My lighting setup
Here's how I hang the lights in my studio....
These are called Par Cans.... they're the kind of lights used in night clubs. Inexpensive and quite powerful, and they have a gel holder so you can tint the beam. If you click on the picture at the left, you can see a selection of similar lights at The Musician's Friend, who has them at great prices. Choose the size you want depending on how powerful you need it to be. I'm using a pair of Par 46 lights with 250 watt lamps, which casts a good strong beam that will cover maybe half of my set area.
The ones pictured are Par 20's, which are much smaller, and cast a smaller beam. If you buy a really small size like the Par 16 pinspot, you can get the effect of a spotlight for pinpointing a puppet or a part of the set.
For holding up your lights, you can get light stands from one of the lighting stores I've already linked to, or buy a halogen work light that comes with a stand. You can get 250 watt or even 500 watt halogen lights from a hardware store pretty cheap, and they have standard hardware which allows them to accept the C-clamps. I have a pretty small space, and don't really have room for a bunch of stands that I need to worry about bumping into, so I opted for a different solution...
The red thing in the foreground is one half of a
pipe clamp set. You buy the clamp pieces and insert 3/4" plumbing pipe that you buy elsewhere, whatever length you desire. As these pictures to the right show, the basis of my rigging setup is a pair of these pipes running parallell, onto which I've secured shorter pieces of pipe to form a scaffold that offers many positioning choices.

Here's a close up that more clearly shows the C-clamp securing one of my lights to the scaffold. It's important that the two screws are perpendicular to each other.... in the lightweight C clamp design, and many others I've seen, they're at a 45° angle, which puts the long screw right in your way for swiveling the lighting unit. Also, behind it, you can see how I put two hose clamps together to attach the extra pipes to the main support pipes.
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