Chris Cooke

I just remembered at the end of the day that I was gonna snap a picture. We had already turned all the lights off and flipped on the fluorescent work lights but you can kinda see how I have one of the sets lit. I used lots of 2K's, flags, black wrap, diffusion frames and bounce boards to get the soft but controlled light. (Sorry the picture is so big, I don't have a picture editor at the moment)

Well, we just finished our second day of production. So far it's been going decent but we've had a few interesting moments. The hazers decided to quit working a couple times during the show which meant no beams of light during music. We got it figured out now. One of the console operators hasn't been on the ball the past two nights (forgets to bring up the smoke, makes lighting changes at random times in the song and once she actually hit the blackout button) so I'm getting a new guy for the rest of the week (I can't operate the lights because I'm needed all night as a camera operator). I had an interesting conversation with our head sound tech today. He's complaining that my flags are causing the audio from his main speaker for one of the sets to be muddy. I told him that it doesn't affect the sound on air and my flags affect the look on air so they're gonna stay. He obviously wasn't too happy with my reply. That's ok, I think that I'll get our rigging gaffer to move the speaker for him tomorow to a better location. Near the end of the night, one of our shoulder cameras went down and I don't think we'll be able to use it for the rest of the week. I think it's the triax connector. I'll snap some pics of the lighting tomorow and post them at the end of the day. BTW, the rebroadcasts are from 10:00pm - 12:00pm mtn and 11:00am - 5:00pm mtn. We're airing this stuff 13 hours per day so I'm sure that you guys can catch a bit of one of the shows. Again, the link is http://miraclechannel.ca/ (click Watch us Online). You don't have to sign up for anything just click the button and you're good to go. We're also available in Canada on Star Choice: channel 357, Bell ExpressVu: channel 652 and many cable systems. In the states, Intelsat Americas 5 (Free-to-air) and on digital cable in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Should i use par lights? or the usual fresnel? Use a narrow spot par. It'll output more light per watt and you can get a tighter beam. The best option is to use a Xenon. It's an arc light that is very efficient and creates a high intensity parallel beam. Very expensive though. plus: the tricky thing is, that i shoot on location - not studio. meaning i got some sunlight coming in as well. luckily, i don't see windows in shot. would it make sense to build some kind of a "tent" with black cloth (hope you know what i mean) to get i darker - in order to cope with the 2.5ks? Yes. Otherwise, your blacks will get milky similar to flashing the negative. It's hard enough getting rich blacks when using smoke without other unwanted light entering the frame. ...how much more expensive are stronger hmi's anyways? HMI's are 3 to 4 times stronger than tungsten units of the same type. over all - would you say it's feasible at all to do beams of light with 2.5k? or should i abandon the idea in the first place? 2.5k is plenty of light depending on what your exposure will be and what other light is in the frame. I've created nice shafts of light against a black background with only a 500w narrow spot tungsten par.

I'm the lighting director for an international Christian television station called The Miracle Channel based out of Canada. My crew and I have been setting up for this show for the past week. It's always interesting doing live TV because everything has to be set up before hand and there can be no mistakes. We will be airing and streaming live every day from 5-10pm mtn and rebroadcast the next day from 1-5pm mtn. I felt that this should go in the In Production Sub-Forum because it's literally in production as you watch. Why does this belong on a Cinematography forum? Because I find that I use a lot of the same techniques when doing live tv as when I'm DPing a dramatic story. It's just a lot harder to get the perfect setup when doing tv with 4 different sets on the same show and only 5 cameras to cover the action. I have to light everything from above and keep the floor clean of all cables. For this show, I only have 36 channels of dimming so I'm using 26 of them for music and 10 of them for the main living room set. Everything else is plugged into 20amp breaker circuits. I'm running with about 100 lights. 40 of them being silver PAR64's and the rest are mainly 2K Fresnels, 1K Broads, 1K open face Varibeams, 750w Fresnels, pinspots and a blinder. I have 2 Martin Hazers for music and unfortunately no intelligent fixtures for this show. My main colors for the band are steel blue, light relief yellow and white. Over the main set, I have flags, 3x3 diffusion frames and foam core hanging all over the place. All of my key lights on talking sets are white and I have #02 Bastard Amber on the fill lights and back lights. Background colors are often straw tint or special lavender (doubled or tripled up). I'm lit to an f4.0 @ 500 ASA. Take a look at this link... http://miraclechannel.ca/ (click Watch us Online) and watch us live from 5:00-10:00pm mtn Tuesday (May 23rd) ? Saturday (May 28th). Usually we go to music at the bottom of the hour after we come back from a break.

