotto)
varibeam 1000w USD669 (+ tripod manfrotto)

FLUORESCENT:
visio : S5502(dimmer) USD803
S5504(dimmer) USD1083
photonbeard : highlight 110w USD1513
220w USD1914
330w USD2306

The Ianiro Varibeam looks basically the same as the Arri that you linked to.

The Photon Beard prices are definitely over my budget.

Also another shop in Bangkok that sells 2 Chinese-made lights made by Fokon: An 800W tungsten light with a stand and barn doors (no daylight filter) for USD223 and a "Kino Flo" type light (4 x 55W flueorescent, switchable for 2 or 4 bulbs) including stand for USD668.

What do you think?

I'd go for the daylight Kinos such as seen here http://cgi.ebay.com.au/PRO-LARGE-1100W-FLUORESCENT-LAMP-WITH-2-OUTPUTS_W0QQitemZ180179789934QQihZ008QQcategoryZ30088QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItemeBay[/link]
the OSRAM tubes are the ones to get (see the advert photo) and I expect these are the Chinese lamps you have been offered.

nothing in that video was "lit". Available light only. Plus since it's going for the net if u have to u can gain it quite a lot and still get away with it.

I cut (but didn't shoot) a promo video for the Metro hotel chain down here. Was shot on digibeta which helped.
Serena is right on the money. You'll have daylight coming in the big windows and almost certainly tungsten light in the rooms.
If you need more light in the room use a daylight source. The lights will look overly warm but thats acceptable, flooding the room with tungsten light means one of two things will happen. You white balance for that and the outside is a horrid blue or the interior looks dingy orange. Flooding the room with more daylight is what you want to do if you must. You could replace the room lights with daylight fluros, cheap enough so take a few CFLs along . One thing to remember in this kind of setting there should be a reason why there's light coming from somewhere.
For the footage I cut no lighting was used apart from what was in the room and it turned out pretty well.

One tip, get some local talent to do something. You don't need professional actors, just people who look like they might be guests and get them to do the usual guest things, like walking into the place, upto the checkin counter, into the lift, out of the lift, into a room. Heck you get the idea, make some kind of story. The highly paid crew who shot the stuff that I had to cut did some of this, with different people! Brilliant continuity stuff ups that I had to cut around.

Bob.

Thanks for the tips Bob. I hear what you're saying but we're talking 20 hotels here and I just feel that at some point I'm going to have to shoot a shady room and I'm going to need some extra light.

I'm quite tempted by something like the fluorescent light that Serena linked to becuase it's a better match for daylight and because I've heard a larger light source makes for more attractive lighting.

That's a good idea to replace the room lights. By CFLs do you just mean the "cool", "economy" screw-in fluorescent lights regularly available on the high street?

The compact fluorescents that are designed to replace household bulbs are very useful. I prefer natural (5500K) to cool (6500K) but if the window light is skylight (not direct sun) then cool maybe a better match -- not very important. I presume you are familiar with Vic's nanolight.

Actually I'm not familiar with it Serena. Please tell me more.

I'll try to get hold of Vic's DVD but being in Thailand, I can't get it very quickly and these hotel jobs start next week.

Here is a link through Vic's site http://www.quitwh.fatcow.com/NanoLight/SteuartNanoLight.pdfNano light[/link] which shows a variation on Vic's design. Keep in mind for a future project because if you're shooting next week you'd better buy the Chinese Kinos and some CFLs. I presume the budget precludes you engaging a gaffer with lights? Bit of a worry to have to learn on the job.

Don't know how this would work out but I know the bits are easy to come by in Thailand. Buy a length of that festoon lighting, the kind that almost every restaurant over there has strung out the front. Replace the coloured lamps with CFLs. You could snake the thing into many shapes, even a spiral to create a large light source which is what you want. The festoon lamp holders have wings with holes so you can easily screw them down. A piece of white melamine coated chipboard would do to both hold the lampholders and reflect some of the light.
Certainly not a effective as Victor's original or Serena's variant but something you could throw together very easily from local parts.

Bob.

