A Rocket To The Moon: Whole Lotta You [OFFICIAL VIDEO]

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.

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 ;-)

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!

Orbea Ordu

Sometimes the challenge of a job has nothing to do with lighting.  On this Orbea Ordu commercial the director wanted a spinning bike on a green screen.  After fumbling around the grip truck for awhile I found a solution - goal post, chain viced power drill attached to a rotary dimmer and some high test fishing line.

The rest of the day was easy.  We side-lit the green screen with some divas, dropped in a soft top source (2 4banks through a 216 4x4 frame skirted) and popped out the more interesting parts of the bike with 650s and 300s placed around the room. 

Here is a link to the final product:
http://vimeo.com/47911218

Lightning on the cheap

Normally I write off LED lights as a necessary evil.  Something a gaffer would feel forced to use for a fast pace drama or reality tv show.  They are a light source everybody hates and everybody uses.  I'm talking about you LitePanels! With your green shift and multiple shadows.  If I do find myself having to use a 1x1 LitePanel, I always make sure there is a chimera in front of it.

Today I got a chance to check out two new LED lights by AAdynTech (ECO Punch and Jab).  Right out of the pelican case and on to the stand I noticed some differences that made me think twice about LED lights.  The construction of the housing was very comparable to that of a 2.5 LTM HMI (strong and durable).  The barn doors were industry standard and the lights came with several different lenses.  When the tech turned the light on it struck up instantly and I was amazed by the output.  These are LED lights you can use outside!

 The Jab, only using 1.7 amps of power, would be perfect for indie feature car rigs.  The light can be powered by a cigarette lighter inverter and has the same output as a 400w joker.  No need for a process trailer if the production can't afford one.  Another thing worth mentioning.  I can't count how many times during driving scenes that we've had to pull over and drop or pull a scrim on a light because of spotty cloud cover.  With a little handheld DMX controller you can ride the brightness level on the light depending on the external environment (Going through a tunnel, under a bridge or through some clouds) allowing the actors to stay in character and giving the director better footage in the edit room.

The Punch, running at 5 amps, is equivalent to a 2.5k HMI.  Once again the light strikes right up.  No more having to wait for the globe to come up to temperature and because of its low heat output you can aim this light straight down (great for condor rigs).  Can't say the same about HMIs. They need to be slightly angled up to allow for heat release.

Now to get to the title of the post.  The punch has a controller with several different functions built into the back of the light.  My favorite function, the one that makes me the happiest as a gaffer, is the randomized lightning strikes.  It has a built in sporadic function that changes the intensity and duration on its own.  Life like lightning for a fraction of the cost!  Next time I gaff a scene with stormy weather I'm putting this green beast on the truck.

Anyway I could go on and on about these fixtures.  I'll just wait till I finally get to use one on set!

Mrs. Novak's 5th grade class

Today Patrick Durkin (Key Grip) and I taught a 5th grade class at Saint John Catholic Church about special effects in film.  I started the class by showing them this demo reel montage from Stargate Studios on their smart board (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clnozSXyF4k).

They watched in amazement and almost every kid had their hand up wanting to ask a question when the video was done.  We talked about Lord of the Rings, Planet of the Apes, Harry Potter, The Nutty Professor, Jurrasic Park and Ace Ventura.  Each film had something different to teach.  Lord of the rings and Planet of the Apes used motion capture suits with lazer guided helmet cameras tracking their facial expressions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i6f7H8SVFQ).  They liked how they used trampolines to make the humans jump like monkeys.

Jurrasic Park of course had animatronics (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4J9TBlFxAg).  In this clip the kids noticed how much noise animatronics makes over special effects.  One kid thought the dinosaur was real!  The Nutty Professor used make-up and prosthetics while Ace Ventura used live animals with trainers.

We finished off the class by passing around an old wind-up 16mm Bell&Howell automatic cinecamera from the 40s, a super 8 camera from the 80s and then a modern day cellphone which we used to take this picture.

