COMPACT LIGHTS
Small and efficient quartz bulbs stimulated the development of portable location lights. Among the variety of such instruments, Lowel-Light Manufacturing is a leader in sophistication of design.
For example, an instant change of reflectors on the Lowel DP light allows a choice from a smooth flood pattern to a narrow intense beam punching for several hundred feet. At the same time the parabolic design of these reflectors provides much better shadow quality than is generally expected from the open-face quartz fixtures.
Lowel DP light
(courtesy of Lowel-Light Manufacturing Inc.)
A stick-up light made by GAM Products is one of the smallest open-face lights. It weighs 9 oz. with the power cord and measures 3 × 3 × 4 in. It uses 100- or 200-watt 120 V globes or a 100-watt 12 V bulb, handy for battery use.
Certain situations require a battery-operated light. Usually such lights are equipped with a 30-volt lamp of 100 or 250 watts. A nickel-cadmium battery provides up to one hour of shooting time, depending on the globe.
Today, portable battery-operated lights are available with HMI heads. Among these, the Joker-Bug series, produced by K5600 Lighting, and Pocket PARs in the ARRI line are widely used. Because of their efficiency, a 200-watt HMI provides an equivalent of 1000 watts of light, balanced to daylight.
500-watt Morlite with barndoors
(courtesy of Mole-Richardson Co.)
For many applications requiring a portable light source, LED panels are a popular choice.
Richard Crudo, ASC
I always like to carry a Joker Kit or a Pocket PAR kit. In daylight situations when you need a little fill or some eye light on the run, they can be an instant lifesaver.
ARRI Pocket PAR 125. This small HMI light can be operated on a battery belt.
(courtesy of ARRI Group)
Joker-Bug 800 by K5600 Lighting. A light (6 lbs.) versatile daylight fixture producing light output comparable to a 4000-watt quartz light.
(courtesy of K5600 Lighting Inc.)
Matthew Libatique, ASC
Now we don’t use sun guns, we use the Jokers 400 W and 200 W. Or maybe an LED panel. Sometimes we put the short 2 × 4 Kinos on a battery.
With faster film emulsions and digital targets, cameramen and gaffers are looking for less powerful globes that will still produce the color temperature of 3200K. Next to the always-popular photofloods, they are using photographic enlarger bulbs of relatively low wattage (PH211 bulb = 75 watts, PH212 = 150 watts), which can be utilized in practical lights and other applications. Another very useful globe is the MR16, a tungsten halogen projector bulb with a 2 in. parabolic reflector.
The reader will find more information about the use of lighting fixtures in chapters 5, 6, and 7, where the practical applications of lighting fixtures are discussed.
ACCESSORIES TO LUMINAIRES
In the art and craft of lighting, next to the lights themselves, the accessories to control light in its intensity, character, and pattern are most important.
Intensity of light can be gradually diminished either electrically by means of dimmers or mechanically by such devices as shutters or floating scrims.
Lights can be set on dimmers individually or in groups.
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
Filming has become all about time and flexibility. I think that the greatest advancement in lighting is control. How do you control them fast? How do you control them efficiently? Obviously the traditional way is C-stands, flags, nets, and a diffusion frame. But it’s gotten to the point where maybe you cannot have that much equipment on the floor.
Everything is on dimmers. No matter how much the producers hate the cost of installing dimmers, they save time. To be able to have every outlet on the set on a dimmer, to have a number attached to every practical, to have every softbox and recess light controlled, to have that kind of speed and efficiency is enormously time-saving.
Custom-made cloth flaps will extend the existing flag. When not needed, they are folded back and secured with Velcro attachments.
In addition, the lights themselves need to have snap-on controls, something that requires less of the traditional forest of C-stands and more egg crates, along with metal honeycombs, Chimera banks, and soft fabric baffles. They control the light fast and take up less room. They are not always ideal, and the forest of C-stands will never be entirely replaced, because with it you can have so much more control and can create such beautiful frames when given the opportunity. However, more often than not, the time is short, budgets are small, and the cameras are moving, and you still need to shape the light or it will look like hell, only now you need to do it faster. Besides, the actors and directors are starting to get used to the idea of a clear space with freedom to explore it; if you can’t effect quick, innovative control over strategically placed lighting, your photography will not look the best.
M. David Mullen, ASC
It makes sense on a soundstage to have a dimmer board when you have lots of prerigged lights, especially when they are hanging from the stage ceiling. It is faster and safer to run them through a dimmer board and then be able to control their intensity than to have electricians constantly climb ladders or run up to the catwalks to adjust them manually. You can also put all the household outlets built into the set through the dimmer board so that the brightness of practical lamps can be controlled.
One example is when you have a scene where an actor turns off the lights in the room. The set has to switch from its practical lighting to a moonlight effect. So you may have several lights providing the look of the room when the practicals are on, and then several more lights providing the moonlight effect. They all have to be on a single cue when the actor touches the switch on the wall. Usually I have the room lights switch off quickly but the moonlight effect fade up a bit more slowly so you don’t see an abrupt transition, it’s more like your eyes adjusted for the moonlight levels.
