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:

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 ;-)