Re: Some Gear Advice for a Small Set

Here's my 2 cents.

You have two primary issues. Set lighting and character lighting.

Let's start with set lighting. You'll need enough overall illumination to expose the whole frame accurately. Your Lowel V-lights while not ideal, should do an OK job of this. As others suggested, NEVER use them directly pointed at the scene. Reflect them off something. A white ceiling is good. A couple of 4x4 sheets of white foamcore is also OK. (the formcore is angled toward the scene, the V-lights are then aimed AWAY from the scene but directly at the formcore which reflects the light directly back toward the scene, creating overall soft illumination for everything. This will be "flat" lighting with little talent or character dimension.

So next up in character lighting.

Again as others have noted, your softbox can serve as your keylight for the human talent. What really remains is to make the other "stars" of the show - the puppets - pop. I'd consider buying as many small fresnel lights as you can afford. You don't need anything big. Arri 150's or similar would do fine. These are under $150 a fixture and there are a LOT of them in use, so you might be able to find them used. They're light and easy to rig on cheap stands or clamped to virtually anything. Ideally, you'd want two of these per character on stage. One as a character key - one as a back or rim light. Used with cheap Harbor Freight dimmers, you can control the intensity of the key verses the rim light for each character. The fact that they're fresnels will let you use them directly on the characters "faces" to make them stand out of the overall scene.

What you want is a decent overall light level with the characters standing out as the brightest elements of the scene - each with a rim light to provide separation from the background.

One more note. whoever chose the black shiny drape for the "stage" background clearly didn't understand video. It's a giant light sink with nasty sparkles. I'd replace that first.

Let us know how things come out.