How To Make A ROGER DEAKINS RING LIGHT | Cinematography Techniques

- 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) ♪