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Hi all, I've heard that Local 600 has a catagory for lighting designer. Is this true? I know that Local 829 does but that covers live entertainment. Who, in the NY, office would I talk to?

I would construct a foamcore light box that was the same dimensions or a few inches smaller than the table. the light bouces off the soft box and hits the talent across the table. Since the box isn't over their heads it cuts down on top light. Then your backs and kickers don't need to be so hot to overcome the top key.

Condors are used frequently in professional film and t.v.. If, however, you havn't used them before DO NOT do so without, at the very least, getting certified by a supplier like Pride Equipment or similar. Once you do then you will realize that everything that we do with them is outside of the manufacturer's instructions. Except wearing the safety belts. I don't think someone who hasn't used them before should employ them with out having someone who's done it before rig them. Period. No matter what the DP says he's done or the producer or whatever. Find someone who has rigged them before and learn from them. However...better to have the correct information than none at all is my way of thinking. Here are the pertinent points: Grips drive condors. Grips rig positions on condors. Electricians place lights and rig with cable. Electricians go in the bucket to great heights and stay there all night peeing in bottles and wishing they'd rigged a better position for themselves. Radios are required to operate. There is a 500# load limit!!!. After that the hydrolic stops will blow and the unit will shut down its move. For instance the bucket might not self level as it comes down. This can require subsequent underwear changes for the operator and is never pleasant to deal with. Its hell on the shooting schedule too and might require the calling of adults (like the fire department with their ladder truck) Heads go on condors. Ballasts DO NOT. Add 2 50' head cables and rig them along the arm. Add a piece of 3 wire banded from the ground and a snake bite with lunch pail for heater/110v power. The cables should be ratchet strapped to the top of the first arm (boom arm) in two places until the 1st extension point and then sufficient cable should be looped between extension points to the basket. Sufficient to extend the arm all the way out. Leave a sufficiant hanging loop for the little jib arm at the end to go up and pan around. Strain relief this cable to the bucket. Use 1/4" manilla, not sash cord. the feeder/header then comes of the back joint of the boom and goes to the ground. Stay the hell away from ALL overhead cables. ALL. I believe the general rule of thumb is 10' for every 10,000 volts. figure a minimum of 25'. When you get in the basket put on the safety belt and CLIP IN!!! When you are 80' out and panning or booming the whip motion can be sudden, especially if you hit a hydrolic stop or hit the wrong switch in the middle of the move. Gravity ALLWAYS works! I usually wrap a tarp around the bucket and put rubber mat along the bottom. Add a sound blanket and an apple box and a reading light (1k par works o.k. as heater and reading light) If you see lightning, COME DOWN! no exceptions. Check in on the grip forum they might have stuff I missed. Don't let the DP talk you into a position that you feel uncomfortable with!!!

I would think it very easy to create a rainbow effect. Huge misting sprayer comes to mind. But the angle of the viewer to the sun never changes. 40d isn't it? Camera positon is therefore set with regard to background and sun. Now mist away and have the camera on a dolly to vary position. Natural Rainbow? A fluke sir. You must create it ... just like everything else in film

While Kino's are awesome ( I own a bunch) why not get marine batteries and make a lite box of 12volt lamps? 12 bolt mr16s are really brite and can be wired into a litebox of foamcore really effectively. The batteries can live ontop of the elevator (through the maintenance hatch) and the light box can be 4" thick. Also most elevators have a 15 amp outlet in the maintenance panel - you just need the key.

Wait for late afternoon when the sun will be at the same colortemp as your lights and wait for the outside to come down in exposure to match what you can bring in. Get the maxi brute and shoot it through some lite diffusion or bounce it into an 8x8 white muslin or grifflyn. A late afternoon with a hazy sunshine would be perfect. Shoot the wide shot at a completely different time as the rest of your scene so that you don't have the stress of having to make the shot fit into the A unit schedule. Don't worry, the audience will completely buy the differences in the two shots. They're not that sophisicated.

[From what I've been told, HMI lights require a very steady frequency of electricity running to them, and normal generators create a frequency that sometimes varies because of the way they run. If you're using a ballast with your HMI, a bad frequency could eventually damage your equipment.] Not quite true. The frequencey question and generators has only to due with an interaction between the shutter of a camera and the frequency of the light - nominally 60hz (60 times per sec.) An HMI is an arc light where the arc is being generated 60 times a second. There are "flicker free" shooting speeds that put the same number of arcs on every frame of film. When there are sequential frames that have different amounts of arc flashes on them, say the frequency was 59 hz, we percieve that as hmi "flutter" - the frames get lighter and darker - it sort of looks like blinking flash frames. Running an HMI on a non crystal synced generator can cause this if the hmi is set to silent mode or has a magnetic ballast. When an HMI is set to flicker free (electronic ballast only) then the ac sine wave is squared off - the top is electronically cut and the duration of the arc is extended to prevent hmi flutter. Its an electronic way of simulating "thermal inertia" - the decay of a filimant as it cools from full to off. Its this thermal inertia that keeps a tungsten unit from fluttering. The filiment is still being flashed 60 times a second but the filiment is still glowing hot between the flashes and doesn't perceptivaly dim. If the electricity coming from a generator isn't within the operating perameters of the HMI it won't strike. Most HMI's these days have electronic ballasts. An easy way to tell is if you can pick it up with one hand easily. Elecronic ballasts are light - magnetic ballasts are extremely heavey. a 4k magnetic ballast takes 2 men to lift. Flicker free should also be used with 24 frame video.

