- Hey, how's it going?
Todd with Shutterstock here, and let's talk about Roger Deakins.
Roger Deakins is without a doubt one of the greatest cinematographers of all time.
And obviously, I've always been a really big fan of him,
not only because everything he shoots is just pure cinematic magic,
but I've always thought it was really cool how willing he is to share his secrets
and how he achieved certain lighting setups.
The man even has his own website with a forum that you can go on there
and just ask him how he did certain things. And lo and behold, he will actually tell you.
One thing that always comes up is that he loves to use ring lights.
And specifically, he likes to use ring lights with tungsten household regular light bulbs.
And in this video, I'm going to show you how to make one of these,
a Roger-Deakins-inspired ring light.
♪ (mellow electronic music) ♪
All right, so we are on our way to pick up some supplies
to build our very own Roger Deakins ring light.
I guess Roger Deakins didn't really invent the ring light.
A lot of people use ring lights.
- I've seen it in tutorials on YouTube and fashion vlogging stuff,
where it's just people sitting at desks and you can see the light in their eyes.
I've never used one, and I don't care for that kind of light,
how you can see the literal circle in their eyes and it kind of gives it
a weird robotic feel.
- The thing that he does differently is how he uses the ring light.
What he tends to always do for warmer scenes is he takes one of these ring lights
and he puts tungsten bulbs in them and just dims them down to, like, 20%.
That basically just creates a really, really warm, pleasing light.
It just seems like it's more about the quality of the light,
almost like the science of it or something.
♪ (off-key vocalizing) ♪ (laughs)
I've just always been super intrigued by how it clearly does something different
than any other type of light.
So to make one of these ring lights, here are the supplies that you're going to need.
First, you're going to need a whole bunch of light bulbs.
Here, we're just using some 60 watt tungsten household light bulbs.
And the light that we're making is going to have 25 different sockets,
so we're gonna need at least 25 light bulbs.
You're going to need 25 lamp holders or lamp sockets.
They should cost something like 2 bucks apiece.
You're gonna need a 4 foot by 4 foot piece of plywood.
And you're gonna need something like 30 to 35 feet of lamp cord.
You're gonna need some sort of power source, so here I used a power tool cord replacement kit.
But you could just cut one end off an old extension cord,
and that's going to be the part that will actually plug into the wall.
And you're gonna just need some screws. I use some 3/4-inch screws.
And that's what I'm gonna use to screw the sockets into the piece of wood.
And definitely make sure that you have a car that can fit
a 4x4 piece of wood, because we didn't think that far ahead,
and things got a little bit dicey. - See you in a few hours, buddy.
- If you get in a wreck, I will crumple
like an accordion. - You'll die.
♪ (mellow music) ♪
- First, to start, I just laid out all of my sockets and just kind of made sure
that they were going to fit on the piece of wood.
You want to make sure that you're not gonna have
too many large gaps between each of the sockets,
because if you do, then you might get some nasty,
multi-shadow kind of problems. Now you need to make your circle of plywood.
To do this, you need to measure halfway from side to side going both directions.
And that's going to tell you where the exact center
of your piece of plywood is.
From there, just screw a screw into the very middle of your piece of plywood
and just tie some string to it. And then on one end of the string,
just tie or tape a sharpie and mark a circle going around the piece of plywood
all the way to the edges. Once you have your first circle drawn,
now you can draw the inner circle.
So what I did to do that was I just twisted my sharpie a few times
to where I knew there would be enough room for my lamp sockets.
And I drew another circle inside of the bigger one.
And once you have your two circles drawn, you can go ahead and grab a jigsaw
and just cut along the red lines or the lines of your sharpie.
And don't worry too horribly much about getting it perfect.
Just try to get as much of a perfect circle as you can.
And once you have your circle of wood, you can go ahead and place all of your lamp sockets
back onto the piece of wood and get it all laid out the way that you like it.
And then what I did was I just went around with the sharpie
and lifted up each socket individually and put a little dot right underneath
each and every socket, so that I would know
where to drill my holes later on. Then you'll just go around the entire circle
and drill a nice 1-inch-ish kind of hole, where each dot was.
