Lowdown, a day in the life of

It occurs to me that I should talk more about my work attachment on Lowdown, while it’s still reasonably fresh in my mind. I’m not going to look at the report requirements of Media Industries, not yet, because that would feel contrived.. so for now, it’s just free-association, or something like that. (To refresh: I was working in the electrics department, and Lowdown is a comedy series for broadcast on ABC next year).

So. I’ll take you through a day of shooting. Sounds like a good idea.

The day starts at Unit base. Because shooting on location requires everything to be mobile, “Unit” is a massive truck.. the home base.. and every morning, tables chairs and shadecloth tent-things are constructed around this unit truck. Porta-loos are shipped in, as well as mobile trolleys with boiling water and tea/coffee. Hence wherever we are, the Unit facilities stay the same and the catering stays the same.
Anyway. We start at unit. Usual call time is around 7.45am, sometimes earlier. Everyone piles up their plates with breakfast items.. lots of breakfast. On my first day I foolishly had just a bowl of fruit.. and starvation descended upon me after a couple of hours. Working on a film shoot makes everyone quite ravenous, it seems.. So breakfast is extremely important. You’ve got around 15 minutes to configure your breakfast and then eat it.. then the 2nd AD announces it’s time to go and everyone rapidly mobilises. We head to location, usually somewhere nearby, and it’s chaos.. an organised, professional sort of chaos.
I generally stand by, with Chris (the best boy), waiting to unload equipment from the truck. Everything has to happen fast. No department wants to hold up the shoot, so setting up in the morning is especially hectic for all involved. Darryl, the gaffer, will decide on what lights we’re likely to need for each stage of the shoot, and these lights and all associated gear will be moved out of the truck to somewhere more readily accessible. We’ll take a magliner filled with lighting gear and wheel it onto location, plus a trolley of C-stands and whatever lights we need. Usually we need 1 or 2 ARRIsun 575s, the ARRIsun 12 (1.2kW), a 4-ft 4-bank kino kit on the magliner, a china ball, and possibly redheads. I never saw any dedos or tota lights on location, or in the lighting truck for that matter. There were also spacelights, household tungsten bulbs, coloured tungsten bulbs, household fluorescent tubes, 1k tungsten stage lights, 5k tungsten fresnels, a blondie… plenty of other lighting gear. But generally the Arri HMIs and Kino fluorescents were the most commonly used pieces of lighting gear.
In any case, there’s usually a lot of gear that needs to be mobilised. Lots of dashing back and forth between the truck and our on-location equipment-pile, dodging out of the way of video split kits, dollies, audio people, magliners, camera department, all of which are rapidly moving places.. and if you’re shooting in small, narrow corridors (which we often were), there’s a lot of traffic congestion. But you’ve got to move quickly, set everything up quickly so that other departments can get on with whatever they need to do. You’ve got to be conscientious.. simply standing in the wrong place can disrupt the entire process of setting up or planning a shot. So it’s a delicate balance between mobilising lots of gear quickly, without putting the gear at risk, and without getting in the way of any other department. Setting up for shooting on the 14th floor of an apartment building is the hardest, I’ve found. There’s no space to move, it’s all very claustrophobic and easy to piss people off. And you’ve got to load mountains of gear into elevators that want to close on you every five seconds.. you can jam the doors with a metal box for a while, but after a minute even the doors get pissed at you, gnashing against the metal box over and over again. “Please remove obstruction from the elevator”. *crunch*. “Please remove obstruction from the elevator. *crunch* You get the picture.

