How to build your own DIY floating balloon LED light using a few shower curtains

Balloon lights are an uncommon light source for most of us. But such lights are often used in TV and movie production. They’re essentially huge light sources that are overhead of your subjects using very bright bulbs. The balloon part of it acts like a big diffuser to help soften and spread the light out more evenly. They’re not cheap, though.

But this DIY option from Todd Blankenship at Shutterstock shows us a way to make one fairly easily using some shower curtains, LED strips and helium.

You can see from the video that it’s fairly involved, and will probably leave you searching for leaks so that you can make sure it stays afloat. The materials list isn’t very large at all, really…

• 3x extra-wide frosted shower curtains
• 2x Quad row LED strip lights
• 2x 360 Watt power supplies
• 2x power supply cables
• 50ft lamp cord
• 2x pool inflatables for the air valves
• Helium

The helium can be swapped out for air, after all, we are running out of helium. Of course, air isn’t lighter than… air. So, it’s not going to float all on its own. But being inflated, it’ll still be fairly easy to manage, and you’ll be able to suspend it quite easily from tall structures.

You’ll need a few tools to help make life easier, too.

• An iron (the clothes kind, not the golf kind)
• Scissors
• A screwdriver
• A hot glue gun and glue
• Wire strippers
• Electrical tape

Now, even though this is a DIY project, it’s still not going to be cheap. You’re looking at around $300. $200 of that is the LED strips, and another $80 is the two power supplies. $300 is a lot for a DIY lighting solution, but it’s nothing compared to the commercial systems available (and that one I linked is less than half the size of this).

[via No Film School]