Matt Read

3239 Union Pacific Ave Los Angeles, CA 90023 323.981.1520 info@pollutionstudios.com www.pollutionstudios.com Office hours: 10a-6p Mon-Fri Studio facility plus grip and electric rental, crew and production services

(Sorry for making two posts, it wouldn't let me edit my previous one to add this info) If you've asked for more prep time and been denied, unless you feel very strongly that you need it, there's no reason to keep pushing for it. You've done your job by asking and covered your ass. It's now on the DP if there's a registration problem. You should always set the diopter for your eye when testing lenses. Point the camera at a white object or light source and throw it out of focus. Adjust the diopter until the ground glass appears sharp. It's always a good idea to make marks on the diopter for your eye, the operator's eye, the DP's eye and the director's eye (if he/she likes to check the frame through the viewfinder), so that you can quickly adjust it for each of these people.

Checking the gate isn't difficult. You need to do this after you're finished with every setup and before anyone moves anything. Take off the lens and shine a flashlight at the gate. You're looking for hairs or anything else that shouldn't be there, that may have blocked light from hitting the film. If you see anything, call it out immediately, as the last setup will have to be re-shot. To remove the object, gently run an orangewood stick around the edge of the gate. Only if this fails to remove the hair should you use a blower or canned air. Put the lens back on. If there is nothing in the gate, put the lens back on and call out that the gate is clean.

Seattle Grip and Lighting is probably the place to go. I'm interested in ACing as well. I'll send you a PM.

Shooting a watered down talent through a fish tank full of water will usually give a pretty convincing underwater effect, as long as your talent doesn't have long hair. The breathing out milk is a little more difficult, but I'd think that you should be able to do it in a similar manner to how one adds breathe effect. Shoot the milk getting dropped into water in front of a black background. Key out the black and composite it onto the shot o the talent.

You should easily be able to replicate that lighting with your gear. She's lit with a large soft source from above and straight in front of her. That gives her the nice highlights on her cheeks and nose. There's also some fill from below to help with the shadows. You can see all of that from the reflection of the sources in her eyes.

You're not getting a lot of bang for your buck with those lights and cheaper LEDs tend to have poor CRIs. I understand the need to work quickly, but the fixtures you picked will seriously limit what you can do because they are all small soft sources. If you're mostly shooting talking heads, then what you picked should do just fine, but if you're looking at doing anything more than that, you will need different lights. I would consider going with several PAR 64s (about $40-80 per fixture) with a variety of different lamps/lens (about $40 each), a few 650w fresnels ($300-400), a couple chinaballs and photofloods ($3-20 for the balls, $5 for lamps) and spend the rest on stands, C-stands, flags, sandbags, scrims and 5-in-1 reflector discs. Boards of foam insulation work work great as bounces (about $10 for a 4'x8' sheet at any home improvement store; get the kind with silver on one side and white on the other).

Are you saying that there are no lights inside the pool you will be shooting at? If that's the case, I wouldn't worry about finding underwater lights. You won't need them. In the stills you provided, the lights in the pool aren't actually lighting the pool much. In the wide, you can see a small area of orange in the pool in the lower right of frame and that's all the pool lights are doing. Everything else is out of water lights. The big blue area in the lower left of frame is lit by a source to camera left. All the water reflections on the walls are caused by hard lights reflecting off the surface of the water, not underwater sources.

Chris, Unfortunately, what you are looking for doesn't exist. Pretty much any light powerful enough to bring up an interior (assuming it's not a coat closet) by 1-2 stops will not run on a battery. Depending on the size of the area you need to light, you're looking at a Joker 400 or 800 or even a 1.2k HMI bounced into the ceiling or otherwise diffused. For smaller windows, you might also consider putting ND gel on the outside of them, either in conjunction with lighting or as an alternative to lights (though if you're using daylight as your main source, this will bring down the light level inside, too). Another option would be to shoot any shots of windows as lock-offs and shoot them twice, once exposing for the inside and once for the outside. Then in post you can replace the overexposed windows with the correctly exposed ones. Still photographers do this all the time with real estate.

You might consider LED Christmas lights. I have a string of 50 that only uses 3 watts and produces no heat. You could connect a couple strings and hook it up to a battery and stuff the whole thing in whatever you find to use as an orb.

Overall, it looks pretty good. The B&W section and the section after it looked very good. There were several shots from the first section with the old man that looked over-lit to me, namely the CUs of him in bed. I'd also lose the second half of the last shot of the servant going up the stairs. That will make that whole section look better. If you want to sell yourself as a documentary DP and a narrative DP, that's fine, but I'd split your work into a documentary reel and a narrative reel. If I'm looking for a DP for a narrative, I don't care that you can also shoot documentaries (or vice versa).

I'm not seeing too much noise. What I see looks more like compression artifacts. I have no way of telling whether that's from YouTube's compression, from blowing 720p footage up to fit fullscreen on a 1080p monitor or compression from the camera's codec.

Also, your math looks right, but you should still test to be sure.

The best way to check your math will be to just do a test, even if that just means shooting a still on a SLR. It won't show you exactly how it will look on film, but at least that way you'll know if It's within the realm of possibility.

I would suggest that instead of balancIng your lights to the flashlight, you balance the flashlight to your lights. With most flashlights you can unscrew the lens and you can drop a gel in behind it. This way the only light you'll lose some oompf from is the flashlight, which I'm guessing is just a gag light anyway. As for how to light the space, it really depends on the story. There's any number of ways you could light it. But if you're just trying to simulate daylight, bouncing your 2ks into something should work just fine. Use your peppers to give some detail to the background and your 650s for fill or backlight. If you want to simulate direct sunlight, a spotted 2k through some light diffusion should do the trick.