Stuart Allman

David, I saw this short two months ago and thought WOW! I know that Lana has some beautiful music videos which are more tributes to the early 80's shorts like Michael Jackson's Thriller. Since she seems to have consistently used great cinematography to complement her songs, does Lana get involved in the photography or does she just hire directors that she admires? Just curious. That was a lot more power than I would have expected to light the set at first glance. Were you shooting on film? If your AC ever flakes on you - I'm there! Stuart ------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

If what you're after is mostly top light, then you can also staple white paper or muslin to the ceiling and bounce a fresnel or source-4 off of it. It's less efficient than placing the light up there, but if you have the power available and can flag unwanted light off then that might work for you as well. There's also the china ball solution. You don't have to hang it directly overhead. You can hang it closer to the camera and flag off the unwanted light with a partial skirt over the lantern, which would give you more eye lighting as Guy suggests. I do this when I want to supplement a practical lamp in the shot.

Tony, I have to admit that your description is kinda vague, so I'm not sure where to start...and maybe that's your issue too! There are lots of ways to light this, depending on what you want and your budget. If this is a daylight basement you could use some HMI lights and have daylight streaking in from ground level with a little smoke added. You could rig an overhead light with a grid and supplement it with a chinese lantern as required. You could string a circle of tungsten bulbs overhead as Roger Deakins often does to like a space...etc. You could have a series of practical lamps in the shot that get supplemented by video lights just off camera. It often depends on what you want lit and what you want in shadow. Then there's the question of color(s). Perhaps you can find a reference off a favorite film or find some inspiration from 500px.com and come back with how you envision the scene. Directors often have something in mind when I start a project with them and I'm able to bring them a better visual reference as the DP, then I can determine how to do it under their budget. S. -------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

John, I'm sure Guy will strike down this idea (no pun intended...no really), but have you thought about using a series of projectors and run a "lightning strike" video loop through the projectors? I guess this really depends on the area involved, but it might be enough if you're using the large theater sort of video projectors. You can also put the projectors up on tall stands so it appears that the lightning is coming from above. A generator would easily power the projectors and laptop. The trick would be how to distribute the video to multiple projectors. Stuart ----------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Alexandre, A rental shop local to me rents the Matthews slider for $275 (US) per day. I wouldn't want the cost of buying one either. Stuart -------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

The Matthews motorized slider is another option as well. I've used the Dana and like it too, but the Matthews slider sits on a single tripod and has more travel than a Kessler slider (maybe double?) - less than the Dana can do with long pipes. You can also do smooth motorized moves, jib moves, and vertical/diagonal moves since the sled is counter balanced. I know about fitting into tight locations! Fighting one less tripod is likely a good thing. The Matthews slider has much less track depth than the Dana so it fits in tighter spots and closer to walls than the Dana will. There are probably similar solutions from other manufacturers out there. S. ------------------------------------ illuma.blogspot.com

Michael, I had the exact same problem in a recent doc shoot. There's a thread from December that I started on this subject. One concept I've been mulling since then is using a clam shell type setup in reasonably close to the talent. If you need talking head/torso type shots this may work for you as well. You see this setup all the time in modeling - an overhead key and a lower bounce/fill card or soft fill light. Usually the ratio is about 2:1 or 3:1 depending on the look you're going for. As long as the lights are boomed somewhat close to the talent and the talent doesn't wear big bug eye glasses you should be free of the reflections. Of course this is somewhat impractical for narrative shoots, so it really depends on what you're trying to do. Now I just need to keep the camera and operator out of the reflection! S. ------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Allen, I blog for a local rental house in San Diego and I recently measureing LED lights. Out of the bunch of daylight balanced fixtures the Mole-Richardson's seemed to be the best, spectrally speaking. I'll let the data speak for itself. http://videogearsandiego.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-do-video-lights-really-perform.html Power output from hte M-R fixture seems to be decent, but you'll likely need to gel the windows that appear in the shot, just as the other Stuart wrote. It's pretty hard to compete with the sun, unless you do your shooting early in the morning or have the windows angled toward shade. Then again, maybe you just need to open another window and use a reflector for fill. That would be the cheapest way to do it by far. Hope this helps. Stuart --------------------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

I ran into a problem during a documentary shoot last night with out main subject. She's a 90 year old woman who wears large (bug eye) glasses with built in bifocals. The key and fill lights were all over those glasses and there wasn't much we could do to debug the problem on set given the time constraint. We couldn't exactly ask a 90 year old woman to take off the glasses and do the interview completely blind and squinting. Even when the subject tilted her head down the bifocals would catch the lights. I'd like to hear peoples' advice on how they handle interview subjects who wear glasses. I already know about providing frames without glass and watching incident angles, but are there other techniques I could have used to quickly adapt? I tried having the subject angle her body more toward the camera, but that didn't work because she was still looking at the interviewer (duh!). Thanks in advance.