Hi Nick -

Sorry to join the party so late - this one just slipped by me -
so...

first some thoughts - as Patryck stated, THAT video is purely available light, and by and large so will yours be, if it's going to be similar to the demo shown.

Hotels are nicely lit - they have to be - so it's great for us.
90% of what you have to shoot will not require lighting, and if you're lucky - it will be 100%, so I don't love buying and schlepping heavy lights.

I also looked at some of your work - extremely nice, but... for this job you MUST use a tripod for every single shot. Your beautifully done hand-held footage won't cut it.

Next - at night and in very dark areas, don't be afraid to boost gain to +6 or even occasionally +12 where absolutely necessary. (And equally important don't forget to TURN IT OFF)

Also at night, etc., use 1/30th of a second shutter and even 1/15th. If it's dark experiment with even slower stuff - it might prove to be the best footage in the movie.

I personally wouldn't spend the bucks on that "red head" - reasons??
1 - with 20 hotels, you're going to be on a lot of planes - these days getting your baggage delivered on time is questionable
2 - that light and case and stand is heavy - overweight baggage is expensive
3 - that light is HOT and will try to tip over and burn a beautiful carpet, everytime. If you don't have a good assistant, I wouldn't even take it out of the case (I still remember the teeny weeny burn we put in a carpet in an aerobic studio - w/o insurance I would have been out of business)

Next - I'm totally on Bob Farss' side with "curly flourescent" bulbs. I know that in your part of the world the voltages and sockets are different, but I'd invest in six daylight bulbs and six "warm light", and I'd build a small foam-packed case to carry them in - preferably on the plane. They are tiny. Get the right size to substitute in hotel room lamp fixtures. Use them with a paper "china ball" - the light is fabulous.

I'd also bring along the lightest electrical extensions possible for these lights (they don't draw squat, put out a lot of light and are cool to the touch- see above)
Then I'd buy or fashion a bunch of simple sockets on 4 meter extension cords. You can lay these lights anywhere necessary to open up a dark corner.
Light, fast, cheap and accessible everywhere in the event that the baggage goes astray.
My nanolight would be the final perfect "big light" but I remember seening a flourescent based Umbrella rig the last time I cruised B&H. I'd buy one of those before that red head.

Finally, I'd also take the best still camera you've got in your kit (or buy a "nice" one) with a wide angle adapter. A still camera GUARANTEES you a shot in ANY situation. You can even pan the scene in multiple shots, and stitch the shots together in Photoshop. Shoot it at a 4 or 5 meg resolution on a tripod, and you can shoot long exposures. Then pan and scan them in Vegas. If you only use them for emergencies, no one will ever miss the fact that there are no people in the shot.

If I think of anything else, I'll log back on.

The most important thing I've said in this whole dialog is "tripod"
Do lots of lock-offs, THEN slow zooms and slow pans. This is architecture and you want to be able to study everything in the shot.

And finally, for you beginners that want to do this kind of work (where strangers are going to care what it looks like, before they pay you)
Cover every shot with a lock-off.
Use your slower shutter speeds to help in dark areas.
Double check your focus.
Review your shooting with "end roll review", regularly - especially to check for dirty heads.
Carry a roll of head cleaner - you may only use it once in your whole career, and that day you will bless me
NEVER play back scenes while you're shooting (too much chance of over-recording something important if you don't cue up correctly- and you are not in your right mind "on the job", believe me.)
Lock your tape the second it comes out of the camera
Don't put EVERYTHING on one roll of tape, in fact use a separate tape for each big move - tape is SO cheap, don't forget it.
Carry your camera on the plane yourself and everywhere else - trust on one else to carry your camera gear on location.

best,
v

best,
v

Brilliant ideas, both of those, and the DIY thing is right up my street.

No budget for a proper gaffer but I'll have an assistant with me. Nothing like learning on the job! It's not like I can't go back a couple of days later if I screw the job up.

Here are pictures of the Chinese Fokon redhead 800W light (USD 222) and the 4 x 55 Watt fluorescent (USD 697). They look OK to me and he says they're all Osram bulbs. Thinking seriously of the fluorescent which will pay back in 2 days' shooting, but I might try and rig up one of the DIY options as well.
[IMG=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/bubblevision/800watt3.jpg]
[IMG=http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v290/bubblevision/coollight1.jpg]

Vic, our posts crossed over. Scanned your post very quickly because I have to go out in a second but thanks very much for all the advice. I'll absorb it all tomorrow.