Mole Focal Spot allows for sharp cut-off shapes of the light beam and the projection of various light patterns, such as church windows or French doors.
(courtesy of Mole-Richardson Co.)
It’s good to have all the lights run through a dimmer board for this gag. Otherwise you may have to have four or five electricians, all on individual switches or hand dimmers, all trying to work in unison once they see that actor touch the light switch on the wall. If you had to handle this scenario on location, some sort of portable dimmer board might be useful.
A set of snoots
(courtesy of Mole-Richardson Co.)
Shutters, for dimming the lights, work like venetian blinds and have no effect on the color quality of light. Electronically controlled shutters can be worked on cue on several lamps simultaneously.
The simplest dimming method consists of moving a net in front of a lamp during the shot. Any scrim used in such a manner is known as a floater.
Depending on their position in relation to the light, flags are referred to as the topper, the bottomer, and the sider.
Funnels and barndoors limit the spread of light. Their function can be further modified with gaffer tape.
A vast array of accessories is available for controlling light without “in the shot” changes. Starting with the lighting instrument itself, the familiar barndoors and snoots (funnels) limit the spread of light. They provide a sharper cutoff pattern in the flood position of the globe and a softer pattern in the spot configuration. A snoot designed by Mole-Richardson with a lens at the end is called a Focal Spot. It has several apertures and patterns that can be projected as sharp silhouettes to imitate window shadows and so on.
Ingenious snoots can be shaped from black wrap, which is a heavy black foil. Foil is also useful in shielding any unwanted light leaking from the lamp housing. But care must be taken not to obstruct the ventilation of the fixture. More effective yet are flags put up on stands farther from the light source. The flags are named depending on their respective positions in relation
to the light. And so we have a topper, a bottomer, and a sider. Narrow flags are called cutters, fingers, and sticks, and round flags are known as solid dots. To control soft lights, much larger flags are needed. For example, teasers are large frames covered with black material. They are put up on stands or hung over a set to cut off unwanted light. Floppies are flags with flap-down material to extend the original flag.
Whereas flags cut off the light, scrims limit its intensity. Sometimes scrims are erroneously called diffusers. The optical principle here is that where the gaps between the wires or threads are larger than the thickness of the wires themselves, the scrim does not diffuse light. It only cuts down its intensity.
Round scrims that are mounted directly on the lights come as singles and doubles. A single cuts the light by one-quarter, which is equal to one-half an f/stop. A double cuts the light by one-half, or one f/stop. Round scrims come also as half scrims with the other half of the circle open, letting all the light through.
The round scrims exposed to high temperature from a lamp are made of a wire mesh, while scrims to be used on stands are made of a net stretched on a metal frame. They come in the same shapes as the flags. Rectangular scrims are made with one side open, without a wire frame, to allow for a soft blending of the shadow cast.
Long, narrow scrims are called fingers, small, round ones are dots, and larger round ones are targets. All these scrims come in single and double densities. A very fine net is known as a lavender, because of its color. When a true diffusion is needed, any of these scrims can be made of silk.
The soft lighting technique popular today requires diffusion screens. There is a wide choice of materials available. However, not all of the materials can be placed safely near the lamp. Rosco’s Tough Spun and Tough Frost in half and full densities can be used on hot lights. The Soft Frost diffusion needs to be kept farther away from the lamp, as does tracing paper, which is a favorite with many cinematographers. Among these materials, the Tough Spun stops the light most severely. On the other hand, a light grid cloth cuts down the light by only one-quarter of a stop yet diffuses it very well.
Silk, an alternative material for scrims, is also used for large screens and for a diffusing ceiling over sets. Bleached muslin is another such material. Before diffusion in such sizes was used in interiors, silk was traditionally stretched on frames or hung on ropes to soften the direct sunlight on exteriors, as overheads or butterflies. These two terms are sometimes confused. An overhead is supported from two or more points, a butterfly from only one.
Frames with diffusion are often preferable to commercially manufactured soft lights.
Jordan Cronenweth, ASC
Commercial soft lights are all right but they are big and bulky. They are all right for stage work, but when you haul them around in a truck to do a lot of practical interiors, they take up a lot of room and they don’t put out much light. I can take a quartz 10K, put it through a diffusion material, and I will have five times as much light. Or you can use a Croniecone.
A Croniecone is used for diffusing hard light sources without the need for an additional stand.
The Croniecone, named after its developer, Jordan Cronenweth, is a device for mounting a diffusion screen directly onto the light. It protrudes from the lamp on a widening cone so that light will not spill to the sides. The screen is far enough from the Fresnel lens to be of a reasonable size, for instance 4 × 4 ft. on a 5K or 10K light.
Diffusing materials are also used in the construction of lamp shades for the practicals.
Richard Hurt, gaffer
For Jordan Cronenweth, I built regular lamp shades. They were made of China silk and white crepe on the outside. They do the same thing as the Japanese lantern but are not made out of paper. Crepe is a white washable material, more durable than silk.
