I have been asked to shoot some pilates (exercise) instructional vids. Shooting in the studio, but have little experience with lighting.

I stumbled across this video (YouTube - Bar Method Change Your Body Demo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0jK2cEiOpw&eurl=http://www.barmethod.com/dvds/dvd-c2.htm&feature=player_embedded))
and was wondering if the gurus could offer an opinion on how they achieved such an even and seemingly shadow-free image (i am sure that money was involved).

Any thoughts/wisdom gratefully received.

Ciao,

marks

Evenly lit and flat is the only good way to do exercise videos in my opinion. People need to see well what's going on so if you get too artistic that may be a problem. The best way to get evenly lit without shadows is to use some soft diffused lighting from the front and sides. You'll rarely have the luxury of overhead video studio type lighting in one of these videos as you usually end up using someone's exercise studio. Even if they did have the room for the lights, they'll probably not have the budget for someone to come in there and hang lots of lighting from the ceiling.

Once upon a time I did a yoga video and we ended up using a church stage which did have lots of good lighting pre-existing so that is one possibility. The space was pretty much donated as I recall for free. The other exercise/yoga studio they wanted to use had too many mirrors on the walls for one thing which disqualified it in my mind.

So are we thinking "blondes"? "Readheads"? other things? combinations of all these?

marks

hard lights if they're diffused, like Richard said.

also could be a number of fluorescent fixtures overhead too. They're nice soft (and cool) sources especially when people are already sweating during the shoot.

cheno

Overhead Chimera lanterns or something similar???

You can usually deconstruct lighting by looking two places.

At specular highlights

And at shadows.

The shadows show large soft sources positioned left, right, overhead and behind the subjects.

The specular highlight on the floor at about :35 shows that these sources are at least 4x4 or perhaps 6x6 overhead softboxes or silks lit by large fixtures. (Can't tell which because we have no way of knowing how high the ceiling is and therefore how distant the fixture causing the specular highlight might be.)

The video looks professional because it's very professionally lit.

The wider shots show the students are about a stop below the instructor, so that your eye goes to her.

You may be shadow free, but you don't want flat, it still needs to reveal body texture.