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freddie bonfanti

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Posts posted by freddie bonfanti

  1. I'm not sure there's a planet in the cosmos where that's a low budget setup. That's an absolutely titanic setup.

     

    Phil, i understand this might look like a "Titanic" setup to you, but even for UK standards, it really isn't.

     

    Two 60' machines and a few floor lamps are very straight forward, not expensive at all, even for a low budget film. I have seen similar setups on 1m pound films here in England, back in the day, and several tv dramas.

     

    A 60ft boom would cost 200 quid to hire for a night. Stand by riggers and ipaf electricians can operate them so there are no extra costs.

     

    Please, let's not exaggerate.

  2. Shermen,

     

    like any other cinematographer you would benefit by starting a relationship with a good gaffer who will 'enlighten' (see what i did there?) your way into film lighting. A gaffer will be an invaluable help for all your future projects. If you're just starting out then maybe you can find a set electrician who is willing to step up and work as a gaffer on smaller project.

     

    Film is all about collaboration. Surround yourself with good technicians. They have got all the answers you're looking for!

  3. John, the Mail is not my first choice when it comes to printed matter, however it is often rich of amusing behind the scenes gems (just like the Telegraph) when it comes to major motion pictures filmed in london. I enjoy flicking through and seeing my colleagues or myself in it from time to time. it's a funny old game

     

    Anyway, regardless of what publication it is, the gear is left exposed to the elements and not bagged properly (including the non water proof 125> 63a FDU's) and if there was no security around, which seems to be the case, all that would have been up for grabs.

     

    I'm sure the very competent rigging crew of Ep VII would have polished it all up by now

  4. As much as i would love to embrace Plasma technology, it seems to me still miles away from being ready for film purposes. Led is more reliable. I recently tested the SGM Q7's, a brand new fixture used mainly for event lighting, and i was shocked how bright it was. unbelievable. I reckon if the price goes down they might just replace par cans for big studio rigs where you need a big, constant and even back light. It doesn't get as hot, it draws less power and it's just as bright.

  5. Jordan, you'll be pleased to hear the above shot was filmed in your hometown Sydney, at Fox Studios. Look up gaffer Reg Garside and ask him yourself! He's a good guy and i'm sure he'd be keen to help out.

     

    I would say if you're trying to replicate it with budget lighting then either go for David's suggestion ( i would say use 3 kinos plus you might want to add a good layer of 216 too keep things v soft) and work with lots of negative fill around the edges of frame.

     

    Personally if budget was a problem i would get hold of 2 source 4's and a long sheet of poly (8'x4'), rig it as if it was a backlight and bounce the source 4's up from the camera side.

     

    Source 4's are much cheaper than kino's and work beautifully

  6. Well,

     

    haven't been around here for ages! Today i saw the second Gatsby trailer and i thought i'd share it here and see what you all think.

     

    I had the privilege to work on this film as main unit lighting tech, and i have to say it looks much better than i expected. Yes it's bold and crazy and very "Baz Luhrmann" but i still think it'll be a great one to watch and look forward to next year

     

    merry xmas to you all

     

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN183rJltNM

  7.  

     

    One of the big rental houses told me that studio features have gone down almost 50% in the past three years according to their books, and that's not just in Los Angeles.

     

     

    yes, they're all being shot in London these days! Arri and Panalux London are having a cracking time!

  8. i don't know what the cage looks like or if there's any way you can rig around it, but the balloon idea suggested above sounds best.

     

    if you're REALLY keen on punchy tungsten how about a genie boom? if you can drive one in and push the arm out on top of the cage then you could rig a light box under its basket, which is basically a cube of 8x8 frames covered in B/U with a belly of diff under it. You can then fill it with spacelights or cans or nooks or what have you and punch it above the set. very effective

     

    it all depends on space and manoeuvrability obviously

  9. Hi,

     

    I'm trying to work out my lighting plan for a sci-fi short film. The film is being shot completely in studio and I want to build practical lights into the set. The setting is an underground facility.

     

    These are my aims:

     

    1. Emphasise architecture/perspective using rhythmic practical lighting - eg. a small light every couple of feet along a tunnel. (a still from Moon is attached to illustrate this)

    2. A 3:1 or 4:1 lighting ratio (still from Deeper Than Yesterday attached to illustrate this)

    3. An industrial quality to the light (as in both stills)

     

    From a design perspective, I like the tubes of light used in Moon, which leads me to think about fluoro tubes and LED tubes. Fluoros are cheap but if i place so many in a small space i'm afraid they'll wash my set with direction-less soft light, limiting my lighting ratio. I don't want to use egg-crates because i prefer the look of the bare tubes. From what i understand, LEDs are more directional but has anyone used LED tubes with the frosted coating?

     

    An idea about making fluoros more directional would be to inset them within the wall/roof. I want to see the tube clearly so I would only be able to inset about 1/2 tube diameter. Will this do much for me?

