Today I celebrate my time on Lemony Snicket: A Series of Unfortunate Events. Nearly 22 years ago,
@chivexp hired the late John Buckley to gaff this monster of a movie. Filmed at Paramount Studios and Downey Studios(no longer there), the crew of this movie accomplished some of the largest dimmer rigs ever assembled under one roof. In 2003, I had just purchased the new Wholehog III console, and was working on Soul Plane. Buckley's best boy, at the time, was Michael Yope, who happened to also be on Soul Plane. He was telling me about this huge feature film he was about to start with Buckley, and the number of Spacelights they planned to use, which was around 2,000. Word around town had spread about Lemony, and there were rumors they were planning on renting numerous Expression consoles to handle the large number of dimmers to be used for the Spacelights. I told Yope that my one Wholehog console could probably do the entire rig. Weeks later, I received a phone call from Buckley, who I had never met before, and he quite simply asked if I had a console that could handle 10,000 dimmers. I said yes, and he hired me on the phone, with no further questions.
Rigging Gaffer, Gary Dahlquist, along with a killer rigging crew, pulled off some amazing rigs. The highlight of the show was the Downey rig, which ended up being around 1400 Spacelights and just over 6,500 dimmers.
The team at Flying Pig, helped me achieve this show by creating a custom Spacelight fixture I used, that simplified the six dimmer channels for one light down to a single Spacelight fixture and
with individual control of each circuit. A very common type of fixture used these days, but back then, it was ground breaking. It basically fooled the console into thinking it was only handling 1400 Spacelights, and not 6,000 dimmers.
Lemony was a milestone movie for me, and one of a handful of films that catapulted my career, but it would have been nothing without the crew that made it happen.
Director: Brad Silberling
DP: Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC
CLT: John Buckley
ACLT: Mike Yope
RCLT: Gary Dahlquist
Dimmer Tech: Josh Thatcher
#setlife🎥
@iatselocal728 @filmlights @iclsociety @etcliveevents #dimmers #filmlighting
