I rebuilt mine to go into an instrument case (found used at a guitar shop).
My case will sit on a speaker stand using a http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=245-014Top Hat[/link].
They are thin plastic so I also used a http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&Partnumber=245-015backplate[/link].

Looks very professional, can travel well, and still light weight.

Nick -

I'm sorry that you haven't had the opportunity to see my video, Light It Right.

In it I explaing that the "nano-light" is a CONCEPT - not a specific construction. It can be any size and made of practically any material.

The important elements are the "curly flourescent bulbs". They draw very little electic wattage and throw very little heat off. The nanolight that I "invented" is made of 1/4" foam core. You would NEVER dare to do that with a halogen bulb - it would be WAY too dangerous. Same thing with a paper Chinese lantern - that would catch on fire in an instant. But the curly bulbs are sufficiently cool so that the Chinese lantern is extremely useful. Now here in the states you can buy light bulb "Y"s where you screw one bulb Y into another, thereby adding an accessible socket with each "Y". With only three splitters you can have four bulbs, yielding 400 watts of useable light for only 80 watts of draw. We generally use four to six bulbls in a 36" lantern and that is Plenty Bright for a twenty foot radius.
Transportation is a cinch for these lanterns. They collapse to the thickness of a thin cardboard, and the bulbs and sockets are reasonably small, as well.
So that's the way I'd go, in your shoot.

v

I'm definitely going to buy the Fokon flueorescent unit as advised and will supplement it with a whole load of CFLs and accessories as suggested.

I love the instrument case Nanolight idea for a future project. And Vic, I will order your DVD for sure.

Question about the paper china balls... How to mount them? Most hotels dont have pendant fixtures so mount them on stands? Or hand held by an assistant? Or on the floor? Or hanging from whatever I can find? Or any one of these?

If anyone's interestd in this subject I asked the same lighting question on the DVinfo.net lighting forum. One interesting thing that came up from Nino Gianotti (post #8) was that he always does the exterior shots before 10am or after 4pm, and interiors/details between these times. Do you guys think this is a good idea?

The simplest thing is to hang the Chinese lantern from a boom stand (maybe a mic stand with a short boom). Or get an assistant to hold the boom (i.e hang it from a stick which the assistant holds). You could stick it on top of a stand (i.e. the lantern upside down). On the floor or table? Depending on the shot, you could. Best to have the gear to suspend the lantern, but you might at any setup use any of the methods.
Early morning/late afternoon -- yes. Need to scout the locations. You won't want sunlight pouring in a window, so inside when the sun is up somewhat is probably right. Given the opportunity I'd scout the hotels and rooms with a digital still camera and compass to determine the best times for each location. The compass lets you work out the times for best light.

You can buy a fixture thingy for a Chinese lantern so you can hold it in the clamp on the end of the boom on a C Stand.
I've managed to pickup some big CFLs down here, 50W and 70W that only just fit through the hole in the lantern.
And then there's the Bob Ball for some serious light but it don't fold up!

I've also got a few of these Lamp holders in my kit bag, very hand for putting various CFLs onto things. Use them along with some clamps that've got a baby pin to hold lamps onto doors or soffits or cheap light / mic stands.

Bob.

Done 2 days and thought I'd give some feedback, not just on the lights but on some of the rest of our kit, much of which is being used intensively for the first time.

The Fokon "Kino Flo" type 4x55W fluorescent light is working well. The clamp isn't very good and doesn't feel that secure. We also need to get a case for the head as we can only fit it in a large suitcase. Thinking of getting the local wetsuit shop to make a 7mm neoprene case for it unless someone has a bright idea. We'll make a case out of plastic pipe for the stand. We also need a gel to match it to tungsten for darker shoots. Anyone know what colour/number gel that would be?

The 23W curly-wurly CFLs are only available here in 2700K (more yellow than tungsten) and 6500K (more blue than daylight). They're mostly Philips "Tornado". Nevertheless we assembled quite a kit of them and various leads, festoon lighting, etc. etc., much of which is going to be ditched tomorrow when we pare the kit down to basics. Biggest lesson learnt so far for this sort of shoot is to keep the amount of kit down so we can carry it all around from shot to shot between 2 people and not leave bits of it lying all around the hotel.

Something you guys may be interested in... Instead of building a "flower" of curly-wurly CFLs we bought Philips Econotone 65W fluorescents, one at 4000K and one at 6500K. The 4000K one has been very useful for supplementing light in bedrooms as its colour temperature sits between the tungstens and daylight. They also make a 45W one but the 65W one is great. We couldn't get a china ball/paper globe for it anywhere here so I'll have to bring one from abroad.

Most of the lighting in the hotels so far has been low voltage dichroics, so we haven't been swapping out any lights. Time is rather rushed for doing that anyway and I'm not confident with the safety of some of the local wiring either.

My Bolex Aspheron wide angle lens has been a dream for this job. Super wide angle for tight bathrooms etc. and straight edges stay straight because of it's aspheric shape. During pans and tilts it does give a virtual point of rotation that is in front of the camera, but I'd rather have that than curvy edges towards the edge of the shot. For more info on this lens search www.dvinfo.net where there has been much discussion. It does need an adaptor making to fit on video cameras such as my Z1.

My Miller Solo legs have been brilliant. Light and stable, quick to set up, and can get into all sorts of odd shaped corners and territory. I'm not so sure about the Miller DS10 head. It's OK but perhaps not as smooth as it should be. Never had a fluid head before so it's hard to compare but it just feels a little rumbly at moments. Maybe it just needs running in more.

My Manfrotto 521Pro zoom controller has been working great, especially for slow zooms, but the rubber pads fell off on just the 2nd day of use and we've lost one of them. If you buy one of these pull the 4 rubber pads straight off and superglue them back on.

