Dahnielson

I’m a Gaffer. And when people ask me about lighting I usually ramble on for hours, I love lighting and I love talking about it, often slipping into the area of different camera responses to lighting and D log E curves. But here I’ve tried to contain myself to a list of practical lessons about lighting learned over the last couple of years, especially from the low-budget shoot of Camp Slaughter.

Few Lights

There’s really few situations you have too few lights with you. You learn to adopt the lighting scheme to the location and resources at hand. Maximize their use and put the watts where you need them.

Grip Support

However, even if you come up with a perfect scheme using the lights you have it will in most cases be difficult to execute because you don’t have the grip support (studs, hooks, clamps) to hang the light were you want.

Camera Angle

But with such flexibility comes a limitation, the lighting will be very tight and it become even more important to exactly know where the camera will be pointing. A nightmare becoming real, at least for the lighting department, is when the camera operator decide to swing the camera around where there are no light.

Low Wattage

There are very few times you will lack watts per lighting unit. In many cases it quite the opposit. Your smallest unit is simply to hot. Especially when you can’t gell down a brighter light, or put a larger gelled down lamp where you want.

Juice

Appreciate your Best Boy, treat him well. There’s always a big win to appoint your best boy or someone as juicer with the responsibility running all the electric cabling and keep track of how things are plugged into a circuit.

Soft Light

Don’t be afraid of soft light, it’s your friend, a light can’t become too soft. It’s really very easy to create good quality softlight (I’m talking about the light itself not the unit) on shoestring budgets, much easier than high quality focused (”hard”) lights, even if you pay the cost by lower watts to foot candle ratio.

My love affair is ofcurse also with fluorescent, the nifty KinoFlo and Cinemagic of the world. But it is really simple to build your own units using tubes designed for motion picture work with parts from your local electric shop. The great thing is it give you more lightoutput per watt, they’re lightweight and can be places (or even taped) everywhere and they do not produce any heat (actors love ‘em).

Night Scenes

The trick to light scenes at night is to use a big softlight as the “moon”, and light foliage with regular nooklights, hard floodlight, from a low angle. It’s important to avoid making any distinct shadows on the ground.

Darkness is important in night scenes. Don’t light every tree, light one in the front, keep the next as a dark siluette against the tree behind it that is lit up.

The same thing works for open areas too. Make one light stroke on the ground followed by a dark one, and then again a light stroke. The important thing is to not make any distinc shadows. It’s not until they see shadows an audience will realise they watching an artificially lit nightscene.

DIY

Always keep with you sufficient scrap material and tools: four by four wood beams, foamcore, dyventyne, rope, hooks etc. So you can build whatever makeshift construction you need to do a better lighting job.