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.

I've never thought to check out a foam place, good idea. I too have been using the Home Depot variety and stripping off the vapor barrier. One thing on thickness though, is that I've found beadboard bounce that I've inherited from grip houses is usually made from thinner material, maybe half inch, and always backed up by foam core. Which brings me to this problem. In my experience, putting black and white foam core on a reflector with the black side out, (so you have some handy negative fill or a flag), is a big problem because when you leave it out in the sun, black side up, it gets hot and warps like mad, becoming concave on the black side and convex on the opposite which makes the reflector far less efficient. Anybody else run into this?

Oh beauty, that's really fine Phil. Thanks for giving me a look at it. You've done something far more sophisticated than my project but given me a lot of good ideas. If you can post any more photos of the details such as the bottom, that would be really nice. I'm a shameless thief of other people's good ideas :) On the speed rail size, the 1 1/4" I'm calling mine is because that's how the pipe sellers designate it and the manufacturer has labeled it (I've also seen this tube marked 5/4") but the actual measurements are 1 5/8" O.D. ~3/16" wall. Nothing about this tube, including it's I.D. is 1 1/4". As far as I can tell the 6061 aluminum alloy T6 temper is the strongest material available to me and is often called aircraft grade. As this is a standard stateside is it by chance what you have used? There is indeed a larger standard speed-rail tube usually specced as 1 1/2" but bigger in any dimension, of course but it looks bigger to me. Did you manufacture your own trucks? Are they skateboard wheels? They appear to rotate, yes? Do they slide inward and outward to accommodate curves? I bought the best I could find at reasonable price. They are these and they are rated for at least 250 lbs each, about $250 the set of four, but at half the number of wheels as yours they are obviously less robust: Your track looks great. Reminds me of lumabeam a little bit. I hadn't thought of using the U-channel. How is it attached to the tube? Will the track scissor closed? Are the cross pieces, the ties, attached and if so how? I'm planning not to attach my ties but I was also making them out of hardwood or bulky 2X4 lumber.Al U-channel would be far more compact and lighter. Have to get back to the metals place and check that out. What is the deck made of and how is it attached? Is it reinforced underneath? I'm using spendy 1" Baltic Birch 18 layer plywood and if I have to for rigidity I'll run two sturdy aluminum L-channel to stiffen it. Which reminds me, what are the finished dimensions of your dolly and the track lengths? From memory my deck is 44" X 28 1/2" with standard 24 1/2" truck spacing on centers to fit standard track for those rare ocassions when someone will have some. Mine will fit through a standard interior doorway here. What are your track lengths and how do you couple them? The speed rail stock comes in 20' lengths and I had mine cut into two 8' and one 4' lengths, which I think will work okay in the typical interior. I'm joining the lengths with some Modern Studio Equipment couplers and the pads for the rails are also from modern and appear to be molded silicone rubber. I couldn't find these in their online catalog which is a pity because they are simple and really effective. An old-timer tipped me off to them. I'll take some snaps and post them if anyone is intersted. Thanks for any questions you can answer. Oh, and I'm jealous Phil :) Any other comments welcome.

I'm a small scale gaffer and I often supply grip equipment as well so I've decided to make the best doorway dolly I can since it's a common request from my DPs. The dolly will at least permit the cinematographer to ride and perhaps the focus puller. I'm not lowballing this project to ghetto levels -- I'm spending just under $1000 -- but I can't afford commercial stainless steel rail, so after doing my research and thinking hard I've decided to use 1 1/4" 6061 T6 aluminum pipe speed rail. It's strong and stiff and miles better than PVC pipe, which I never really seriously considered because it must always have full contact with the floor or whatever to support it, while speed rail has enough strength to bridge gaps of two or three feet. I'm making wooden ties with molded rubber pads on the end to keep the track positioned at the right separation and so I can use wedges and cribbing to level it on uneven terrain. I have the joints worked out so they are solid. Do any of you folks ever encounter speed rail track something like this and if so, what can you tell me that might be useful in doing the best job possible? Pics would be really great. TNX.

Very impressive. I don't do any of this kind of work but I can see how useful it would be to have the stuff and know how to use it. Exactly how do you attach the speed rail to the underside of the vehicles?

The only cheap ones I know about (~$100) are those old Gossen Sixticolors from the 50s or so. They measure at two wavelengths and use selenium sensors so don't need a battery. They seem like they would be passe but people say good things about them still. I think even the new three color jobs need a continuous spectrum source to give you a respectable reading. Can you white balance under the illumination you have and let the camera tell you the color temperature?

I do it over over too but I'm curious about the "twist comes out naturally." If you lay the coil down and pull one end it puts loops into it. You would have to hold the coil vertically and feed it out by rotating the loop to get the cable to lay out flat with no loops. No? Am I doing something wrong?

Just bought a couple of 575W veteran QuartzColor Sirio2 HMIs and need to install the double-ended globes correctly. Within the bubble the electrodes are round but inside the glass arms they have a flattened portion. One fixture has a diagram showing the flat part must be horizontal -- flat -- not vertical. My question is about the bubble itself. Both have a little "nipple" which must have been used in blowing/holding/evacuating/gas charging the bubble during manufacture. Should that nipple be towards the reflector or the fresnel? I guessed towards the fresnel so as to interfere least with light going towards the reflector. Experts, please?

If a source is truly practical, can be seen in the frame of one of the shots in a scene, then I worry about its motivating the lighting and I try to carry it with an off-screen fixture if I need more light than the practical can provide, which is the rule. If there is no source that's established in the scene then you needn't worry so much and can decide where you think a source belongs in this scene -- a table lamp or ceiling lamp in a night interior or an invented "window" supplying light, for example. You can get the closet light down to zip but I think most people generally want to see something going on in dark places so unless it's essential to the story telling that you literally keep you audience in the dark then supply a little light and don't sweat that maybe real life wouldn't put any there. Study how DPs you admire light night exteriors and you'll see plenty of unmotivated photons that look good and let you see the characters but aren't there in real life. Motivation can be both underdone and overdone, IMO.

Where do you look at images in electronic format to judge the blacks? What display is capable of showing black? My computer can't do it. A broadcast quality CRT, maybe? I really love the looks of movies on my (calibrated with probe and software) 52" Vizio but when the screen goes to "black" in a darkened room I see that it is 1.) not perfectly uniform and 2.) dark grey not black.

Cool. Teach me, please.