And this is where we're gonna be able to run our electricity through
and keep everything nice and organized.
After you have all of your holes drilled, you can go ahead and start with the first lamp socket.
So now you're gonna take your power source cord and you're going to strip a little bit of it down.
And you're gonna start by hooking up the black wire to the brass terminal.
So the black wire is always going to be the hot wire.
And that is always going to need to be wired up to the brass terminal.
And then you're going to take the white wire, and you're gonna hook that up to the silver terminal.
(bell dings) Hot wire always goes to the brass terminal,
and the neutral wire always goes to the silver terminal.
So now we're going to use the lamp cord to wire up all the rest of the lamp holders
all the way around the rest of the circle. So first, you'll take your lamp cord
and split the wires apart. So the way that you're going to be able
to tell them apart is that the hot wire, or black wire in most cases,
is going to be the one with the writing on the side of it.
You'll notice some little inscribed lettering, and it's also the smooth one of the two.
So there's a smooth wire, and then you'll notice
on the neutral wire, there is a little bit of a bumpy edge to it.
And that's going to be your neutral wire. So always remember the bumpy one is the neutral wire,
and the smooth one most of the time with the writing on the side
is going to be your black wire or your hot wire.
So again, you're going to strip down a little bit of each wire.
You're going to kind of twist it up as tight as you can,
and then make just a little hook going in the direction of the screw
so that when you hook it around and you screw it down,
it actually tightens onto itself. And you're going to do that for both sides.
♪ (mellow electronic music) ♪
And then you're going to go ahead and stick the lamp cord
back through the hole up through the next hole
so that you can go ahead and wire the next lamp socket
and just go ahead and screw that down.
And every time I wired one of these lamp holders up,
I went ahead and just put a couple strips of electrical tape underneath
just so that I could have one layer
of something in between all of the electricity and the wood.
So now you're going to just repeat that process.
For me, it was 25 times.
Stripping the lamp cord and then putting the smooth wire
into the brass terminal and then the bumpy wire into the silver terminal
and then doing it again on the other side and then putting on some electrical tape
and running the wire back down through the hole and up through the next one
and then screwing the lamp socket down. And you do this enough times
to where you get into kind of a rhythm with it. And it starts to feel just kind of therapeutic almost.
You'll either get really chill and throw on some music,
or you'll lose your mind, one of the two.
♪ (off-key vocalizing) ♪
♪ (upbeat electronic music) ♪
So once you have all of your lamp sockets wired up, you can put an optional cross beam
down the middle so that you have kind of a handle where you can carry it.
And I happen to have an extra baby pin wall plate adapter
laying around, so I went ahead and screwed that into my cross beam
so that I could use this light with a C stand.
I also went around the edges and added some command strips around the edges
so that I could stick some fabric around the sides
to act as a skirt for the light and control it a little bit better
when it was being used in a top light scenario.
Now, a light like this is really versatile, because you can use it
as a really beautiful top light for a tabletop-type scenario.
You can fly these above your scene and get a really, really nice look.
But these lights also make a really, really nice key light
to supplement for a tungsten practical.
All you have to do is just put this ring light behind it
and dim it down to match the color temperature of that tungsten fixture,
and you have a really beautiful, wrappy, kind of soft diffused light.
And if nothing else, you can just use one of these lights to provide
a really beautiful, warm ambience to the entire scene.
If you just want to kind of give everything a little bit more of a warm glow,
using a light like this would just provide a nice, warm ambience to everything in your scene.
Anyways, a light like this is just a thing that I've always wanted
to try to build for myself.
I know now that I have one, I'm gonna use it a whole lot.
And I'm actually gonna take the circle that I cut out
in the middle of the other one and make a smaller version
so that I can have two different sizes. So try some stuff yourself,
experiment a little bit, see what sort of cool looks
you can come up with with your ring light.
And as always, I hope you found this video helpful.
Be sure to subscribe, hit the Like button, all that stuff.
Anyways, I'll see you guys next time. Thanks for watching.
♪ (upbeat electronic music) ♪