A look back at some of 2013

Justin Moore Live Concert

You can't complain when you spend the weekend working in the Ozarks at Gaston's White River Resort.  We were lighting a live concert for country music singer Justin Moore.  The day started with dumping the truck and laying cable.  We brought two generators because we had to power the whole production.  One 30kw was dedicated for lighting and the other for sound, camera, etc.

There were two big challenges to this particular job.  The first challenge was the time in which the concert took place - magic hour.  The hour long show started with the sun and ended with the moon.  I keyed with a 12k LTM fresnel through a 12x quarter light grid on the same side as the sunset.  This allowed me to elongate the length of the sunset another twenty or thirty minutes after the sun went behind the trees.  The ambient light was still glowing and filling in the shadows and the fill side.  I set my fill light with a 4k ltm fesnel through another 12x quarter light grid.  As the ambient light started to fade this light picked up the pace, eventually landing our stop at a consistent 4/5.6 and filling in the scene very evenly for the rest of the show.  Around the same time the tungsten units we placed around the scene up-lighting the trees started to show in the image adding a nice warmth to the coming night.  Lighting the trees grounded the scene nicely after the sun had completely set.

The second challenge was the amount of space we had to light (an audience, boat, pick up truck, 5 band members, Justin, and the surrounding trees).  We could not get our lights in very close so we had to go with some bigger guns backed up.  The cameras were shooting 630 ISO at 60 FPS and they needed an exposure of 4/5.6.  This is a decent amount of light loss right out of the gate. So there was a goldilocks zone of light we had to find.  How close could we get our units without limiting framing options for the wide camera.  The 12k was 30ft away from Justin.  The 12x frame was 7ft away from the light.  This combination gave us our stop.

After the concert started there wasn't much we could do but sit back and enjoy watching the show gently fall into our light from the TNDV truck.

The only surprise we experienced during the show was a sudden and unexpected hoard of insects that gathered to watch Justin.

Living in the south I'm used to dealing with bugs flying around HMI's at night but this was something I've never seen before.  We ended up having to put clear gel over our tungsten units lighting the trees because the bugs were flying into them and smoking up the scene.

This was our 4k LTM par lighting up the other side of the river and the thick layer of stagnant fog.  We really needed a 12 par here but the light still showed up in the shadows.  Every one at Gaston's was extremely friendly - except for these geese.  They were ready for us to leave!