Light Packages
Depending on the production size, every gaffer has a certain instruments package on his or her lighting truck. Three gaffers describe their lighting packages for a medium-budget production.
Robert Jason, gaffer
On a medium-budget production my lighting truck would contain a very minimum of two 18K HMIs and two 4K HMIs. Everything else could be various HMI PAR lights: you should have four 1200-watts; you should have four 575-watts. And then the same goes for incandescent lights. I think you need at least one 20K and at least eight of everything else down. And a Kino Flo cart.
Ian Kincaid, gaffer
In the HMI world I generally carry four 18K Fresnels. I like the Alpha. It is a compact 18K Fresnel with a large, removable (exchangeable) lens. It is French ingenuity but made in the U.S. Then I would generally have four 12K PARs, four 4K PARs. I generally carry four magnetic ballasts for the 18K HMIs, so I can use some of them inside because they are quiet.
From the 4K PARs, the next step would be the 1200-watt PARs, and I usually carry eight of those. Then the next step down would be 400-watt Jokers. I carry a couple of those. I love those lights. Joker is an HMI PAR and you have a choice of lenses to put inside it.
For tungsten, we carry lights called bam-bams. They have twelve panels of nine globes that are generally used in the mini brutes (PAR 36, 650-watt, FCX globes). It is a big soft light. It is probably a panel 3.5 × 6 ft. It has arms on it that can hold diffusion and color gels. We carry two of them. We carry four 24-light Dinos with aluminum frames. We carry usually four maxi brutes. Usually I have eight 9-light mini brutes, then I carry two 20K Fresnels, two or four 12K Fresnels (the ARRI T12), and then I skip over the 10Ks and go to the 5Ks, usually four 5Ks, and eight 2K junior Fresnels. Then I skip over 1Ks and go to 650 Tweenies; I carry eight Tweenies and eight Mini-Moles. In open-face lights, we carry eight blondes (2K). I don’t like the Mickey-Moles; I like the shorter, more compact blondes. The 1K (open-face) lights are difficult to scrim. I use them almost exclusively for bouncing.
In Kino Flos, I carry four 4 × 4s, four 2 × 4s, four 1 × 4s, two 2 × 2s. I am not a big fan of electronic lights; I try to use tungsten. I use fluorescents like Kinos when I am in a fluorescent environment like a hospital location or a schoolroom. Where there is overhead fluorescent, I’ll match the color.
For LED light I carry a kit of Litepanels.
Len Levine, gaffer
My lighting package consists of four 18K HMIs, two 12K PAR HMIs, and two 6K PAR HMIs. A few xenons.
For tungsten: maxi brutes and an ARRI T12.
A huge Kino Flo package with 8 × 4, the Vista-Beams (Vista 300), Flathead 80s, and I have Kino Flo BarFly 100 and BarFly 200. It is just so wonderfully controllable.
I usually carry five Dedo lights and twenty Source Fours, from 50-degree to 5-degree. I love the 5-degree barrel. If I wanted to light up somebody walking across the street, I can put a bounce card over there and from here I can bounce. And I can control where it hits. We use Source Four for bouncing but mostly for accent. Or to create a daylight. I have got hammered glass patterns that I put in and also standard steel gobos. They create broken light, accidental light.
I carry some LEDs, the little ones that are battery-powered.
Power Supply
Power supply and its distribution on the set are the responsibility of the gaffer and his best boy. Although it will not be covered in depth in this book, for the cinematographer a general understanding of these problems is important enough to merit a few general observations. For a more detailed description of power distribution, I recommend Set Lighting Technician’s Handbook by Harry C. Box, Focal Press.
We will start by reviewing a few basic facts and equations about the electricity on which our lights operate.
Most lamps can be powered by either direct current (DC) or alternating current (AC). The main exceptions are carbon arcs, which require DC, and HMI lights, which work only on AC.
AC alternates at a specific rate (cycles). In the United States the rate is 60 cycles/second, whereas Europe operates at 50 cycles/second. Irrespective of the kind it is, current is always measurable in amperes (amps). The potential o
f electricity is expressed in volts. Amps multiplied by volts equals the power in watts. The equation W = V × A is often remembered as West Virginia. This gives us the other equations:
V = W/A
A = W/V
In practical terms, these equations tell us how much light can be generated from a given electrical supply or how much current is needed for the lights.
Adding up all the watt designations of the lamps to be used and dividing the number by 100 will yield the approximate amperage required. For the exact figure one would have to divide them by 120 V (if such is the voltage). Rounding to 100 provides a certain safety margin. For example, if we are going to use five 2Ks and six 1Ks in a house on location, the total required power will be 16,000 watts. Dividing by 100 will indicate the need for 160 amps. If the house service panel is fused for 200 amps, we are obviously in good shape.
A typical modern 20-amp fuse for one of the household circuits will be sufficient for a 2000-watt (2K) light because 2000 W + 120 V = 16.6 amp. It even gives us a margin of safety, which may be needed if long cables add resistance and cause a voltage drop.
Film Lighting Page 10