Tim, You can see some of the final photography from our production on my latest blog post if you're interested. I transferred over the footage for delivery to the post production team, so I grabbed a few frames in the process. No color grading has been done yet. http://illuma.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-few-pictures-from-coder-god.html S.

I just bought some household 75W "equivalent" 3000K bulbs for a production we are working on next weekend. We just didn't have the power available to go all tungsten at our location. At 16W they are just as bright, but with a CRI of 84. You might be able to find a higher CRI if you need to use these for a key light. In my case CRI isn't an issue since these will be lighting the far background and we have the option of color tweaking in post if necessary (doubt we'll need to from evaluation). These LED bulbs combined with a simple 12V A-B battery and a sine wave inverter should operate well enough just as Phil pointed out. Stuart ------------------------------ illuma.blogspot.com

I put a write up of our final lighting test on my blog with pictures if anyone wants to see our test results. Photography starts next Saturday. http://illuma.blogspot.com/2013/11/cinema-lighting-wraping-light-around.html I think it will work out quite nicely. Many thanks go our to David, Guy, and Tim for their replies. Hopefully I get to share this film with you someday. The producer/director team are known for their long post production time, so David...don't be surprised if I catch up with you six months from now at an ASC breakfast talk with my laptop. Stuart -------------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

I ran another lighting test on our actual actor today and the director was happy with our final configuration. I managed to get a nice soft wrap around our actress, which was more of a challenge because she has much darker skin than the northern brit Clair Forlani. I took some pictures and I'll likely place them on my blog some time this weekend. I'll post when the pictures are up. Thanks for all the help. The trick was trying to emulate film flashing. That made the wrap transition as smooth as I expected. Stuart --------------------- illuma.blogspot.com

Given the size of the set, budget, and crew I'll have to stick with 8' of diffusion. I think we might be able to rent two 1k's and run a book light to get the exposure I'm after. There is only 11' between columns in the space I have to set the key inside and I have to take into account c-stand footprint as well. I'm heading into the local rental shop tomorrow to run another lighting test of our setup. With this small budget rental I think we'll do OK with the Muslin. With a Lowell 750W, which falls off quickly, we were 1.2 stops away from f/4. That's about the smallest aperture I want to run since I have to keep two characters in focus on one side of the table during OTS shots.

Karl, It's really going to depend on the size and type of lighting fixtures installed at the event venue. Even with a 1k I was seeing flicker at 240fps when I tested the FS-700, but just as Brett says, slowing the shutter speed greatly helps. I've also seen problems with LEDs. Some "event" LED fixtures flicker really bad even at 30fps. You might want to test at the actual venue to see what the installed fixtures do. For any lights you add, you might want to consider a video purposed LED unit, like Mole, Nila, Litepanels, or a plasma light like Hive. Perhaps you can mostly over-power the event light such that remaining flicker isn't objectionable to your client. Then again, you might be able to fake it by shooting at 120fps and slowing down to half in post using AE or Twixtor. I was faced with a similar problem for a shoot coming up next weekend. We pre-tested each of the fixtures and chose to go with a mixture of LEDs and larger tungsten fixtures while shooting at 120fps. Stuart ---------------------------- illuma.blogSpot.com

Well, at least he didn't put some CTO on the light and call it softer! If I get a good setup I'll post some pictures to share the knowledge back to the community. So if you don't see any follow up, well.....

