The latest one was a medium scale production for me. Not too long, elaborate or fancy, but not a short, thrown together with little care piece either. Here it is on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUQOZ4_b_zQ
I wanted to get the lighting better than before. But without spending any money on fancy equipment. Before, I have used multiple small spot-lights (the ones from my exhibition booth rig), but these are actually pretty dim for photography / videography and they cast hard shadows and give you over-sparkly point reflections.
What I needed was flood-lights in "soft-boxes" - to create a larger, more diffuse light source to soften the shadows and make reflections of the lights less offensive.
I made 2 of them in very Heath-Robinson fashion. Both from cheap halogen flood lights that I already had. One with two microphone stands and a large sheet of tissue paper:
The second, I made with a cymbal boom arm stand, a microphone stand and an old coated drum head:
I had them either side of the scene so the drums were illuminated quite evenly from both sides (and also from the existing overhead lighting in the room):
Seemed to work pretty well. I had to add a "flag" to screen off the right hand soft-box later on, when I had a video camera with a wide-angle lens on it out in front of the kit. The light, even though out of shot, was still getting into the lens and creating a lens flare. So I hung a black sheet (like the ones I've used as the backdrop) from one of the microphone stands that was actually being used to hold a microphone to block the light to lens path, but not the light to drums path.
So, you don't necessarily need proper, expensive Gobos and soft-boxes to do a reasonable job...
