Lighting Gear

Now that you understand how light works, how do you actually work with lighting? You do so by using lighting instruments and different media, such as gels or filters, to change their color and intensity. Before you race to plug in the Pro-light, however, you need to observe safety precautions. Your safety, and that of your crew, must always be of paramount concern (see Action Steps: Lighting Safety First!, below, and Tech Talk: Don’t Blow That Circuit!, also below).

ACTION STEPS

Lighting Safety First!

Follow these seven rules to stay safe using lights on-set:

  1. image Always use gloves, and never try to feel how hot a light is by touching it. Lights get hot fast, so much so that they will burn you even if you touch them quickly or brush against them. Allow them to cool completely before packing them up. Also, never touch a lamp with your fingers. The fingerprints, even though you cannot see them, will leave a residue that will cause the lamp to overheat and potentially explode.
  2. image Never put a lighting instrument near flammable materials, like drapery. Hot lights can cause fires.
  3. image Always use the correct heavy-duty extension cords and cables, as lights draw a lot of power.
  4. image Always turn off and disconnect lights from the power source before moving them.
  5. image Always steady lights by weighting their base with sandbags. Because lights are often set up on poles, they are top-heavy and can easily fall over.
  6. image Use a screen or other diffusion media. Lights that don’t have a lens in front of them are “open faced” and need to have something in front of them to protect cast and crew in case one of the lamps explodes.
  7. image Stay away from water. Just as you wouldn’t take a toaster into a bathtub, you shouldn’t use lights in the rain or where there is water touching the electrical equipment. If the equipment gets wet, turn lights off at the power source and protect them. Don’t use them again until they are completely dry.

Lighting Instruments

As you’ll remember from Chapter 2, screenplays always indicate if scenes are exterior or interior. One reason for this is that the lighting changes depending on where you are shooting. Following are some of the more common lighting instruments you will use in both situations:

image TURN OFF PRACTICAL LIGHTS

Practical lights are the lights you might find already on your location set—overhead fixtures, table lamps, and the like. It is your job to light the set—not to use the lights that may already be there. Therefore, if you are using a practical location, you will typically turn all practical lights off before you do your lighting setup. In some locations, a skillful lighting designer may intentionally build a scene’s light around practical lighting, or, in collaboration with the production designer, may build special film lights into practical-looking fixtures that are visible in the shot. Never leave a practical light on in the shot unless you have strategically planned to incorporate its illumination capabilities into your lighting plan.

Exterior Lights

Interior Lights

Many schools will have the first four lights on the following list, and you can produce good results with them (see How Do I... Light with Minimal Tools?, below, and Business Smarts: Renting Lights, below). This list also includes other lights you may be able to access, as well as some inexpensive rigs you can make yourself (see Producer Smarts: How Much Is Enough?, below).

This shot uses a fluorescent light manufactured by Kino Flo, one of the most popular providers of movie and TV lighting.

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Lighting LED in action

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image BEWARE SUDDEN BRIGHTNESS

When a tungsten or incandescent bulb suddenly gets brighter, it is about to burn out.

Don’t Blow That Circuit!

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Lamps are measured in watts; power is measured in amps. Most homes and commercial buildings have circuit breakers that are rated for 15 or 20 amps, but you should always check the circuit breaker when you’re on location to see how many amps are in each circuit. How can you know when you’re drawing too much power and might blow out a circuit? Use this simple formula: WATTS ÷ VOLTS = AMPS.

Let’s use the number 100 for volts. (Household current in the United States is supposed to be 120 volts, but it can actually vary from 105 V to 120 V; in most of the rest of the world, it varies from 200 V to 240 V.) If you’re using lighting instruments that total 1500 watts, then 1500 WATTS ÷ 100 VOLTS = 15 AMPS. That’s already at the maximum capacity of most household circuits, so you’ll need to use another circuit or an external generator if you need more power. Overloading a fuse in an older building can result in a serious fire.

Renting Lights

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There may be times you want more lighting equipment than your school can provide. In these cases, a local lighting rental company can come to the rescue. Many professional camera stores also rent lighting gear, along with cameras and lenses.

Rentals can be costly, but there are some tricks that can help you get a better deal.

  • image Develop a relationship with the rental company before you need them. You’ll usually get a better deal if you have been a consistent customer.
  • image Use the equipment that’s not in demand. Professional photographers have highly specialized needs, whereas you may need only a few lights—and any lights will do. Be willing to take what’s readily available; it will be cheaper.
  • image Rent on a weekend. Because most professional film crews take the weekend off, they return their rental equipment on Friday afternoon and don’t come for it again until Monday. Many rental companies will give you a two-days-for-the-price-of-one deal on the weekend, as long as you get the gear back Sunday night or very early Monday morning. And you don’t mind working on the weekend, do you?