After all the gear is standing by, and we’ve run power lines to all necessary areas, and the lights are on stands, shot bagged, with lenses and ballasts, the insanity starts to subside. The gaffer fine tunes lights as necessary, while I evacuate the area, because usually there’s too much going on and I’m basically extra meat blocking the corridor. Which is true. So I’ll be standing by outside as the shooting commences. Sometimes I’ll be inside, and can peer in to see what’s going on.. but often you can’t. I may need to wait at the truck so that it can remain unlocked, and extra gear can be taken out as needed. (When we were shooting in St Kilda, I needed to stand by the truck for much of the day because of the threat of junkies getting into the truck.. I personally don’t know how easy it would be for a junkie to run off with an HMI light and flog it to random people.. or whether your average junkie realises how valuable HMI lights are.. but whatever)
And this is the part of the day where I crash.. the waiting game. You have to keep busy.. cleaning equipment boxes, sorting clamps and spigots.. anything to keep your mind occupied. Sitting down is always tempting, but often frowned upon, depending on the situation. If you can sit down while cleaning equipment, that’s going to be much better. Making instant vanilla chai tea is another way of staying occupied..
Then suddenly, there are things to be done. Apparently, they’ve finished the shot and it’s time for a new setup. New setups aren’t usually as hectic as the start of the day, because the lights are already out of the truck, but often HMIs need to be moved to different windows, readjusted, etc. And then you may need to readjust the frame of diffusion that goes in front of the 1.2K HMI.. (you often use the frame of diffusion and an ARRIsun 12 to simulate sunlight coming through a window, etc).
Suddenly the rush is over.. and you should make more tea. But you don’t, because you’re paranoid.. maybe someone will need.. a clamp, a spigot, a peg, something random.. and this does happen. ‘Standing by’ really does mean standing by, and you have to stay ready for anything while doing nothing. Sounds fairly paradoxical..

And yes.. this is how the day proceeds. Every new set up requires a burst of energy.. New locations require even more energy.. lots more mobilising and running power and avoiding the surrounding chaos.. but new locations and setups are great because they keep you wired through a long day. Nothing’s worse than nothing.
Towards the end of the day, as you approach the final scene, you can start to break down any unnecessary lighting equipment and get it back in the truck. And by the time the last scene finishes, you’ve got very little left to pack up, and everyone can go home sooner.. so that they can sleep, so that they can come back the next day.

I don’t know what it is, but I like it. On paper, my work placement sounds rather crap. But every day’s something different, it’s quite demanding, and you become part of a large production machine that is ultimately responsible for making a comedy series.. cool.

post more later.

Visual Interest

It’s about time I posted something up here.
Ideally, you are currently thinking something along the lines of:
‘So Josh, how did that 48 hour film competition go? That one that you posted about once but then never mentioned again?’

Well.

Andy McPhee (Wolf Creek, December Boys, briefly on Rush, Underbelly, Neighbours), won best actor for his work in our film.
And also I won best cinematography — that’s $3freaking000 dollars of equipment hire from Panavision. Brilliant. Awesome. Great. So now.. what do we (Emma, Stevie, and myself) do with $3000 from panavision? Whatever we end up doing, it had better be damned good to warrant the spending of actual money. (well.. prize money.)

I’ll get to writing up a Panavision shopping list soon enough, I assure you. But for now, I want to discuss the 48Hour Film Project, and why we won, cinematography-wise.

You’ve got 48 hours. 36 teams enter the competition and compete against you. 28 teams succeed in entering their films within 48 hours. Of these 28 films, one wins best cinematography, and it’s ours (‘Mistaken’). Is it because I’m a decent aspiring DoP? In part, I’d like to think so. But ultimately, it came down to the imaginativeness of Stevie’s script, and the great locations that Emma found for us… I’ve never appreciated the importance of location as much as I do now.

After watching 27 other films created in 48 hours, you start to see patterns.. common pitfalls.. and yea. Let’s face it. The 48 Hour Film Project is going to attract a lot of people who do not like planning. They want to be ’spontaneous’, and ‘versatile’… ‘edgy’.. so what do they do? They shoot outdoors, with a small crew, in the bush. Or.. they shoot outdoors, with a small crew, down the street outside their house. They’re all using small/edgy/versatile Z1p-style cameras and haven’t figured out how to switch off the auto-gain, so the exposure is going all over the place. Lighting continuity varies hugely from shot to shot, and the sound’s wrecked by wind and traffic and whatever else. This whole ‘natural light, raw edgy realism in the bush’ thing killed a large number of films. There were a few nice shots, but none of it gelled together and some sequences were so horribly overexposed I’m not sure how they let it happen.
So yea. Natural light.. I’m not a fan.
Also, far too much wide coverage. That was irritating in several films. Granted, you’re shooting handheld and don’t want to exacerbate the shakiness.. but you’re shooting DV, and DV doesn’t like wide shots, especially not wide shots of the bush with huge variations in contrast and dynamic range. You distance the audience, correctly exposing becomes more difficult, your boom operator wants to kill you and you really don’t have enough pixels to properly capture so much detail in a bush environment. I know, it’s not impossible to do, but it wrecked many films. Seeing them blown up at ACMI cinemas really demonstrated the limits of shooting DV PAL.
And finally, so many stories just weren’t.. visually interesting. I know, visuals aren’t everything, and you’ve only got 48 hours so you should be concentrating on clever screenplays and general wittiness. But where’s the visual flare? If I had one of these other scripts to work with, I think it would’ve been hard to find aesthetically strong ways of telling the story, because some of these scripts just weren’t that kind of story. That’s why I’m thankful that Stevie’s script involved poledancing, bikers, satanic voodoo pimps and a massive revolver. There was so much to work with, especially given our locations. The strip club was lurid, every wall was a mirror and there were colourful lights everywhere.. blend all that together with a shallow focus and you’ve got lots of visual interest. And then there was the church with a massive fluorescent cross and the huge brick walls to paint shadows over. You just can’t make these sorts of shots work in a small cluttered loungeroom with white walls and a dying couch. You’ve got to get out of the house and go somewhere different.