The red head is out.

Also there'll be no flying for this job. All the hotels are here in Phuket or close by.

Also I know about the tripod. I have a nice Miller tripod now so no worries on that front.

Using one or two lights such as those you've shown simply won't work. To do what you want to accomplish will require major lighting work in every room you shoot.

Like Pat and Vic have said, shoot available light and adjust accordingly. The results will look 110% better than any feeble attempt at using a light or two.

We've bought one of those fluro lights except we got the 6 tube version. They're a knock off of the Lupo design but a perfectly acceptable one. Price seems a little high and from memory they're bank switchable whereas our Lupos are dimmable.
Jay is largely correct, for the common areas you're pretty much stuck with available light. In the hotel rooms though they can come in handy, even bounced off the ceiling. Where I'd have one on hand for is in bathrooms. The bathrooms are difficult to shoot but they're an important part of selling a hotel, just ask any wife. Also those fluro banks are good for lighting food, Thai food can be very colorful, get shots of food on the tables in the hotels, get the chef to really tart it up. Better yet shots of it being served.
Agree with Victor, get static shots and plenty of shots with very slow motion, zoom, truck, crab,pan,tilt. All really slow. A cheap tube dolly would be a good addition to the kit. In the piece I edited (supervised I should add) we used all the shots with motion and ditched the static ones where we could. Getting the shots to 'dance' made one hell of a difference to the end product. As I said at the outset having people in the shots to tell a 'story' would have really helped.

Bob.

Here's another vote for flouro lights - I managed to pick up a couple of Kino Flo 2' 4-bank fixtures a while ago, and at least one has been on every shoot since - fantastic lights.
After a few hours shooting in a small room, you'll never go back to tungsten lighting again ;-]
If you do spring for the Chinese versions, one thing I might recommend would be to paint the inside surfaces of those reflective 'barn-doors' matt black.
Having a means to control the spread of the light comes in really handy sometimes, but with a shiny silver surface, those may well create more problems than they solve by shooting the light off in unwanted directions.

Good luck,

Andy

that's OK, the reflective stuff peels off.

Incidentally, following up on Vic's suggestion for making panoramas using stills, I recommend http://www.panoramafactory.com/the panorama factory[/link] which is quite cheap and (in my experience) easier and more effective than Photoshop. One job was given me as a challenge because the client couldn't get a satisfactory outcome in Photoshop CS2, and the 3 stills each had only about 15% overlap. It was a cinch in Panorama and the client went off and bought a copy. I've done 200 degree panoramas containing objects in the scene about 1.5 metres away through to the horizon. Excellent result. Important (particularly with things close to the camera) to pan about the lens nodal point and allow plenty of overlap.

Another thought for post production.

You are shooting HiDef widescreen.

You are delivering web stuff (16:9 or 4:3)

Either way, you will have extreme flexibility to pan and scan your movie footage as well as the stills we mentioned.

I tend to shoot a little wider than normal on this kind of gig, knowing this. That way ALL of my shots are smooth and perfectly composed. It goes back to "normal post-productionhandling" in expensive 35mm film TV commercials, but now you can do it for free in Vegas.

Now I HATE "we'll fix it in the mix"!
Shoot it right in the first place, for sure.
But then you can really polish the stone, if you need to.

v

VICMILT:
I have always liked your help here.

I have a new slogan for you:

PLAN------
LIGHT----- IT RIGHT!
SHOOT---
DO---------

Thanks

RCourtney -

thanks - now get out there and start shooting :>))

v

Thanks once again for all the help everyone. Brilliant forum.

Quick question... If i rig up a "Nanolight" out of white foamcore and 6 x 20W curly wurly flueorescent bulbs, how to hold it on a stand? Besides my Miller video tripod I have a very lightweight photo tripod and a sturdy microphone stand.

Looks from Serena's link that a bit of welding/machining is going to be involved in the mounting.