     

    If I do go with fluoros, I'm considering what would happen if I ND them down and make them less a practical source and more a set dressing. I still want them to be hot (at least 3 stops over) so I would have to open up the iris to compensate, but the effect of the fluoros would now be relatively less than the studio lights augmenting them. Given that I want to shoot at T2.8 or T4, I'd probably be using ND.3 or .6 at most. I'm not sure if the end result will warrant the effort.

     

    Any ideas on achieving the look that i'm after with fluoros or other lights much appreciated. Sorry to ramble and let me know if i've left anything out.

     

     

    The best boy electrics of "Moon", Paul Starkey, is a good friend of mine and i remember he mentioned it was all mainly kino flos/fluoro practical fittings in most of the scenes. I guess the trick will be to plan things carefully with the Prod Designer, building sets and designing/creating fixtures that will make your practical lighting effective and directional. look into all types of fluorescent fittings and test them, there's so many options out there!

     

    sounds like a good project

  10.  

     

    Finally just cause I like to think we Californians can lift anything you boys from Oz can lift, for the record 100ft of socapex for one 6k mole space light weighs in at 60lbs (27.2 Kg) or almost 2 Hive Bumblebees. But in the spirit of Pacific friendship let's agree that both my Bumblebee and socapex are light weight!

     

     

     

    Good stuff. Sorry to say i'm not Australian, just happen to be working down here this year. Im giving sunny England a break!

  11.  

    Freddie, what do you see to be the "colour temp issues?" Please elaborate.

     

     

     

    I'm mainly talking about features, Guy, the scenario is a fast paced, demanding and difficult job. Since LEP fixtures have such a pure and particular CT i think it would be hard and confusing to mix them on the floor with lights we already have available. I can see them at the moment being probably a great solution for Second Units, SFX units, car trailers, car scenes or smaller jobs like interviews where maybe you can't get a big gen set or much power and you need a punchy fixture.

     

    The point is that it's really too early to say. As i meantioned above i do think it's an interesting technology and im not against it by all means.

     

    People will use it, test it and if it really does wonders then im sure it will take over the industry! i'll be glad to wave HMIs goodbye, can't stand ballasts, header cables and the annoying rest of it!

  12. The company I'm interning at has a green screen cyclorama (27' long, 15' deep, 8.5' tall) and are looking for pre-lighting solutions. There is a "budget" but I don't know the specifics of that.

     

    I was thinking getting kino flos because of their low profile and nice even lighting but I'm concerned with their output for such a large space. What can you recommend?

     

     

     

    a series of image 80s with supergreen tubes will probably be enough

  13. Well, i think Plasma technology is definitely interesting and fascinating, i'm all up for a greener and more efficient technology, but realistically i can't see it taking over the current technology until the colour temp issues and re strike times are sorted.

     

    Regarding the bumblebee, i was wondering how easy it is to store and transport it. say you've got to rig 150 of them in a studio, how easy it is to pack all of them? thats the beauty of space lights, theyre just so easy to move, rig etc.

     

    p.s- socapex isnt heavy at all where im from! but maybe thats because we're on 240v here and our distro is much easier than yours?

  14. Once you cut through the hype, the bottom line is that LEP heads offer a number of advantages over LED & HMI technology. Where we are a long way off from having a single-die LED with sufficient output and correlated color temperature to match daylight, LEP lamps are really the only cost effective alternative to expensive HMI Fresnel systems when it comes to generating full spectrum daylight balanced light. This feature of LEPs benefits Red users and DSLR users in particular.

     

    One downside to lighting for the 5000K native color balance of CMOS sensors in the past has been that it requires an all 5000K balanced lighting package and HMIs are considerably more expensive to buy or rent than other light sources. Kino Flo fixtures, particularly the Parabeams, are a cost effective alternative to HMIs because they can use either 3200K or 5500K tubes. But, the drawback to fluorescent fixtures (like LED fixtures) is that they generally have a very broad soft light output that drops off rapidly which means the units need to be positioned close to the subject they are lighting. This characteristic has always made them better suited to lighting documentary interviews than dramatic scenes.

     

    With a 5300K output comparable to that of a 575 HMI Fresnel, the Helio 270 Plasma lamp in particular offers the same benefit of being a less expensive alternative to HMIs, but also offers the added benefit of being more versatile than a Kino Flo or LED light panel. Not only does it offer the capacity of traditional Tungsten/HMI Fresnels to throw and control its light output (making it a more suitable Key and Backlight source for lighting dramatic scenes), but it also has sufficient output to bounce it or waste some output to diffusion material to make it softer (existing LEDs put out barely enough, with none to waste.) It’s capacity to provide both hard crisp light that will throw a distance and is easily controlled, as well as offer soft light with diffusion, makes the Helio 270 much more versatile than any Fluorescent light or LED array presently available. It also offers a number of benefits that the new LED Fresnels and traditional HMI Fresnel do not.