So.. it all makes sense. We had an ‘unreal’ script that took place in visually interesting environments, also allowing us a great degree of control with our lighting setups. By contrast other groups wouldn’t have had lighting gear at all. Hence shooting out in the bush under the harsh november sun makes sense.

What I’m saying I guess is that it feels cheap, in some ways, to say “I won best cinematography!”, when so much of it comes down to these other factors. I knew how to work the DSR, I knew how I wanted to light the scene, I knew how to get a shallow focus.. but really, I got the award because of what we had to work with. Visually interesting places and characters, proper film lighting equipment and a shiny metal revolver.

Think back to ‘Silver Lining’, the film I shot with Elliot. Same camera, same lights, same DoP. Why does it look so bland? Because we shot it underground in RMIT, in front of a white wall with a makeshift ‘desk’, and it was meant to be a plumbing supply store. There was something.. NQR about the look of that film, and I think it’s simply the fact that we shot it in such an unconvincing, plain location. So for next year, in all future projects, it’s burnt into my brain.. the technical operation of lights and camera mean nothing if you’re not shooting in a good space with a good script and a damned good art department.

Bedtime Reading

>

I’m waiting for these to come in the mail. Each of these books is 500+ pages, half a kilo.. for between $50 and $80 AUD, minus shipping.. Well worth it I’m thinking. Of course, I’ll find out when I read them. But these are the sorts of resources I’ve been trying to find over the past few months.. and they’re difficult to find in your regular bookshop. Previously, I went to the RMIT bookshop, and the most technical book I could find was

which covers all aspects of production.. but there’s not enough detail, and it’s a bit dated.. lots of debate about whether or not to edit on computers.. and many chapters devoted to linear video editing systems.. (if you flick through this book you’ll also see that it’s where many of our tech-related RMIT dossier readings came from in TV1, etc).
But yes. I’ve gone through quite a bit of Mollison’s book, which was helpful because it starts from the absolute basics.. you learn everything from the ground up without missing anything. Still, it’s one of those ‘all-rounder’ books for people who feel they can/should make films single-handedly.. generic “filmmakers”.. which is frustrating, when looking for specifically cinematography-related information.

So.. what happens while my lighting and camera assisting books are in transit from the UK? What do I read? Well, luckily, one of the camera operators at Studio A revealed to me that if you go into Borders, you can generally find copies of American Cinematographer magazine, shipped in by Air Freight.

It’s about 50% advertising (I don’t mind, it makes you familiar with the sorts of cameras/gear that professionals want to hire), 50% articles discussing cinematography in upcoming feature films (ie Where the Wild Things Are and Antichrist).. great resource because it’s effectively a collection of real-world case studies.. and you can go to the cinemas and know “that was the scene they shot on Phantom HD”, or “there’s the bit where they lit with 5k fresnels and a xenon”.. etc.

In fact.. I’m going to go read the thing now. Don’t tell anyone about Borders.. like all things on the internet, that’s a secret. (ie don’t steal my copy of american cinematography or you will die)

Blowup

“Several other factors, such as subject matter, movement, and the distance of the subject from the camera, also influence when a given defocus becomes noticeable.
The area within the depth of field appears sharp, whilst the areas in front of and beyond the depth of field appear blurry.
For a 35 mm motion picture, the image area on the negative is roughly 22 mm by 16 mm (0.87 in by 0.63 in). The limit of tolerable error is usually set at 0.05 mm (0.002 in) diameter. For 16 mm film, where the image area is smaller, the tolerance is stricter, 0.025 mm (0.001 in). Standard depth-of-field tables are constructed on this basis, although generally 35 mm productions set it at 0.025 mm (0.001 in). Note that the acceptable circle of confusion values for these formats are different because of the relative amount of magnification each format will need in order to be projected on a full-sized movie screen.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_of_field

