This was another quick two day shoot I did in Nashville several months ago. Very natural, barely any lighting. We mostly used bounce and negative fill and the occasional 1.2 hmi. The DP brought his own covered wagons (incandescent bulbs caged in chicken wire and covered in muslin). They are one of the best DIY lights around.
Monday, February 11, 2013
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Lighting Marathon
Mobility is a very important aspect of shooting in any large facility. You have to know exactly what you need to get the job done. You can't bring to much, but you also don't want to find yourself stuck needing something that is far off in the depths of a grip truck on the other side of a building.
Over the weekend I gaffed a two day hospital shoot. We moved all over. Room after room. Set up after set up. If you choose the wrong carts on a job like this your day can become pretty miserable pretty fast. When moving around a crowded hospital you don't want carts that are taller than you or carts that take two people to maneuver. That's why I like to roll with this three cart set-up, keeping bare bones and low profile in mind:
On the left we have a kino cart I made over a year ago out of unistrut. I got tired of working off of kino carts that were always over sized for the job so I built one that fit the parameters of my own work (four 4ft 2 banks and two 2ft 2 banks with three shelves and a space for spare tubes). The middle cart is a run of the mill rubbermaid carrying a 1.2 HMI, 400w joker, two 1k babys, two 650s, a spiderlite, ice light, sand bags, stingers and some 4x4s. There is no reason to push around a huge 4x4 cart if all you need is a couple of floppies and diffusion frames. Last but not least we have the taco cart. Pretty self explanatory (small modifiers, rigging gear, apple boxes, c stands and light stands).
After preparing our carts we were off! Trying to combine quantity with quality sometimes feels like forcing two magnets with the same polarity together. It only works if you keep your set ups simple and consistent. If daylight existed naturally in the environment than we went with a soft high key look:
Over the weekend I gaffed a two day hospital shoot. We moved all over. Room after room. Set up after set up. If you choose the wrong carts on a job like this your day can become pretty miserable pretty fast. When moving around a crowded hospital you don't want carts that are taller than you or carts that take two people to maneuver. That's why I like to roll with this three cart set-up, keeping bare bones and low profile in mind:
On the left we have a kino cart I made over a year ago out of unistrut. I got tired of working off of kino carts that were always over sized for the job so I built one that fit the parameters of my own work (four 4ft 2 banks and two 2ft 2 banks with three shelves and a space for spare tubes). The middle cart is a run of the mill rubbermaid carrying a 1.2 HMI, 400w joker, two 1k babys, two 650s, a spiderlite, ice light, sand bags, stingers and some 4x4s. There is no reason to push around a huge 4x4 cart if all you need is a couple of floppies and diffusion frames. Last but not least we have the taco cart. Pretty self explanatory (small modifiers, rigging gear, apple boxes, c stands and light stands).
After preparing our carts we were off! Trying to combine quantity with quality sometimes feels like forcing two magnets with the same polarity together. It only works if you keep your set ups simple and consistent. If daylight existed naturally in the environment than we went with a soft high key look:
If we found ourselves in an operating room or blood lab than we went with a top down approach:
The Ice light has continuously impressed me. It reveals to me new ways in which to use it on almost every shoot I bring it on. I'm thinking about getting a second one. Below we've got key grip Patrick Durkin keeping the set safe:
We busted out a lot of set ups in just two days. Void was the stress you'd expect to see with such a compact schedule. There were very few hiccups.
So I guess I will end this post with a joke. How many surgeons does it take to fix a kino?
I don't know the answer, but I normally just smack the ballast a couple of times ;-)
Sunday, February 3, 2013
Thrown Under the Uhaul
This last gig was definitely a patience tester; however, it was nice to get a big job - one large enough to allow a bunch of us locals to hang out and do some good work together. Six of us against all odds. We arrived before the trucks and downed a couple of sandwiches in between sips of coffee.
