Professional video lights are great tools. They are color balanced, versatile, and offer great control over the light they give. There is a wide variety of video lights made for different situations. Unfortunately, they are also very expensive. The cheapest ones cost you easily hundreds of dollars.

Fortunately, more inexpensive lights, designed for other uses, can be adapted as video lights. Following a list of lights I consider good do-it-yourself micro budget video lights.

1. Construction lights

You can get construction lights at almost every hardware store. Usually they come with a tripod you can extend to about five feet and two 500W halogen lights. This is as close as you can get to a professional Redhead. Look for the ones with a wire protector which makes it easy to add on gels or other diffusion materials.

However, be careful - the lights generate as much heat as light. The heat can be tricky, especially when you gel or diffuse it.


We used a lot of construction lights in the main fight scene of Ramly at War Begins.
(Curious? Click here to watch the film on my WebTV at Filmannex.)

2. Chinese lanterns

Chinese lanterns are great if you look for diffused light. Be careful to not exceed the wattage recommendation and turn them off in between takes. You can easily hang the lanterns on C-stands (or just pass it to a crew member and ask them to hold still ;) - micro budget style!

3. Cheap Motel Style

Buy color balanced regular 48inch fluorescent bulbs. They fit into any regular fluorescent fixture. The trick is to find fixtures that don’t have cheap, flickering ballasts. Now we need to mount the fixtures in a portable way. I know people who have designed stands for whole fixtures… and that is one way to go. Alternatively, pull apart the fixture and attach the light and connecting elements to a wall or any other stand with gaffer tape. It ain’t pretty, but it is ultra versatile. If the thought of pulling apart a lighting fixture with thousands of volts passing through scares you, buy fluorescent lights for aquariums which come fully sealed and without a metal fixture. But they are more expensive.

The use of these lights is great. They don’t get as hot as other lights and they diffuse naturally due to their length.

Flulorescent lights are also available for smaller areas where less light is needed. Furthermore, you can find 12-volt fluorescent lights for car “emergency kits” that work in and around cars. You can gaffer tape them almost anywhere, e.g on a driver's visor for a driving scene.


On set of Lunatia Dogs - we lit the car interior with a car emergency light.

4. Poor Christmas style :)

Another secret weapon is the use of Christmas lights. Used as practicals they make night scenes more interesting. You can hang them anywhere - on a railing, in a tree or around any post or beam to add an accent to the picture. They provide a good amount of light in larger quantities. The unfortunate thing about Christmas lights - your white balance is screwed. They’re too warm.


Lunatia Dogs - The Christmas lights in the background give the right whorehouse atmo.

(Written by Dexter Bahjanoon - www.nine-mm.com)