So.. if your final output is 35mm film projection in cinemas or whatever, and the apparent focus of 16mm footage becomes dubious when blown up to 35mm size.. does this then cancel out the effects of using wider 16mm lenses with deeper perceived focus? I mean.. you’re using longer equivalent lenses when shooting on 35mm, but if the tolerance, the margin of error is more forgiving because there’s no blowing up of the image, which format ends up being less forgiving in terms of perceived focus when outputting to 35mm film?

This is where I rush to my nearest film lab, beg for their 16mm short takes, and start testing in my backyard on an ancient, makeshift film camera.. I wish I was old-school.

SRII — time to go 16mm

According to the equipment booking forms at RMIT, this is what we’ve got to work with, film-wise.

The Arriflex 16SRII

Specs from http://www.iactionfilms.com/camera_arri.htm:

* 1-75fps
* Super 16 (16mm convertable)
* PL Mount
* Crystal Sync
* Shutter: 180
* Illuminated format markings
* Ground glass: converted to fiber optic
* Video assist: color, or black and white
* 400FT magazine

What scares me is that when you take away the lens and the film mag, your SRII becomes

wtf. where did my camera go..
It’s a strange concept.. also demonstrates that I’m far too into shooting digital. With film, your lighting and choice of stock seems more important than the choice of camera itself. As long as the film camera’s reliable and quiet enough for sound work, I’m not sure there’d be much of (or any of) a difference between cameras, in terms of your final product.

Also, it looks like there’s no way of adjusting shutter angle on this camera.. though I’m not sure. If it’s fixed at 180 degrees.. it’ll be time to break out the ND filters. I’ve used the in-built ND on the DSR cameras, but often I’d just increase the shutter speed instead because toggling the filter changed your white balance preset.. such a stupid system.. about the only thing I don’t like about the DSR. But anyway. With the SRII, it seems that ND filters will be crucial to getting a shallow depth of field.. I don’t want to close down the iris where I don’t have to. (yes, i know that much of today’s amateur cinematography consists of mindless shallow-DOF-porn.. but I don’t care. It looks good. And it doesn’t have to be mindless)

Anyway. Given my half-baked theory that the actual 16mm camera body doesn’t matter much compared to stock and lenses, I want to know what 16mm lenses we’ve got at RMIT.. I’m guessing we’ve got a zoom of some kind.. I don’t think RMIT’s the prime lens kind of university… but yea. It scares me that from Lemac, the longest lens in a 16mm prime lens kit is 50mm. The longest? 50mm? I know that it’s 16mm and the crop factor makes the framing equivalent to around 89mm on a 35mm camera… but on a DSR, with a significantly smaller sensor area than on Super16, the kit lens goes from 9mm to 155… and you can open up to F1.7, even with the lens at its longest. Brilliant lens…

So.. assuming I get to shoot on S16 next year, what happens lens-wise? The lens supplied by RMIT will be a zoom, and it will hopefully be longer than 50mm. But I’m worried about the lens speed.. will it be able to open up to F1.7 or equivalent? Looking at lemac, some 16mm zooms don’t open up past F3.. F3.7 even. That would scare me slightly. In comparison, the Zeiss superspeed mkII series of 16mm prime lenses from Lemac are all rated at T1.3.. which generally also indicates a max aperture of F1.3… that would be some impressive shallowness.. even if the longest lens is 50mm.

The catch?
The cheapest kit of Zeiss superspeeds that includes a 50mm lens is $340 per day, excluding GST. Fuck.
I just hope RMIT’s got a damned good 16mm zoom.. that’s all I can say.

Help. From Panavision

I never realised that film manufacturer websites could actually be useful.

At http://www.panavision.com/tools.php you’ll find a collection of charts, tables, diagrams and calculators.. for depth of field (takes into account your sensor size/film gauge and everything), equivalent focal lengths, f-stop fractions, and HMI filming speeds at both 50 and 60Hz. It’s a good resource, and I was quite surprised to find so much free information on a website that’s meant to be flogging panavision gear. So.. congrats to panavision on providing me with more than XCU camera-porn and propaganda (a la RED’s website)

May need this next year

Hopefully.