Penske, Uhaul, Penske, Uhaul, one after the other. This was not a good sign. The generator came in last. It was a beast (1200 amps). You can normally tell how hard the day is going to be by the size of the generator. This didn't bode well for us electrics. After production lined the trucks up behind the bar/restaurant the staff pointed to which ones were ours. Wait! No grip truck? No lift gate? Apparently their brand new truck broke down somewhere between us and the last crew leaving them no choice but to dump all of the gear into rentals on their day off. We were episode two of eight. This show just got a lot longer for the road warriors following it. Luckily we just had to get through the night.
We dug out the aisle quickly with no real attention paid to how it was all packed. This would come back to bite us on the ass later - later being 6AM. The self appointed best boy and I got to laying some cable. In my opinion he was the VIP of the night. He did the heavy work of arming us with juice for the condor and ground work for the second half of the day. I cabled the inside for the first set up and staid near the gaffer for any last minute tweaks.
We were up and shooting within two hours and the DP was pleased with the look. I took my first water break of the night and went outside to see how the key grip was handling the condor rig. As you can see below he had it all under control.
Three 6k space lights hanging ten feet out from the bucket. He dropped a vertical 8ft piece of speed rail down for each light to support the bottom in case the wind picked up. In the back behind one of the food trucks we hoisted up three source 4s for backlights. On the ground for frontal fill we rolled around two arri T5s with medium chimeras.
The rest of this set up was actually pretty intricate. It took two of our guys several hours to rig out the food trucks with kinos.
The greasy interior made it impossible to use tape. This type of delicate work always becomes tedious. Just when they finished up lighting all three trucks production came outside to shoot. LUNCH!
The hard work of the night was over. Now we just had to wait for them to finish so we could break it all down. Everyone from the show was great to work with and despite all of the challenges no one butted heads. 6AM came slowly, but it came. The door on the last truck rolled down, we turned in our time cards, shook hands and drove home. I know tomorrow I'm going to be sore, but I have the day off.
Go 49ers and all my friends working the NOLA super bowl!
Penske, Uhaul, Penske, Uhaul, one after the other. This was not a good sign. The generator came in last. It was a beast (1200 amps). You can normally tell how hard the day is going to be by the size of the generator. This didn't bode well for us electrics. After production lined the trucks up behind the bar/restaurant the staff pointed to which ones were ours. Wait! No grip truck? No lift gate? Apparently their brand new truck broke down somewhere between us and the last crew leaving them no choice but to dump all of the gear into rentals on their day off. We were episode two of eight. This show just got a lot longer for the road warriors following it. Luckily we just had to get through the night.
We dug out the aisle quickly with no real attention paid to how it was all packed. This would come back to bite us on the ass later - later being 6AM. The self appointed best boy and I got to laying some cable. In my opinion he was the VIP of the night. He did the heavy work of arming us with juice for the condor and ground work for the second half of the day. I cabled the inside for the first set up and staid near the gaffer for any last minute tweaks.
We were up and shooting within two hours and the DP was pleased with the look. I took my first water break of the night and went outside to see how the key grip was handling the condor rig. As you can see below he had it all under control.
Three 6k space lights hanging ten feet out from the bucket. He dropped a vertical 8ft piece of speed rail down for each light to support the bottom in case the wind picked up. In the back behind one of the food trucks we hoisted up three source 4s for backlights. On the ground for frontal fill we rolled around two arri T5s with medium chimeras.
The rest of this set up was actually pretty intricate. It took two of our guys several hours to rig out the food trucks with kinos.
The greasy interior made it impossible to use tape. This type of delicate work always becomes tedious. Just when they finished up lighting all three trucks production came outside to shoot. LUNCH!
The hard work of the night was over. Now we just had to wait for them to finish so we could break it all down. Everyone from the show was great to work with and despite all of the challenges no one butted heads. 6AM came slowly, but it came. The door on the last truck rolled down, we turned in our time cards, shook hands and drove home. I know tomorrow I'm going to be sore, but I have the day off.
Go 49ers and all my friends working the NOLA super bowl!
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