A little while back, I was asked to make a video to announce the winners of the 2020 CCA Communications Contest. (CCA is a professional association of cooperative communicators. I’ve been a member for 17 years and counting.) The only direction I was given was to read the names of the winning cooperatives in either a Facebook Live presentation or a recorded video.

In deciding how to do this, I thought it might be remotely entertaining to be kind of a silly anchorman, something like the character “Perd Hapley” on the sitcom “Parks & Recreation,” so I gave it a try. It was fun, anyway…

But from a technical standpoint, this took a little bit of work. Here’s what I did. (I’ve included a video below that shows some of this, as well as the Amazon links to a few things.)

Primary lighting

I knew lighting would be one of the main issues because I would be shooting this in my own home office, not an actual studio. The solution came from one of my oldest music industry friends, Dennis Ritchie, who also teaches sound engineering. He had recently been doing Zoom classes and had come up with some great, low-cost solutions for lighting himself. Based on his recommendation, I bought two inexpensive clip-on utility light fixtures from Amazon. (These things are SO useful.) For bulbs, I used two LED BR30 reflector bulbs. Once the bulbs were installed, I covered the entire fixture in a white trash bag. Voila! Instant softbox! The fact that LED bulbs emit hardly any heat at all allows you to use the trash bags. The effect is a wonderful, diffused light for a total cost of around $25.

Much trickier, though, is properly lighting the green screen. More about that in a minute.

Camera

The camera I used was a Canon EOS C700 GS PL cinema camera. No, it wasn’t. Just kidding. I actually used my iPhone 11 Pro Max on a tripod. I recently updated my phone and chose this model specifically because of the camera capabilities, which allow you to shoot 4K video at up to 60 frames per second. Frankly, it would be hard to find a dedicated video camera with the same capabilities for a comparable cost, plus you can make phone calls and play Candy Crush on the iPhone. (Yes, I still play Candy Crush.)

Green screen

The green screen, a 9′ X 15′ fabric backdrop, I also found on Amazon for $36. I draped this over the two rolling garment racks that I use to create my podcast studio and pulled them up behind me at the proper distance. I clamped the fabric tightly to the frame to remove most of the wrinkles.

As I mentioned before, one of the keys of using a green screen is lighting it evenly so the greens will be consistent and easier to remove in editing. I did the best I could, which was to place two lamps on the floor in front of the screen and turned on the overhead. This was by no means perfect, but it got the job done. Given a little more planning time, I would’ve probably used another set of clip-on lights for this, but I had to go with the materials at hand.

In this month’s “Toolbag” section, I’ve included a tutorial video on how to use green screen in Adobe Premier Pro, which is what I used for editing. (The background, by the way, was a photo I found using my Adobe Stock Photos subscription. The opening sequence was already an option in Premier Pro.)

Audio

For audio, I moved my Rodecaster podcast studio and microphone onto my desk and just out of camera frame. After starting the video, I clapped my hands once to create a reference point. When I finished, I imported both the video and the audio track into Premier Pro, unlinking and deleting the audio track that recorded with the iPhone. I then synced the Rodecaster track with the video, again using the handclap as the reference point. Worked like a charm!

So there you have it. This is just an example of what you can do with very little budget. Check out the video below. (Unless you have a weird and inexplicable need to watch me read the names of cooperatives you’ve probably never heard of, you can get enough information just from the opening minute or so.)