Hello, Rosebrand, here in NY, lists three different weaves of bobinette, as well as single cinenette (bobinette on the west coast): their parentheses. Does anyone know what the stop cut is on these materials...which one is single stop? Could it be as easy as the single cinenette? thank you.

One trick that I've used on older plaster walls is to use a half apple box on either end to spread the outward force over a larger area than the hardware end pieces use. My feeling is that if the box is hollow, with the usual strengthening members inside it would spread the force better than a solid piece of ply (or a pancake). Limit the items on the pipe to 2 or 3. A kino and a couple of tweenies is about the limit (and better if they're arri tweenies since they're lighter. I've also sistered two 2x6's together and gone 18'. I sweated over it alot. It think we hung a couple of BJs on it. Remember that if you're using wood that temperature and moisture will effect the wood and that you might have to tighten the spreaders if they've been in a cold room over night.

I've used standard 6k space lights, and a smaller 1k and 2k space light. These were awesome on the tv show I gaffed because we did a lot of green screen and these could be evenly spaced to give equal light to the walls and floors. Contact Eastern Effects in Brooklyn NY for who makes the smaller space lights. For china lanterns I usually use 1/2 conduit, slotted with a hacksaw to hard mount the ball. In this way you can mount them from a c stand. I hate how they hang around and spin all the time, hard to mask ect. ect. For a 24" ball put a diagonal slice into the conduit 24" from the bottom and notch the bottom as well, and fit the metal expando frame into the slot and notch.

Here's how I did it. www.readbroslighting.com click on cinematography The film reel is 3 years old and has several glaring mistakes: Its way too long. It has shots in the montage that are repeated later in the reel. Some of the stuff is mundane. My website is really too big as well (I'm redoing it as we speak) but it was a first attempt and I had a lot of stuff to put in it. In a couple of weeks it'll be different and much more directed. That said multiple sites can be time consuming to maintain.

Hey man, I checked out your profile and saw your question in your recent posts. I completely agree with Mr. Nash however I would expand that to say: Rather than a reel you need a website. Its really not that hard. The domain name can be purchased for about 25.00. My hosting company is called GoDaddy. You can see them at Godaddy.com. With a little research on their site you could put up a 1 - 3 page site that included pictures from your rigs and set photos of the movies you've been on. This then becomes very easy for people to check out. My site, listed below is very big (I'm redoing it as we speak) but that is because I have a lot of different aspects to my business and I tend to overdo stuff (;D) Anywho, Good luck

HMI's don't follow the w=va formula because of what is called "power factor". Essentially the lamp has a certain current load but the ballast that powers the unit also has a certain amount of current load. That's why a 1200 hmi can pull as much as 13.5 amps as stated above. Kino Flo's follow the same principle except on a much smaller scale (their lamps have a smaller current draw) 1000watt light at 120volts pulls 8.33333amps a=w/v

So let me get this staight. You have an actor that has to be 3 or 4 inches away from a cyc and you want to rimlight him to get this blown edgy look? Even if you edge him with striped lekos the wrap of the light won't give you the sillouette. he'll/she'll be sidelit. I would try bundling a 4x4 kino-flo together with out the houseing and inserting this between the actor and the cyc so that the actor hides the lights from the camera. You'll have to mask the lamps to the cyc so that they don't spill onto the cyc. Blackwrap. The bounce off the actor should give plenty of expsure to the cyc. You could put a duv. layer on the actor's side to the cyc to cut down bounce light. I still think you'll need more like 12 inches of space though.

Thanks for the reply David, I was hoping to hear from you. This will be a graduate film student's thesis so I'm pretty sure we'll go to print. I usually overexpose the trad. 1/3 but I've rarely been able to pick my print stock. Any suggestions? I'm hoping to take it to Technicolor here, in NY. I've seen some amazing work from them in the past. Do you like the 18? I'll be doing a small test of course but...I'm curious on your take.