I sat down and spoke with Pat at NAB earlier this year. He was of the opinion that most DP's put gels over their lights to modify the color so why make the light absolute color accurate? In a certain sense, he has a point, and in another sense we all want to start from a known good point before correcting anything. So I guess it really depends on your use. Is this an effects light that gets color modified or a key light on a well compensated actor? I've used the sola evaluation units from Litepanels and I can say that there is a large mechanical difference between those and the Mole unit I was using last night. The Mole LED junior light seems to be at least physically comparable to their standard lights, which may be a good and bad thing. I would personally like the same output in a smaller package since I have to pack my own equipment in. As for light quality...I didn't have a way to evaluate it other than to say that it looked bright to me, When I evaluated the Litepanels Sola the color temperature was most definitely a bit "off" toward Magenta in my tests. Between the tweenie and baby the color temperature wasn't consistent either. I'm not insinuating that Mole does or doesn't have that issue - I don't know.

Thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely check into it if plan B turns into plan C.

My local rental/sales house has 4' Lee rolls for about $130 last time I checked. My concern was that I would be asking the producers for experimentation money, which they don't have. At my request they procured more lights, which I now know will help solve the issue, so my plan is to test if those will be sufficient this weekend. I can probably run the camera at ISO1600 if necessary. I've done it before on this particular camera and it's a bit noisy, but not terrible.

Guy, I figured there was a good chance that one of the local ninjas had something to do with this film. Thanks for the confirmation. An 8x8 is where I started last weekend, but obviously I failed during the first attempt - thus ending up here. The contrast was just too high. From the conversation with David I'm guessing that I was off on power/distance. Unfortunately I don't have any lights above 750W, so lighting the muslin diffusion is a bit of a challenge with regards to throw distance. Also, the physical distance available in the set may be limiting in the end. Short of renting a bank of four to six 4' Kino banks, do you have an recommendations on power necessary to light an 8x8 with a target of ISO800 - f/4 through bleached muslin?

I'm using a book light bouncing off a 40-ish-inch fold out bounce, but with the lighting kit the producer provided it was a bit under-powered for our camera. I asked for more/better lights and some should be arriving this weekend. The location we have is about 12' wide and I need to motivate the key coming from one of the narrow direction walls. So with c-stands in place even a book light can be a challenge. We're also somewhat power limited in our location. Where are my 4' Kino banks when I need them? ;) I have this Saturday to work out a good configuration, so with some additional work I'm sure we'll nail it. I let the director know that we may have to cheat the cafe table out from the wall a little after the establishing shot. Again, my sincere gratitude for your help. I feel like I know the theory of the physics I'm working with.

Will do. I might have an issue with lighting power and physical distance to solve with alternate methods. Being in the low budget world I haven't had much experience with very large sources, so this will be a good learning experience. Thanks to both of you for helping me "get it."

It's funny that you mention flashing because I learned about it from you during the last ASC breakfast talk! Growing up in a digital world, sometimes these classic techniques aren't the first thing that come to mind (or even the last). I'll see what I can do for the director. We have a bit of ambient light coming down from a series of overhead lanterns in the production design. That might provide the little shadow lift I need to emulate flashing. I'll also test moving the diffusion frame closer and add a reflector opposite key. I just wasn't sure about the reflector because the edge of her left bicep goes dark and that would be tough to control with just a passive reflector. I have the luxury of testing before the shoot, which is a really good thing. I only have a 8' muslin piece of diffusion to work with and no budget to rent or light a 20' frame of anything, much less a place to put it in the narrow set. During my tests the diffusion was about 4' from the model. I'm pretty sure I'll figure it out with a little more experimentation.

David, OK, now my confidence is a bit thrown. I'm looking at 0:21 in the video and you can still see Clair's ear and left bicep, which would normally be blocked by her face and chest if this was just a large source at the side. Wouldn't you think? I did a lighting test last weekend with just an 8' wide diffusion source and the falloff was either much greater, or the cheek highlights didn't stay the same. Maybe I just had the wrong angle of the diffusion frame to talent. However, here you would think Brad would start to cast shadows on Clair beyond a certain angle. That's when I began to think about some of your comments about wrapping light through multiple sources that I think you (could be wrong) posted over on RogerDeakins.com before the site was hacked. I do trust and respect your opinion David, but I'm trying to figure out what I'm missing in my pre-lighting tests. Something just isn't sync-ing up for me. My original thought was the same as yours.

I'm talking about the fill on Clair, which is quite different from the fill on Brad. Her fill seems to be more even and not even fall off into a true shadow.