Building A Fake Window With Realistic Sun Light For Video Shoots
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Building A Fake Window With Realistic Sun Light For Video Shoots
In this video, we try to build a fake window with realistic sun light for video shoots. We came up with a few different ideas and show the different approaches. The goal is to make a window frame and have soft, beautiful natural looking light shine through, and be able to fully control the setup, even at night, or in a room with no windows or daylight. It was fun to experiment, and we show you what we learned and the end result!
GENERATED CAPTIONS:
I've had so many people dm us asking or saying is this studio in your basement and it is not i know it looks that way because there's literally no windows here but there used to be two big windows they used to let a lot of beautiful natural light in but the problem was there's a commercial building right next door to us that has a lot of forklifts driving around all day so we sealed the windows soundproofed them and then drywalled over them so we're creating a fake natural light window prop that we can use in various sets when we're doing certain shoots before we jump into this video i want to say that i wasn't planning on posting this video because i didn't actually end up finishing the window in the degree i wanted to at the end of the video i talked about what i still learned from this and why it was still worth it.
Our studio from floor to ceiling is about 10 feet tall looks really good in video but we're likely gonna have some drapes covering our fake window and most drapes typically are the size that would fit in a regular house so lucky for us we found some white curtains that are nine feet tall we bought like i don't know five sets of them at first and figured that since they're so see-through we should buy another four sets of these curtains so that we can bunch them together more and hopefully this will do a good job of hiding any of the imperfections in our fake window that we're working on.
These light strips these look like they're a lot closer together so i think the light will be a lot more even than those trying to see if i'm going to be able to use led strips or if i need to switch and actually use a film led light so that you know looks a lot better than those right now but that's also a few feet away so as i get closer it gets to a hot spot but even that you can't tell that they're strips even all the way on it it's just a hot spot which is good so that's another problem though because this is expensive it's an expensive film light those led strips are from amazon and they're 30 bucks or something so do i make a smaller window and use the led strips or do i make a larger window which will be better for the set in the background of shots and use leds but we might have to buy an extra set of leds because they're like 500 watts each and they push a lot of power out a lot more than the led strips but like i said they're pricey that's a tough call i promise it's just not that bright too so my first attempt at creating a fake window uh started with what i was going to do in the background behind the uh diffused glass or the diffused plexiglass i came up with the idea of led strips they're cheap available on amazon and you have a large light source which also makes the light a lot softer because the led strips themselves are spread out along the white backdrop piece the issue with that though is led lights are not typically that bright there are some higher end leds now in the market that are very bright but it's not really worth spending a thousand bucks or more to imitate this sort of thing.
So we're trying to do it for just a couple hundred bucks and i think this works but unfortunately especially for shoots that need a lot of light on the talent this isn't going to work because in the background you're probably not going to see the light all that much because you're exposing for the other lights on set if it was just a dark lit scene and this was in the background i think it would work well so even with just the house lights on it's probably not going to do too much you most likely won't even notice that it's on behind the drapes or the curtains so the other idea we had was using this 500 watt led actual film light and this is great it's a lot brighter but that means the light's also a lot more concentrated because it's a lot of leds in one spot as opposed to spread out with the light strips this works really well if we had three four or more lights but i'm thinking about going more of the led light strip approach maybe buying another two sticking within 100 or so in total for the lighting at the end of the day though video production is about doing tests, pre-production is very very important so the more mistakes you can avoid by doing better pre-production, the better your shoot will end up being, and the more money you will save so that's where we're at right now; we're just in the pre-production stages before we shoot, trying to plan and make sure that everything goes accordingly, and within budget to hang the curtains because it's such a long distance, it's about 16 feet or so.
I've been trying to think of different ways i can go about hanging that many curtains i think we have nine in total what i came up with was hanging these wires off the sound panels having hooks at the end and then using this long fencing pole and then we'll use that as the main support piece to hang the all the curtains now we're trying to figure out the best way to get that up into the wires because it's a 10 foot tall ceiling there's only two of us we only have one tall ladder so that's the next steps i've already cut the one pole connected it together and then we'll hang the curtains.
Jumping ahead here i didn't actually end up using the fake window in the shoot i had planned there was a few reasons for that one after finalizing the style and look for what the client was going for a window didn't really make sense and two the window project ended up being a lot bigger of a project than i had originally planned for i would have had to build an entire wall on either side above it and below maybe drywall or sort of hardboard material that would cost a lot more and require probably 30 more hours of work and also the light intensity wasn't nearly as strong as i would have liked it even the film light i tried didn't really do the trick if it was the only light and i was shooting with a higher iso on like a fast prime lens it would have worked but with the uh the lighting setup i was going for for the shoot and the concept for what they were going for didn't really make sense for those two reasons that being said though i did learn a lot about led light strips so yes technically i did fail in my goal of trying to create a fake window for a shoot however i still have the fake window it's still built i can still use it sometimes it takes a little longer sometimes you go down the wrong path at first but it's all part of the process and failure is just what gets you to that end result.
That's it for this video i hope it was helpful to you or at least interesting in uh seeing my process for creating a fake window it was an idea i had for a shoot and while it didn't work out as i mentioned it still was worthwhile and i still learned some stuff from that process we have over 100 other filmmaking tutorials and review videos on this channel so if you like this video give it a thumbs up and subscribe to see more videos like this or tutorials from us in the future we put out about one video a week thanks so much and we'll see you next time.
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