Hello all, So its been a while since I've shot film - the prevalence of the variacam blah blah - and the last time that I knew the look of stocks and could choose them from memory was when 5277 and 5279 were the primary working stocks. I think 87 was just coming in and people were liking its low con properties. I'm reading here that 5218 is being shot a lot and wondering how people would contrast (pun) this to the older stocks. I'm online to shoot a short in either super 35 or 'scope (for 2:35). Its a psych. thriller set in and around a mansion with lots of int. and ext. night. I'm looking for rich blacks, and a warm, soft keys from just behind the 180 (to increase the ratio) Thanks for your input.

yes

On Chappelle's Show we used the leko through a box fan technique used above for the flicker effect. We pulled the guards off the fan (caution!) and ran it through a variac (autotransformer). The variac allowed us to vary the fan speed to monitor. The screen flash can be done with 2 flicker boxes controlling baby's shooting at a griff. frame. Gel one baby in 1/2 blue and the other in 1/4 CTO (season to taste of course). For the flicker effect I find a DF50 hazer is a great look.

One of the techniques that I use for this is to use multiple sources close together - essentialling making a 6x4 source with S4 lekos. Using pars for this would work but the lekos are more controllable. Throw a little 119 or hampshire in them and mount them 24" or 36" apart. 6 lekos double hung from truss and focused properly can be very soft. Remember since you have 6 units equaling one the level on each unit can be run at 20 or 30% - consequently you can save on CTO as well (;D) This is the formula I use for one acting area. If you are trying for a whole stage or scene then expand the number of units to fit the area . 6 leko's can be soft for an area about the size of a single units throw.

Actually its really called a cyberlight. It is an automated luminaire - it uses a 1200 hmi source and a moving mirror to project a hard light beam. This type of unit is sometimes called a scanner, as opposed to a moving yoke unit which most current automated lights are currently patterned. Rather than a scroller it uses internal color wheels to output different colors. It has both fixed color wheels and 3 color color mixing filters allowing for soft transitions between colors. It also has a number (2?) of gobo wheels allowing for for different projections. The ballast is located in the body of the unit which is why it weighs in at @ 90 pounds. The unit is controlled be DMX 512, the standard theatrical control protocol established in 90 or 91. I believe it takes 20 channels to control. This is a standard concert lighting unit and is used in many live shows as well as multicamera tv. This type of unit is usually controlled by an "autofocus lighing board" like the Whole Hog or Grand Ma.

To answer Igor's question: yes wysiwyg does global illumination. It can be turned on, off, or scalled from 0 - 100%. In addition in the rendering engine light bounce can be rendered off one, two or three serfaces. The more the bounces, the more realistic the rendering of the lit image. There are stands in the program. I usually make my own c-stands as the set on these is so different from one to another. (I've made two - where I wanted to show the flag positions in a set up.) Flags are easy to make as by simply making a square surface of what ever size you want. The two limitations that I have run across time and again. One is that soft shadows are not possible. This in itself makes it extremely limiting for the filmmaking world where soft light is often the desire. In additon light cannot be transmitted through a serface of varying transparence. Serfaces can be scaled in their solidity (for glass I do 90% transparence) but light will not be transmitted through a serface of any kind. I should also point out that the program is a bit time consuming. The more its used the faster you get with it. Additionally the more library items that can be brought in quickly and knowing where an item is in order to have it available quickly will greatly hasten the process...but it isn't that quick. It think for large setups with cranes and things it could be very useful for layout and plotting but the fact that you cant put diffusion on lights and see it work limits the rendering capability for filmmaking. you can see on my site that I used it to do a layout in a park in NY with a condor that I built. But if I were to build a brute box (maxi brute cube suspended from a crane) it would create many single par throws with hard shadows, not the single overhead source (and corresponding single shadow) that I want.

As a WYSIWYG user for several years I will confirm that its strongest asset is in the live event/concert/live/live to tape venue. It has a relatively simple cad program and has recently been upgraded to accept google sketchup files (which allows sketchups huge library of pre drawn things). I do single camera film and video and multicamera video and live event lighting: its a huge time saver, especially witht the control aspects (light boards and moving lights). However the program is slowly including more film gear. Kino Flos are in as are many of the Arri products. Mr. Whitehead is correct in his assumption that it lacks the lighting rendering finesse to show accurately (for a cinematographer) what the light will do to a human face. It does render though. For a gaffer it can be invaluable. The biggest drawback is in putting the 3d model in place. Its time consuming. I'm a theatre trained draftsman so i don't have much problem but it might be daunting for someone just learning. On Chappelle's Show I used it a number of times to produce plots for pre-rig crews; this was successful most of the time. Interestingly enough the biggest problems occured when I included 3d or isometric drawings in the plot packages - too much information I guess. For a number of wysiwyg pre-visualizations and their corresponding live looks you can visit my website at www.readbroslighting.com, click on wysiwyg previsualizations. Also under the press heading is a project that was a 3 camera live to tape that I did extensive preshow rendering in working with the director. The closeup of the actress and the jailbars is about the best you're going to get in wysiwyg for lighting rendering in closeups. Actually I think I can attach that image.

Here in ny we say that if you have to put a tennis ball on the end of the arm to prevent an injury then the stand is set wrong. There is always another way to set that doesn't create an eye-poker.

Andrew is entirely correct. Switching out for known good lamps, and or ballasts is the way to isolate the problem. Let us know what you find. Once you rule out the headcable then I would think its a ballast.