FloLight LED Panels

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Post Type Production Gear

We bought a pair of Flolight panel lights about 6 months ago and I thought I’d wait a bit and see how they held up over half a year span.  The lights we purchased are daylight balanced with an anton bauer battery adaptor on the back. We’ve taken these lights all the way from red carpets to the middle of the desert and the ease of use and versatility have made us believers in this type of lighting.  For ENG, run and gun type productions, to be able to set up quick, toss on a battery and have 1000w of light without the hassel of cords was a life saver in many situations.  Top lights sometimes don’t cut it.  We do plenty of quick shoots and I find myself packing a flolight more often then not.

 

There are a few problems I’ve found that should be shared.  First off, all are lights come in balanced between 6000k and 6300k, not 5600k as advertised.  The lights aren’t built tough, meaning in the 6 month time period we’ve had them in for flicking, dimmer malfunction and one went toast and stop firing all together.  The build quality isn’t up to what I would consider production standard.  The light can also be a little harsh so a couple pieces of diffusion are necessary if doing any sort of interview which drastically cuts the throw of the light.  And, even though we have the gel adaptors, adding gels or diffusion isn’t an easy endeavor.   However, when we ‘separately’ purchase the barndoors that problem should be solved. 

 

The most common question I’m asked is how do the Flolights compare to the LitePanels.  We rented a couple of LitePanels for a shoot and while we had them we decided to do a few tests for comparison.  The Flolights, despite being 6300k, had a more realistic daylight apperance then the LitePanels which didn’t even make it to 5600k but closer to 5000k.  They were almost twice as bright as the LitePanels and lit our subjects at much further distances. The LitePanels did appear to be studier and have a better build and a few more features like the dual color temps. Oh and the one Flolight costs about 1/3 the price of a LitePanel.  

 

I’m not going to use them for everything but these lights do have a place in my packages and I will continue to use Flolights until I see another panel light that can give me the same value.  And though they tend to have a few more malfunctions than I’d like, returning the poor units and customer service has been very good to this point.  

 

The f-stops here.

Corporate Storytelling

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Post Type FIVESIX Productions

        At FiveSix Productions, we find more and more these days we’re shooting and editing for strictly web video delivery. Businesses are finding that to differentiate themselves from their competitors, their website needs to show rather than tell a potential consumer or client what the business or brand is all about.  A compelling video that shows all facets of a business including their product or service in action can be consumed in a more effective way than reading text blurbs.   We’ve done a few storytelling pieces in the past month and have a couple more scheduled in the next few weeks and anticipate this trend to continue as more businesses realize this is an effective way to spend marketing dollars.

        With that said, these video pieces can’t be considered as just another marketing outlet or they will fall into the forgettable category, nor can they be a commercial or heavily sales driven in nature. These videos need to be thought out well in advance and planned accordingly.  The right tools are a start(such as our new Canon C300 camera, Kessler Cineslider or  Steadicam Flyer), but more important are putting the right people in place. Those people are the ones who will listen to your ideas, help you focus them in the right areas and help you to visually get across what it is you think is more important about your brand and image.  If the brand and image of a business is portrayed in the the correct way, the product or service will sell itself.  

        We understand how to put these corporate storytelling videos together and have had success in doing so.  They are some of the most fun projects to work on where we get to be collaborative and creative and in the end, see the results in web traffic, views and conversions.  We’re just getting started in this businesss trend and we like what we see so far and hope to make corporate storytelling an intricate part of our video production work moving forward. Check out our projects page to see some of our more recent work.  

At FiveSix Productions, the f-stops here.

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