     

    For instance, LEPs do not require the active microprocessor color control that is required to assure consistent color rendition in the best LEDs on the market today. Absent such microprocessor based color management systems, LEPs are less expensive and more robust than LEDs. Plasma lamps also have a much more continuous color spectrum than even the best LED luminaries. As is evident in the Spectral Power Distribution graphs below, LEP lamps, unlike LED lamps, generate light at wavelengths shorter than 425nm - which means that violet colors will render better.

     

    Plasma_vs_Mole_LED.jpg

     

    And, unlike LED lamps, LEP lamps also output in the medium blue-cyan-turquoise range from about 465-510nm so aqua-type colors render well by comparison. Skin tones and warm, amber-yellow colors stand out better under LEP lamps because of the strong presence of their complementary colors. And, since the output of LEP lamps extend all the way out on the long-wavelength end (well beyond the 600 nm cutoff of LEDs), pinks, reds, oranges, and other long wave-length colors look vibrant under LEP light where they tend to look a little dull under LEDs. As a continuous spectrum source, colors not only appear more natural and vibrant under LEP lamps than under LED lamps, they also reproduce more accurately on the screen since, as is also evident by their spectral distribution graph, the output of LEP lamps is almost an exact match to the spectral sensitivity of daylight film emulsions and digital sensors. An added benefit to LEPs is that color meters, like the Minolta III F, that make their calculations of the Color Temperature (CT) based on a light sources continuous spectrum, are able to generate accurate reading of the CT and Green/Magenta of LEP lamps. Color meters are completely useless reading the “spiky” discontinuous color spectrum of LEDs (see my newsletter article for details .)

     

    The biggest benefit to LEPs in comparison to HMIs has got to be the cost savings in not having to replace lamps every 500 - 750 hrs as is the case with HMIs (or an entire LED light panel when its' emitters reach low light failure.) Where a 575w HMI globe typically retails for approximately $150.00, the 5000 hr L85 lamp life of an LEP bulb is equal to seven HMI globes, which amounts to a savings of $1050.00, or nearly half the cost of the Helio 270 Plasma lamp head.

     

    Plasma_Helio270LG.jpg

    The Helio 270 LEP

     

    Another advantage is that Plasma emitters use solid state, hardened components that improve their reliability under harsh location production. Plasma bulbs are rugged and vibration resistant, and so will not break or explode inside expensive lighting heads the way HMI bulbs can. Since the LEP emitter is extremely compact, in the case of the Helio 270 at least the emitter, driver, and power supply all fit in the lamp head (the Photon Beard Nova 270 uses a separate AC power supply), eliminating the need for a separate ballast connected by header cables (the acknowledged Achilles heel of HMI systems.) Finally, with much lower UV emissions, LEPs do not require elaborate and ultimately finicky safety switches. In total, LEPs have an order of magnitude better reliability than conventional HMI lamp heads while offering the same intense beam and the colorful spectrum needed for motion picture production.

     

    Finally, Power Factor Correction (PFC) is standard in LEP lamp heads where it is not in HMI ballasts. In fact there is one LEP head that we are looking at (not the Photon Beard Nova 270 – it’s too expensive) because it has a Power Factor of .99 making it a near linear load. As a result, it uses power more efficiently, minimizes return current, and generates virtually no line noise. Where, it is as much the Harmonic Noise that non-PFC HMI, Fluorescent, and LED power supplies kick back into the power stream, as it is their higher Apparent Power, that limits the total number of them that can be reliably operated on conventional portable generators; the efficiency and near unity Power Factor of this LEP head means that you can operate more of them on portable gas generators. For instance, you can only safely operate four 575W HMIs on a 6500W portable AVR generator, where you should be able to operate 23 of these 270W LEP heads (each with an output comparable to a 575W HMI).

     

    Plasma_PowerWaveform.jpg

    Oscilloscope shots comparing the current and voltage waveforms of the PFC Helio 270 with an equivalent wattage of non-PFC LEDs

     

    Besides better color rendering, light quality, and lamp life, this different method of transforming electricity into light has other benefits as well. For more details about LEPs see our newsletter article at http://www.screenlightandgrip.com/html/emailnewsletter_generators.html#anchorHigh%20Output%20LEPs.

     

    Guy Holt, Gaffer, ScreenLight & Grip, Lighting Rental & Sales in Boston

     

     

    i hear they take ages to restrike after you pulled the power?

  15.  

    Also Hive has a spacelight model which may be of interest to you as well, the BUMBLEBEE 540 http://hivelighting.com/PDFs/BumbleBee540Spacelight.pdf uses 3 emitters and gives the equivalent output of a 6,000W tungsten spacelight.

     

     

    what's on top of the bumblebee? it looks like a ballast. The fixture looks heavy. One thing about old school space lights is that they're relative light, which makes it easier when rigging

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