The Z1 has performed well, especially the transition function. Got a couple of cool rack focus details and slow zooms using the transition function and I've been using it for bringing details into focus from out of focus. A bit cheesy but gives the editor another option.

I have some homemade A4 "warmcards"... Pantone PMS 290C, 2707C and 283C printouts which I got off the net somewhere. The 290C is nice for warming shots up a bit. The others have been useful for getting white balance nearer to tungsten in some situations so we don't jump harshly from "white" to "yellow".

I also have a 4"x4" Expodisc that I bought for use underwater. It no longer gets used for that but it's been quite useful for this job. It tends to give a slightly warmer balance than the outdoor preset MWB on white.

Now all we need to do is speed up a bit and get better at dealing with harsh shadows. The strong sunlight here in Thailand is a bit of a nightmare for shooting exteriors.

Thanks again for everyone's help!

Bob,

Interesting that in trying to check out the Bob Ball link, I get 403 error ("Forbidden") which I'm guessing could be their way to reduce server hits from abroad (by doing IP address filtering).

I got the text of the page from Google's cache, but to see the photo I would have to use a proxy in Oz.

Nick,

You need big silks for shooting typical scenes outdoors in strong sunlight. You can use remnants from a fabric store if you want, but getting a good frame is helpful for portability.

For low-budget silks use shower curtain liners - cheap, light and efficient. I'm talking about the ones that are non-see-through.

For frames for above consider 1" polyethelene plumbing pipes.
Lightweight, cheap and easy to build with.
Four pipes with four 90 degree corners. Use screws with wingnuts to fasten and hold them without torque-ing (have no idea how to spell that or if it's even a word) I mean the frame should not twist around.

For low-budget silks use shower curtain liners - cheap, light and efficient. I'm talking about the ones that are non-see-through.

Good, just make sure nobody gets the idea to use these with hot lights (I have seen that use).

The result can be halfway between a fire and an explosion.

The filter you want for daylight to tungsten is "full C.T. Orange" Lee filter #204. You can attach it to the barndoors with fold-back clips (those things you use to hold together your notes) but better to make a frame.

Thanks guys for the tips about silks and Serena for the gel number. I'll get hold of some of that.

Well, a "15 hour shoot" turned into 4 full days of hard work. No doubt our inexperience with some of this type of work didn't help. But sadly towards the end of the last day my Z1 died with a couple of important shots still to get and a tape stuck inside. Off to Sony service on Thursday. Anyone know how to manually eject a tape or if it's possible?

Manually eject the tape? Yes, I made a note somewhere and will now look for it.

EDIT: it was in my equipment carry out case, but it is a diagram which I'll try to describe.
Remove your camera battery. On the bottom of the camera (below the "auto/manual" lettering) you will see a cover (of a very broad L shape) held by a single screw. Remove that. This reveals a cavity and down there you can see 5 contacts. The two adjacent to the tape door are the ones you need. You get a 4.5v battery and connect negative to the contact nearest the side of the camera and positive to the adjacent contact.
I haven't had to use this procedure and so cannot vouch for it personally. Those contacts are not easy to reach, which is why my diagram shows probes connected to the battery. I would prefer to take my camera around to the professionals to do on the spot, but stuck on location this procedure should be known. Wish I could re-locate the original source.


EDIT2: I note that you got there already! http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=96897&highlight=manual+eject+fx1DVinfo[/link]

We've done 5 hotels so far and the first 2 of them are now online:

http://www.tvtrip.com/phuket-hotels/centara-karon-villas-phuket

http://www.tvtrip.com/phuket-hotels/centara-kata-resort-phuket

We did loads of arty medium and tight shots and they haven't used any of them. Rack focus and stuff like that. But we learnt a lot doing them.

In my opinion the videos look a little dark. I tended to let the Z1 do an auto iris, then go fully manual and stop it down a little. But having seen the result I dont think I'll stop down as often in the future.

Also you get a good idea of how the Bolex Aspheron looks. It makes those bathrooms look much bigger than they really are, and all lines around the edges stay nice and straight. Pics of it with my home made adaptor are here.

Frank comments and feedback would be more than welcome!

Pan left, pan right, pan left. Is this a good idea. moreso when they're very wide shots. Getting a Wally Dolly (get an extra 1M of track) and use some crabs and pushes. The Wally Dolly packs up into an easy to transport bag.

Apart from that it looks very good. Without some serious lighting kit there's not much you can do to make some of those shots look any brighter I suspect.
Bob.

Looking at the videos I don't think you've under exposed. You have nice balance with indoors and outdoors in same frame and no over blown highlights that I noticed. A bit of work in post would have brought up darker areas, but nothing can correct over exposure. I'm not keen on the frequent "not slow" pans (I would have said fast, but to video people that probably means a whip pan), particularly with them being cut in opposite directions, because my impression is "restless" rather than "tranquil/luxurious" (which is the mood the music suggests). In editing I would have used more of your closer "happy people" shots and maybe fewer zooms and more dissolves in preference to pans. Your wide angle lens works well and certainly makes those spaces look big.
Good job.

Thanks guys, I agree with your points about the pans. Most shots I supplied them with a variety such as a static, a left pan and a right pan or a slow zoom in or out. I was really trying to keep in style with their other videos but I think I will slow those pans down a bit.

The Wally Dolly does look like it would be a nice addition to the kit. Cheers.

Don't know if I've got this right or not but in my head is something about L to R pans being natural, I think maybe because that's the way we read.

Bob.

>> Don't know if I've got this right or not but in my head is something about L to R pans being natural, I think maybe because that's the way we read. <<

In that case the right-to-left pans are for their Arab customers!

Edit: ... and the tilts are for the Chinese!