The guys over at Indie4K have thrown together a post that shows how they built their own soft light sources using (5) Compact Fluorescent bulbs in a simple enclosure. Looks like it takes a few surface-mount light sockets, wood backing, foamcore, and a little patience. They dressed it up with a nice Avenger Baby Wall Plate to make it compatible with standard stands and grip gear. This is a really nice DIY project, and the resulting daylight-balanced light source looks fantastic.

“We managed to build three of these in about four hours, figuring out the details as we went along. Each one is lamped with five 27 watt nVision daylight balanced CFLs (also form Home Depot), which (our Red tells us) have a color temperature of almost exactly 5000K. One benefit to this design is that you can reduce output, and even aim the light to some extent, simply by removing bulbs.

Each fixture puts out the equivalent of around 450 watts of tungsten lighting, while using only 135 watts. (With the foam core sides, they’d probably catch fire in fairly short order if you actually put 450 watts of tungsten bulbs into one; with the CFLs the foam core gets no more than mildly warm.) One almost comical benefit of this is that you can plug ten of these fixtures (equivalent to over 4000 watts of tungsten light) into a single 15 amp household circuit, and never run out of power on location again.”