In 48 hours

Two weekends ago, I took part in the 48 hour film project. It was a hellish and great experience simultaneously.. it’s something that’s really valuable to go through, I think. I worked with an absolutely great crew, everyone was so devoted and ready to sacrifice their time, sleep, and mental health for the sake of our final product. Our film was directed by Stevie Day, produced by Emma Haarburger, DoPed by me, sound mixed by Shu Shu Zheng, 1st ADed by Dawn Lo, Assistant produced by Stacey Kwijas, Boomed by Laura James, Technically assisted by Lachlan Stewart, Continuityed by Malcolm Yeo.. the list goes on, I don’t have access to the credits list right now, but everyone was awesome.

Making a film in 48 hours is radically different to making one over the course of a semester. You cannot plan the film in advance.. not in a great degree of detail, anyway. You’ve got to be flexible and inventive on the spot, prepared for anything. There was no shotlist for this shoot, let alone a floorplan, and only a loose schedule of when we needed to shift locations. Hence it was daunting at first. I walked into our first location, a massive church that I’d never seen before.. and I have no idea where we should start. Do we light the entire church? Do we have enough power to light the whole church? Do we just set up for one specific frame and reset everything later? The clock is constantly ticking and it took me a little while to decide on what we needed to set up, equipment-wise.
We blasted a 2K fresnel from the entrance of the church, throwing a strong backlight on Andy (the father) and casting stark shadows over the walls (adjusting the intensity as needed with strong ND gels). We used the kino gelled with 1/2 CTO to act as a fill. On Johnny (our voodoo pimp), I placed a dedo behind him on each side, and crossed the beams in an ‘X’ shape for strong contrast and facial modelling. The ‘X’ system was a bit of a pain however, as whenever Johnny needed to move forwards, we needed to cheat the dedos forward as well and try to recreate the same angles and shadows on Johnny’s face.
Throughout the film, we ran the DSR450 white balanced at 5600K despite using millions of tungsten light sources.. Stevie and I liked the warmth it provided.. (very little was done to our footage in post-production. We blackened the blacks and slightly boosted the highlights.. colour-wise, 99% of our footage is exactly as we shot it, and I’m happy with the way it came out, considering.)

What did we mess up? Continuity between shots was the biggest thing, cinematography-wise I think. Each shot looked fine in itself, but we discovered numerous problems when we got into the edit and tried to combine them all together. One sequence in particular really pissed me off because we’d covered it as a 2-shot and twice more as a CU of each character.. yet in edit we found that our 2-shot was extremely different to our tighter shots. Dani’s hair was completely different in the closeup, and I’d adjusted the lighting angle in Andy’s closeup to get rid of a shadow.. bad move. Our wider 2-shot was thus unusable, the cut was jarring, so we had to use only tight shots. Hence there’s no sense of space between the two characters.. they could be 500m away from each other and we wouldn’t have a clue. It’s quite weird to watch without a master shot of some kind. Even worse, the framing of each closeup didn’t match. Andy’s CU was much tighter than Dani’s Cu, so it seems like Andy has a massive head for no reason. Sucks. It’s something I hadn’t considered before, not properly anyway.
On a more general note, that may have been the problem with our coverage in general. Not enough wides. Now.. I’m not a fan of wides. They can be messy, cluttered, far too colourful, everything’s in focus and there’s no room for a boom operator to get any good sound. But otherwise you’re stuck with ambiguous floating heads.. yes the shallow DOF is awesome, but there’s no sense of place and it looks so contrived and cut together. It didn’t help that the stripclub we were shooting in was covered in mirrors.. every single wall was a mirror, which severely limited our framing possibilities. Shots generally needed to be tight to blur out equipment and crew members you’d otherwise see in the background. Similarly in the church, wides were difficult because we were using dedos and a small kino on Johnny. These are small lights that need to be in close, and going too wide results in seeing them. I guess we could’ve pulled out redheads instead, but I don’t think it would be the same effect. Cheating the lights backwards would result in a softening of shadows, making everything seem flat.. not worth it.

So yes. Continuity, coverage and framing were the main problems on this shoot, but that’s to be expected given the time constraints. Something had to go wrong, obviously. And overall, I’m extremely happy with how the film turned out. Thanks to everyone involved, it was brilliant to work with you all. I’m going to shut up now and stick in some pictures.

