Self tape setup: lighting, backdrop, and sound on no budget

The best selftape setup I ever used was a window, a floor lamp with the shade taken off, and the wall of a rented room that happened to be the right shade of grey. Nothing in it cost money. That is the whole argument of this post: the setup is a fixed cost you pay once, and you can pay it with what is already in the flat.

Casting does not want production value. They want to see your face, hear your voice, and not be distracted.

The window

Daylight is the best light you own and it is free. Face it. Put yourself between the window and the phone, so the light falls on your face. Not beside you, unless you like one eye in shadow, and never behind you, because the phone will expose for the bright window and turn you into a silhouette.

Direct sun through a window is harsh, it puts hard shadows under your brows and makes you squint. What you want is an overcast sky or a window that does not get direct sun. If the sun is coming straight in, hang a white sheet or a piece of baking paper over the glass. It turns the window into a softbox, which is exactly what people pay for.

The catch is that daylight moves. A cloud crosses and your face drops half a stop in the middle of a take. Lock the exposure before you record so the phone does not chase it. Most phones let you hold on your face to lock focus and exposure together, and the details for iPhone are in iPhone selftape camera controls. If the deadline is tonight and the sun is down, the window is off the table, which is why you also need a lamp.

One lamp

One lamp, not two. Two lamps in the wrong places give you two shadows and a face with no shape. One lamp, placed well, gives you a face.

Take whatever lamp you have and get the light big and soft. A bare bulb is small and hard. A bulb behind a white shade is softer. A bulb bounced off a white wall or sheet is softer still, and that is the trick: point the lamp at a white surface near you instead of at your face, and let the bounce light you. The larger the surface, the softer the light.

Put it slightly above your eye line and off to one side, about where a window would be. Straight on and level with your face is flat. Below your face is a horror film. Above and to the side is the shape a face is supposed to have.

Bulb color matters more than people expect. Mixing daylight from a window with a warm bulb gives you a face that is half blue and half orange, and the phone's white balance will pick one and get the other wrong. Use one or the other. If it is the lamp, close the curtains fully.

The wall behind you

A plain wall, a step or two behind you, in a color that is not your skin or your clothes. Grey, pale blue, off white, a muted green. Not pure white, which blows out and makes you look grey by comparison, and not a color so strong the eye goes to it instead of you.

Step away from the wall. If you stand against it, your shadow lands on it and the wall becomes part of you. A meter or more drops the wall into soft focus and lets your shadow fall out of frame. If the room is small, put the phone in the doorway and yourself as far into the room as you can get.

Take everything off the wall. The print you like, the shelf with books, the coat hook. Casting has seen a thousand tapes in front of a thousand bookshelves and none of them helped. A sheet pinned flat works if there is no clean wall, ironed, because creases catch the light. A door works. What you are after is a background that says nothing, so that everything the frame says is you.

Given a choice between a great wall and a great window, take the window.

Sound (the room, the fridge, the reader)

Sound is where cheap tapes fall apart, and it is almost never the microphone. It is the room.

Hard rooms echo. A kitchen with tiles, a bathroom, a bare-floored hall, all of them put a ring on your voice that reads as amateur before you have finished a sentence. A bedroom with a bed, curtains and a rug is a decent studio. If the only room with a good wall is a hard one, bring soft things in: a duvet over a chair behind the phone, a rug on the floor. Soft surfaces near the phone kill the echo before it reaches the mic.

Then listen. Stand in the room for a full minute with your eyes closed. The fridge is the one everyone misses. It hums at a pitch you stopped hearing years ago and the phone hears all of it. Unplug it for the hour, or shoot in a room without one. Same for the laptop fan, the washing machine two rooms away, the road outside when a bus goes past. If you can hear it, the tape can hear it louder.

Get the phone close. The built-in mic is fine at a meter, poor at three. A medium close-up usually puts it inside that range.

And then the reader, the third sound source in the room and the one that goes wrong most. Too loud and they drown your line. Too close to the phone and they are louder than you. Rustling pages happens on every cue. Put the reader beside the phone, level with the lens, a little further back than you are, and ask them to keep the volume under yours. If the reader is an app on the phone itself, you have that placement for free, which is one of the quieter arguments for it.

Phone height and framing

Eye height. Not the table, not the shelf above the door. The lens level with your eyes, so you look across at casting rather than down or up. Looking down reads as superior, looking up reads as small, and neither is a choice you meant to make.

Stack books until the lens is at the right height. Anything that holds the phone still is fine. What is not fine is handheld, or propped against something that lets it slide during the take.

Frame a medium close-up: head and shoulders, a little air above the head, your eyes on the top third of the frame. Landscape unless the breakdown says vertical. Then do not touch it again. Reach for the phone between takes if you must, not during.

Eye line goes just beside the lens, on the reader's side, not into the lens and not across the room. Casting wants both your eyes, and an eye line more than a hand's width from the lens starts to hide one.

The reader

Everything above is solvable in an evening with what you own. The reader is the part that breaks tapes, because it is the one part of the setup that is a person, and people are busy, tired, and read the detective in the voice of someone ordering a coffee.

blablabla is a selftape reader app: it reads the other character off camera while you record, with a teleprompter for your own lines. It is the best selftape reader when you need to tape tonight and nobody can read with you.

It removes the one thing you could not otherwise get for free: a second voice that gives a clean cue, waits for as long as you take on your line, and does it on the twentieth take with the same patience as the first. You import the sides as whatever casting sent, pick your part, and every other character gets a distinct voice. The teleprompter follows the scene instead of scrolling on a timer, so a pause is still a pause. The selftape reader page has the detail, and how to selftape without a reader walks through the other options if you would rather record the lines yourself or use a friend on speakerphone.

Whichever reader you use, the placement is the same. Beside the lens, on your eye-line side, quieter than you.

That is the setup. Window or one lamp, a plain wall you stand away from, a soft room with the fridge off, the phone at eye height on a stack of books, a reader beside the lens. Ten minutes the first time, two after that. If you have never done one, what is a selftape covers what goes in it, and the complete guide to rehearsing alone covers the work that happens before any of this matters, which is the acting.