I'm looking back at some setups I've done somewhat recently and I thought this one was worth mentioning since we were operating within an unusual set of circumstances. Despite having a whole truck full of lights, grip gear, and plenty of time to play, I opted to go for a simple 2-point lighting setup for this interview to get a cozy, understated evening/night look. I don't remember the exact number but we shot at a super high ISO on the Sony cameras for this interview so as to not irritate our light-sensitive subject who has been bed-ridden with COVID. Our Aputure B7C and Infinibar were rocking near the bottom end of their intensity, the photo of the setup doesn't really do justice to how dim the room actually was.
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#filmlighting #filmmaker #filmmaking #film #gaffer #grip #setlightingtechnician #setlife #setlighting #bts #behindthescenes #aputure #sony
I work a lot on jobs where we film in corporate environments like office buildings full of cubicles and every time I enter somewhere like that, my soul recoils. I can't imagine doing anything other than what I do, filmmaking just hits the spot. Sitting at a computer couldn't possibly feel as epic as this does. Unless maybe you just invented FaceBook or something.
Pictured here is my best boy on and off set KoRie @analog.mp . He's the best hype man there is and he always helps me keep my ish together when the going gets tough.
If you ask 10 cinematographers how to light a night exterior, you're probably going to get 10 different answers. Shooting in sunlight during the day is usually a grip-heavy proposition but filming at night is where the electric department really shines. In my almost decade of working as a gaffer and SLT, I have lit night exteriors dozens of different ways and the requirements for doing so have varied greatly depending on the location, budget, tone of the story, camera, cinematographer's tastes, etc.
So far, I think the rig that gave me the moonlight look I liked the most was a 12x12x12 cube- black on all of the sides, except for the diffusion on the bottom, with two sky panels inside (those wouldn't normally be my first choice of fixture but that's what we had on the truck that day) attached to a 40 or 50-ft condor that we sent up over the set. But on other shoots where I've had fewer resources, I've also gotten good moonlight results just using something like 2x1 panels up on mombo combos.
How do you guys like to do your moonlight for night exterior scenes? Do you have a formula you keep going back to?
#gaffer #cinematography #behindthescenes #filmmaking #cinema
Sometimes when your client asks if you know how to do something you've never done, you take Richard Branson's advice to just say yes and then figure out how to do it later. Owala contacted me asking if I could do pixel mapping effects on LED tubes for a Tron collab and I just couldn't bear the thought of another gaffer getting to do it- IT'S TRON!
When I told them I could handle it, I knew vaguely that Madmapper's software could do what I wanted and that was about it. So I consulted the product manuals and ordered some stuff I'd need. At home, I got Madmapper to talk to one of my tubes so I could get a handle on how it all worked before I showed up on set to run a whole bunch of fixtures with a crew of people watching.
Anyway, the shoot went great and I had a great time- see the results on the last slide.
#gaffer #filmmaking #tron #owala #madmapper
Here's a quick little short I put together in about 5 hours just to show off what you can accomplish with a handful of lights and a little bit of know-how. Follow me to learn more about how we do lighting in the film industry! #starwars #maythe4thbewithyou #filmmaking #digitalsputnik
Back in January, @owala invited me to come light some promotional videos for their collab with Star wars for their May4th release (today! Go check Amazon). Of course, my response was "I'll clear my calendar." On the last slide, you can see the lighting diagram I sent to my cinematographer to give them an idea of what I had in mind for a general lighting setup on our small video wall stage.
Rather than a second light for fill, we ended up using a lot of negative fill on the right side to increase contrast. Probably the hardest bottle to light was the Darth Vader black-on-black pattern. It was tricky trying to show off the contrast between the gloss and matte finishes on the bottle without ruining the shape of the falloff on the bottle in general.
May the 4th be with you.
#starwars #behindthescenes #maythe4thbewithyou #gaffer
At the end of last year, @foxforceproductions invited us to come light a spoof of "How The Grinch Stole Christmas" to help promote a law firm. We had a blast filling the stage at Enigma 3 with digital blue rags and covering the floor with fake snow. Since our crew was fairly small and the schedule was pretty tight (something like 7 pages, a set swap, and several VFX assets), we had to light fairly generally and tweak everything on the fly. To enable that quick working pace, I was double-fisting two iPads running @blackoutlightingconsole and @sidus.link . Thanks again to everybody who was on this job, it was hectic but it was a genuinely good time with great people.
For Kit's 8th birthday, we decided we were going to do a family trip to Legoland California! We had a great time staying in the Lego Castle Hotel and playing at the park with our two-day tickets. Some highlights included the Lego Movie Ride, seeing their museum of screen-used Lego sets and models for the movie and watching Kit enjoy looking at everything. I'm not going to say how much I spent at the gift shop, but let's just say I earned a lot of rewards points for my Lego Insider account.