I try to do something like this whenever I can.  In 2012 I worked with a teacher at Berclair Elementary on a short documentary about alternative teaching techniques in the classroom (http://vimeo.com/50169895).  We also did one the previous year in 2011 which the Memphis City Schools then showed to other teachers (http://vimeo.com/12060976).

At the end of the day doing something like this gives me a huge energy/creative boost.

Happy Birthday Joe Horn

Just wrapped up a two day PSA shoot with former Saints football player Joe Horn.  You might remember him as the wide receiver that was fined 30,000 dollars for making a phone call to his family after scoring a touchdown against the Giants (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zrcAGkuk_o).  On this shoot he played the famous son to a single mother.

Unfortunately we encountered nothing but a mixture of freezing rain, ice and snow throughout the shoot, but key grip Patrick Durkin kept the outside together and safe.  Never forget your rain gear and always bring lots of socks!

The first bit of work involved a young woman in a hospital waiting room.  The director wanted the scene to feel hopeless and dark, while still accentuating or actor.  We hung a couple of 300's overhead to turn eye sockets into black caves for the extras, popped out the table in the foreground with a spotted 650 and rimmed the actress with a 1.2 HMI coming from outside.  We color corrected the window with 1/2 CTO.

Then after a quick company move we found ourselves in the bedroom of the young woman - thirty years into the future.

For this scene we used two 1.2 HMI's outside acting as moon light.  One was a direct source to pop out the forest in the background and the other a high bounce bringing some soft light back into the room.  With such large windows this proved to be a task of "where can we hide the light," but after a couple of tweaks we found the goldilocks zone.  Scenes like these make you wish for a condor and at least a 4k but we made it work.

On the inside, down low on a beaver board, I had a 650 covered in 1/2 grid cloth bouncing into a 2x2 bead board.  This acted as a practical glowing from out of frame and edged her out nicely on the profiles.  Sometimes we get lucky and this time set decoration provided us with the perfect mirror for the scene - It had some built in tungsten lights.  To add a bit more punch to this source, off frame I placed a fat boy kino heavily diffed out in light grid.  This gave a nice creamy look.

This was our martini scene for the day.

One of the first scenes of day 2 involved our actress being escorted by a shofer to her sons limo. Once again we got a bit lucky with the architectural lighting that was already in place.  I decided to use this as our motivating factor for our fill light.  The challenge was finding a place to put our light.  The whole house was in frame and there were no condor cranes coming to our rescue.  A quick solution was placing a 2k Junior in the second story window aiming down through a 4x4 opal frame.  This covered the whole walk very evenly.

Now to keep the moonlight look going I used one 1.2 HMI bounced up high and backed up on the same axis as the camera.  I find placing the moonlight source right behind camera keeps the architectural shadows from showing, which decreases the sourciness of the light.  This also acted as the key source.  As a final touch I barely popped out a house deep in the background with another HMI.

LIMO IN THE RAIN

For inside the limo the cinematographer wanted a nice wide shot, which left very little room for lights.  The space was already cramped enough with everyone in there so besides from the existing rope lights I decided to approach this one from entirely outside the vehicle.  The only problem of course was the heavily tinted windows that took away about 3 stops of light.  The cinematographer made one concession for me that made this set up possible.  Gotta love cinematographers that leave room for collaboration and compromise.  He angled the frame away from the windows on the right side allowing me to bring in a key source that looked like it was emanating from inside the limo. 

For this I used another 2k Junior with 1/2 CTO on the doors.  I knew with this much ND on the windows I'd get a magenta shift but I really liked the way it looked on camera.

For a backlight I punched a 1.2 HMI through each of the left side windows.  I flew them high and angled them down all the way. Two more lights and we were done.  A 200w Joker came in on the right side as a moonlight wrap and I had a guy up on a later with a Leicho to act as a street light.  After a couple of people got on car pushing duty we were off.  The scene looked great!

Here are a couple of more shots from production.  Oh and if you like BBQ sauce, look for Joe Horn's Bayou 87 in a grocery store near you: