Steve London

I see makeup artists doing their work under tungsten lighting for talent that is going to be photographed in daylight balanced light. What is the industry standard practice?

John David, I really like your suggestions. Hate to ask but could you fix those links, none of them work?

I like that quote too and DWW is a truly beautiful movie in every respect I can think of.

These look really good, thank you. I see they come in 6" lengths. I haven't been able to locate a price yet.

I hadn't thought of this but I don't see why it wouldn't work just fine. Why would you want to do it this way, easier to drill the complete hole (which would be true)?

Let me gently challenge you on this. If you never establish the entire layout of a room and where the practicals and windows are, why be limited on where your lights should be? Shouldn't you decide the places that will best serve the images in your story? It does matter where you decided a light should be. If you've decided that blank wall over there has a window in it and it's DAY then you make your source large and the direction of the light generally level. If the source is an overhead lamp that you want on the ceiling but there isn't one there, you have to make sure the light from your source falls as it generally would from the virtual lamp in your mind. Motivation is fine but can be limiting when it needn't be. The best advice I've ever run into on this topic is from someone's sig right on this forum: Make sense?

They're awfully stiff in the cold though, and usually not black to be easily hidden on set.

I've used the Home Depot 5600K house brand for years in China balls and not had a problem anyone complained about although the green has to be there. Skin tones have been rendered quite attractively. I like the CFLs because I can put daylight in the lantern and get a usable amount of of light with low temperature and no worries about fire. I used to use three Y-adapters screwed together so I could put up to four globes in the fixture, controlling the output by the number of globes screwed in but have since found some adapters that give me four sockets from one Edison base, so a little tidier and tighter than all those Y adapters. Home Depot used to list CRI on their packaging but no longer. I've also often found there is more info on the ballasts of the globes than there is on the box. Manufacturer or distributor websites are often useful too. I don't think a color temperature meter is terribly useful with these things because of their spiky discontinuous spectrum but still and movie camera tests tell the tale.

This thread is yet another reminder that I wish I had read every word that David Mullen ever said :)

Hi Andrew, I think your frame is nice-looking and don't think most people would stop and stare so long that they got out of the illusion by studying the shadows. That said, the actor and left side of the frame look right, but the right-hand side is obviously lit because the lamp could not have illuminated the sheet from the right side and so far toward the bottom right. If you'd flagged your movie light off that side it all would have worked nicely. Still, a good-looking frame.

I am in the market for a used flicker box for fire and TV gags. Looking for a Magic Gadgets or GAM with 2K capacity. I don't care about cosmetics but must work well. New ones at full retail are $449 and I'm looking to save substantially from that. I'm a small time gaffer and half my work is free helping young filmmakers produce good-looking shorts. Thanks in advance.

I'm a lighting guy but when the 1st AD calls the roll I hear camera operators from various good university film programs say "speeding" or "camera is speeding." Can speeding possibly be the right term? Doesn't the practice come from the days when all cameras were mechanical and the film (or later, maybe tape) had to get moving at proper speed? The appropriate term is speed, is it not, as in, "The camera is up to speed? Anyone else hear "speeding" and annoyed by it? Anyone hear "speeding" on a major motion picture?

I don't plan to construct curves. They're nice but not as interesting to me as plain vanilla straight track for now. (This will all change instantly when the right project comes along, of course.)

Phil and Warwick, thanks a million, gentlemen. I really appreciate your going to all the trouble to supply such detail and the benefit of your experience. Phil, your point-by-point response answered all my questions, now I just need to adjust a few things for my rig. I'm definitely going to look into aluminum for the sleepers. I haven't been able to find hardwood at decent prices so was considering 2X4 lumber but it is very bulky. One of the sources I consulted in planning this thing is from the great Ron Dexter: http://www.rondexter.com/professional/equipment/making_dolly_track.htm Here are those pads for the ends of the sleepers that I didn't describe well enough. So far, I don't plan to connect my tubes to the ties, rather to simply set them in the pads, which are molded to cradle them and prevent lateral movement. I'll have to think more about that now that you've explained exactly how you did it, Phil. I might bag the pads and attach the tube to the ties. Ah, here are several snaps. I thought I'd resized them small enough for the forum but no, so they're on FLickr. Excuse the photography. Modern Studio Equipment's excellent coupler Its inside One of the tie end pads cradling a tube. Pad end detail Notch in tube end required to access set screw. This pic is of the track I'm half copying after running into it on a shoot last month. I can't do this notch accurately with a hand drill, you really need an end mill in a milling machine, so I asked a casual friend who's a machinist. "Sure, no problem." "Okay," I say. "That'll be just $180." Yikes, but what else could I say? And I just found out this hour he cut 3/8" notches instead of the 1/4" ones that I asked for and that are all you need since it's just the hex wrench that has to fit in the notch not the whole 3/8" set screw. Ah well . . . :) Together in a scrap piece of tube with no notch.

Mr. Mullen, as a long time reader and devotee of yours here, there and everywhere, I think you need to collect your thousands of informative and helpful posts together and put them in a book. I would buy it. Thank you for your many contributions to those of us plying the craft and aspiring to excellence.