Mounting Equipment

Lights can’t be positioned by themselves—for this you’ll need special equipment. There are a variety of stands, arms, and clamps that allow you to place lights exactly where you want them. Here are the most common ones:

How Much Is Enough?

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The speed of a shoot is often governed by the speed of the lighting: how long will it take the cinematographer to set up the lights, or if something unexpected comes up, is there enough extra equipment to solve the lighting problem?

Speed is an important issue for producers because it is directly related to budget. As you learned in Chapter 5, Production Planning and Management, if your shoot can stay on schedule, you can generally stay on budget. If not, you sink into budget deficit with every day you fall behind. Cinematographers try to solve this potential problem in two ways: by having an extra person or two on the crew, and by carrying supplementary equipment in case a lighting instrument breaks or the director suddenly decides to switch locations. In other words, the cinematographer should always be prepared.

But preparation, too, has its costs. An extra crew member adds to the budget in terms of salary, food, and transportation; extra equipment adds to the lighting rental budget. It is typical for the cinematographer to ask for more than may be needed, and likewise typical for the producer to try to pare things back.

What’s the solution? Find a happy medium. Luckily, you don’t have to commit to lighting equipment rentals for an entire shoot—you can rent by the day or week. You can also bring an extra crew member on for only a day or two. On big days, with lots of extras and a complicated location, it’s a good insurance policy to overspend a bit on the lighting package to make sure there will be no delays. When you’re dealing with smaller and more contained shooting environments, you can afford to take the risk and go a bit leaner.

image PRACTICAL TEMPERATURES

You can get 5500 K and 3200 K lamps that screw into conventional lighting fixtures, so that the color temperature is right if you use practicals.

Diffusers, Gels, Filters, and Cookies

Just as Johannes Vermeer used curtains to manipulate the quality of light in his studio, cinematographers use a variety of materials to change the quality and color of the light. Some of the more common lighting materials you may work with include diffusion materials, colored gels, filters, and cookies.

This effect is similar to the change that happens when clouds pass over the sun. Anything that gets between the light source and the subject can be a diffuser. Grid cloth, nets, and silks can be used to diffuse sunlight. They come in different thicknesses (full, half, and quarter), which allow lesser or greater amounts of light to pass through.

Grid cloth

Harsh sunlight on this actor’s face is being softened by a grid cloth. Because of its widely spaced weave, grid cloth is silent in the wind and won’t create sound problems.

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Colored gels are sheets of plastic that change the color of light. They do not add color; rather, they absorb opposite wavelengths. For example, a red gel will absorb blue and green light and only let through red wavelengths; thus, the light will look red. Although you can use theatrical and party gels, which come in a wide variety of colors, to create extreme color effects, gels are most often used as an essential tool for changing lighting temperature when you have a mixture of indoor and outdoor light.

image USING LIGHTING GEAR

Spend some time with your school’s lighting gear. Get to know the different instruments, lamps, cables, connectors, and controls. Some instruments may run on 220-volt current instead of standard 120-volt household current. Make some combinations: which instruments can go together and not overload a single 15 amp circuit?

CTB (color temperature blue) gels raise the temperature of tungsten lights to 5500 K, the color of sunlight. CTO (color temperature orange) gels lower the temperature of sunlight to interior, or 3200 K. In the shot from Inside Llewyn Davis we looked at earlier (see here), the cinematographer would have used one or two layers of CTO gels on the window to lower the light temperature so that it balanced with the interior lighting setup.

Cookie cast

You don’t need special tools for this do-it-yourself cookie. Here, the DP has created a web of tape in front of the light (right), creating the pattern of a window frame behind the actor (left).

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Filters are like diffusers or gels, except they are round pieces of glass that screw onto the front of the lens of a lighting instrument. Filters can change the visual palette by enhancing or subtracting colors, increasing or decreasing definition and contrast, or making the image sharper or hazier.

Cookies are metal panels with shapes cut out of them. The resulting light casts a pattern, just as leaves cast their shadows on the ground in a forest. Cookies are useful for creating texture and identifiable shadows, such as a window frame.

Lighting Pro’s Emergency Kit

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  • image Extra heavy-duty extension cords
  • image Leather gloves for handling hot instruments
  • image A fan or hair dryer for drying out wet electrical gear before you plug it back in
  • image Clothespins to attach gel and diffusion media
  • image Rolls of blackwrap—heavy-duty foil that has been painted black and can be shaped around lighting instruments to focus the beam or prevent light “seepage”
  • image The free color predictor app for your iPad or iPhone