Welcome Matt, I'm a Canadian as well. I'm quite familiar with North America's Never Twice the Same Color system. Yeah, check out the Video Only Sub-Forum.

Kino's are more easily controlable than a bounce (you can actually crop the light to make it go only where you want it). They output a lot more per watt, they're lightweight, they're easy to rig, they can fit in small spaces, they're a lot cooler than any tungsten or HMI and all you have to do to change the color tempurature is change the tubes. Although, bouncing lights off of foam core has it's advantages too such as being cheaper and you can't get the output of a bounced 5K HMI from a 4 bank kino.

Sorry, I forgot... click on Huron Carol. It's only part of the video but I hope that it helps. http://www.sierraventures.ab.ca/2005caf/2005_screenings.html

pray... I needed some low smoke for this shoot that only moved when people moved through it. It was about 7:30am when we shot one of these first shots in this teaser for a music video. I brought down a generator and plugged a fogger into it. Then put a cooler in front of that with ice in it and a pvc pipe going through (this is what we pushed the smoke through). It ended up sitting perfectly but that was mostly due to the weather man. http://www.sierraventures.ab.ca/2005caf/2005_screenings.html

Nice job. I could tell that a lot of thought and artistry was put into lighting the train scenes whith the lead singer and the cello player. I loved the little slash of light on the door, the contrast in the walls and the blue background. I also liked the fact that you focused on the girl on the OS as the guy was leaving. The editing in the middle of the song was a little choppy and felt abrubt but I liked the editing for the rest of the song. The most powerful moment was when the dude was in the battle fields singing the song into the camera and flinching when guns/bombs going off.

Also, I've noticed that most music videos stick to the 1.33:1 (4x3) aspect ratio where a full frame 4-perf 35mm frame would make most sense.

Yeah, I'm going to try this soon. I'd like to see some examples as well. I think that the main thing to remember is that the image will become even more grainy than s8 is already and that there will be even less latitude than reversal already has. You can use both of these things to your advantage if it's the look that fits your story. If you want it to look like Domino, you have to remember that they shot on 35mm and did a DI after they cross processed it to clean it up and get a consistent look.

Thanks. It was shot at Popson Park down by the Old Man River near Lethbridge, Alberta (Canada). Only one of the actors was a professional but they all did a good job (with lots of guidance from the director). All of the costumes were made out of fur jackets from second hand thrift stores.

Thanks, it was actually the festival that edited it down (and put that cheesy title at the begining). They also compressed it for the web. It's not great quality but it's better than You Tube.

Hey, This is a music video/dramatization that I shot a couple years ago. I was searching the internet and found that it's still in the archives on this site so I figured I'd let everyone critique it. It's only a small portion fo the actual video. I shot it clean on an Ikegami HL-45W and put filtration and color correction on in post. Unfortunately, we didn't have the budget for any dollys or cranes so I had to zoom a lot for movement. http://www.sierraventures.ab.ca/2005caf/2005_screenings.html (click on The Huron Carol)

While making fun of "movies that are destroying America" in Tuesda night's show Stephen Colbert mentioned that the only movie that's worth seeing in the theaters right now is Akeelah and the Bee. Interesting comment coming from someone that pretty much makes fun of everyone and everything.

Been there, DONE that... 1K Red heads are not the ceilings friend. The principle actor noticed smoke comming from the ceiling before any of my crew.

I would suggest lighting your screen one stop under key to reduce green bounce from the screen onto the talent. It can also be a good idea to put some 1/4 minus green (a majenta gel) on your backlight to help with the composite. Don't use anything heavier than 1/4 unless you want your talent to have an obviously majenta backlight. Have pictures or video on set of what you will be compositing behind your talent. This gives you a chance to visualize what you are lighting and where the motivation is coming from.

