Reflector Board

A 4'x4' Reflector board is a very cheap way to get a hard daylight balanced light by just bouncing the sun. They often have two sides, a hard side, and a soft side. The soft side when new has a silver leaf that extends out past the board a bit, but this quickly gets rubbed off from normal use. They are also sometimes called a Shiny board.

Uses

Mostly these are used on low budget productions that cannot afford an HMI. Instead, they'll just use reflector boards to get hard hits of sunlight, or they will shoot these through 4x4 or 6x6 frames to get a softer light. You will have to focus these by reflecting the sun, oftentimes the easiest way to do this is by looking at where the sun is in the sky and thinking about how it would bounce off your board and where you would like it to go. You can double-check your board is getting full sun by looking at its shadow.

Put your board where you think it will work best for reflecting the sun, then move the board around until you find your reflection. Once you've found your reflection you can pan it where you need it to go. It can very easily blind someone, so be careful where you point it. When not in use you will store them on a stand with the board "tabled" or flattened out. This will keep it from reflecting in anyone's eyes and also keep it from falling over when there is a gust of wind.

Troubleshooting

Reflector boards will need to be recovered from time to time, this is how to recover the hard side of the Reflector board.

• Use heat gun to remove old reflector material. You’ll need to slowly pull up the material as you heat up the adhesive and pull it off.

• There will be bits left over, use paint thinner to clean the old surface. It should be relatively smooth once you’re done.

• Measure out the replacement silver reflector material and cut two ~ 2’ x 4’ pieces. They can be a bit bigger than the board as you will trim them down.

• Make sure the surface is dry and use Spray 77 to coat the surface. Do a pass spraying horizontally along the board. Then do another pass where you spray vertically.

• Using 2 people, put the new reflector material on.

• Taking your hand, spread out the material from the center out. Get out all of the air bubbles.

• Then put the other piece on and you can overlap the two pieces of material slightly. Make sure to get out the air bubbles as well.

• Using a sharp razor blade, cut around the edges of the board and trim off all excess material.

• Take a straight edge and clamp it to the board at the center using furniture clamps. You can use a piece of square tubing or any other straight edge. Then make a cut down the middle, make sure you line it up with the center of the board. (There should be marks in the blue channel around the edges to figure out middle.

• Make sure the edges are really stuck down around the board.