Very good point. These are my thoughts: Latitude - Any digital camera that claims to have the same quality as 35mm should look very carefully at this issue. Lenses - It looks to me that you only have one 300mm lens on your site. I'd like to see you make one GOOD zoom lens that comes standard with the camera and just let Cooke, Zeiss, Primo, etc. do what they do best for all the varying primes. Body - Don't worry about making the camera look all futuristic but just make it comfortable. Viewfinder - I'd like to see a super high quality flip out screen that the 1st AC can actually judge focus on. Storage - Wireless RAID? I don't know, this will be one of your biggest issues for whether or not this camera will sell. Editing - Contact FCP, Avid, Quantel, etc. and get the support you need. Audio - Give us at least 2 channels of onboard audio (balanced XLR jacks)

Don't forget to put sand bags on stands. On a show which I was operating for Douglas Munroe, CSC, the gaffer forgot to put a bag on a C-Stand. A flag ended up getting bumped (by him) and fell on the lead actress. She couldn't act in any more scenes that day and there was almost a law suit.

I finally got to see Akeelah last night. My wife and I both loved it. The cinematography was motivated by the story. There actually was a storyline in this movie as opposed to most other films that have been permeating the market lately. The character development was great and the acting held it's own. I laughed when I saw that scene where the producers told David that he didn't use enough fill on Akeelah's brother's face. It was a great looking scene, any more fill and it would've felt overlit to me. Actually, throughout the whole film the closeups all had beautiful modeling (besides the final spelling bee where I think David went for more of a live approach based on ESPN's anual National Spelling Bee). In the final scene, I loved the look of the anamorphic lens flares as Akeelah walked in and all the lights in the shots really gave the scene that much more excitement. I talked to the theater manager after the film was over about a shoot I wanted to do in there and also about playing some of our films. We got talking about why there were so few people watching Akeelah and he figured that Canadians from the prairies (I live in Alberta) can't really relate to black ghetto's. I don't know if I agree with him but it's an interesting point nonetheless. I personally think it's because of the particular theater that we were in has bad seats, poor audio and jumpy projection. He told us that they will be doing 5 million dollar renovations within the next few months to fix all of the problems. When I started talking to him about the projection, he told me that he was just at a convention where they were talking about projection. He says that if the major studios had their way, every theater in the world would have 2K DLP projectors. They showed him the difference between 2K and 4K and he couldn't tell the difference untill he went up close to the screen. My concern is that he probably saw a film that was scanned at 2K instead of 4K in order to minimalize the difference between the two projectors. Great job and a film well done David.

I love when people are this passionate about cinematography. Don McAlpine ASC, ACS shot The Chronicles of Narnia and he did an impressive job. AC did an article about his cinematography on Narnia in December of '05 as well as many others including Kodak... http://wwwau.kodak.com/AU/en/motion/about/...es/narnia.jhtml I havn't seen the film in a while but I seem to recall that the scene in question was shot on greenscreen (that probably isn't a big help but if I have time later, I'll look it up or watch the film again). BTW, welcome to cinematography.com, "carefully". It's nice to see you here. Just so that you're aware, it's prefered that people on this site use their real names (but of course not it's required if you have issue with that).

I would suggest turning off the fluorescents that are closest to the walls. Do this either by pulling out the tubes (some electrics won't do this because it can cause harm to the ballast if left on with no tube for long periods of time) or flagging them. Next, I'd get some tungsten kino tubes for the rest of the fluoros and gel some of them with them with 1/2 CTB to give an overall blue fill. Then key the room from some of the windows with light that's motivated by orange sodium vapor lights.

Please do! I'd love to see 65mm with a 6K DI the wave of the future. Then either print it back to 35mm (and 70mm for those theaters that can handle it) or project it on a 6K DLP. I'm looking forward to seeing Akeelah and the Bee when it comes to my town. I'll be leaning over to my wife every couple minutes saying, "You know that he shot that scene with 3 18K HMI's on Condors blasting through the windows to create that beautiful natural sidelight." I can't believe it's not here at our Cineplex yet.

Make sure that you have a lot of wild and ambient sound when you're on location. When you're doing your overdubs, get it right and don't just hope to fix it later. If your talent is far away from the camera in the scene, you should often times place him/her a little further away from the mic than when over overdubing for closeups. Find some good plug-ins that allow you to place room appropriate reverb on the overdubs. If you're the director, be there when recording takes place in order to make sure the right emotions are being portrayed.

Will you see any windows in your shots? If it's a night scene, what's your motivating light source(s)? Is this a horror or a comedy? Red heads are a blast (no pun intended) and are most effectively used when bounced or punched through a big diffusion fram but be carefull what you bounce them off of, they melt stuff, trust me.