Lowdown, pt1

A few weeks ago I started my work placement, in the electrics department on an ABC comedy — Lowdown, written by Adam Zwar and Amanda Brotchie. Production goes on as we speak, but I’ve already wrapped because I went to Bali for a week and got replaced. Fair enough. But still.. it frustrates me that I couldn’t come back in some capacity, as I was just starting to feel comfortable doing my job before I had to leave, and being on a professional set was an incredibly valuable experience in general. Sucks that I couldn’t stay on for the 6 weeks of shooting. But that’s the way it had to happen, as I’d already locked down other commitments before I knew that I’d have the work attachment. I got a call from Rachel Wilson and rocked up to production the next morning, very short notice, and as a result my working schedule was very erratic.. I tried to fit Lowdown in wherever I could. Anyway, it pains me that I couldn’t work for longer, but regardless, the placement was awesome, so all is well.

Right. So technically I was working as a “lighting assistant”, under the command of Darryl (the gaffer) and Chris (the best boy, but a gaffer in his own right). On a professional shoot there are so many more roles, a much larger and more disciplined hierarchy, and even the lowest roles are occupied by extremely skilled people (I’m not meaning me). Chris gave me great guidance throughout my time on Lowdown, and Darryl made sure I learned from my mistakes. It feels quite harsh at first, very old-school to be verbally punished for slipping up, but it works. You grow a thick skin and make sure to do things better next time.

For now, I want to regurgitate some of the things I’ve learned about lighting while on set.. technical things. I’ll come back to my actual experience of the production at a later date. So.. from here on, it’s all raw information. Enjoy.

HMIs
HMIs are extremely efficient lights. A 1.2K HMI outputs about as much light as a 5K tungsten lamp. Hence you can blast your scene with light without tripping any circuit breakers as you’re well under 2400W. HMIs are also extremely expensive and potentially dangerous — all HMIs are covered by a special sheet of UV-filtering glass. Without this sheet of glass, the light could literally burn your skin off because of the extreme UV output (you can get sores from ~1-2 minutes of direct exposure). Note that UV is on the complete opposite side of the light spectrum in relation to red and infra-red — the primary output of tungsten lights. Hence it follows that HMIs have a stronger output of blue light, running at 5600K (daylight temperature), and are used to mimic sunlight (which is why ARRI’s HMIs are labelled ‘ARRISun’). Also, as the light functions by sending an arc of electricity through mercury vapour, the current would alternate and the light would flicker without a ballast. The ARRI ballasts are relatively small and extremely quiet, but as a rule, the ballast must be connected to the HMI BEFORE it’s plugged into power, or there’s a chance that the ballast explodes.. not pretty. As with other high output lights, HMIs become extremely hot, meaning that if cold rain falls onto the lens or UV-filtering glass, the drastic change in temperature could crack or shatter the glass.. again, not pretty.
Anyway. If someone asks for a 575W HMI PAR to be set up, here’s what you need:
The lamp itself (an ARRIsun 5, or 575, is about the size of a 1K ARRI tungsten lamp, very high output for such low wattage)
The header cable (connects lamp to ballast)
The ballast
The lens box (PAR lamps are used with lenses that disperse the light in various ways. The default setup is to insert the green lens unless otherwise stated)
The stand (generally not a C-stand, something sturdier such as an Avenger combo, made specifically for lights, with two sizes of spigot)
A shotbag

Fluorescents
A 4-ft kino box is freaking heavy. It’s long, unwieldly, and does my back in. Seasoned gaffers and best boys obviously get by, but otherwise it’s a two-man job.
A 4-ft kino runs at 75W per tube on high power. We were using a 4-bank (ie 4 slots for tubes) which ultimately pulls 300W max.. that’s incredibly efficient, considering the light output of the 4-ft tubes. The kino ballasts allow for each tube to be turned on and off individually, so that intensity and colour temperature can be manipulated on the fly. Each kino box comes with a set of tungsten and daylight balanced tubes — you can tell the difference by the colouration at the ends of each tube (blue socket means daylight). A “mixed grille” is where you’ve installed one tungsten tube, then a daylight, then a tungsten, then a daylight. This makes the colour temperature 4400 — right in the middle of 5600 and 3200. It’s important that you alternate between tungsten and daylight tubes to ensure the colour temperature remains even.. or else half the frame will be daylight and the other half tungsten.. you get the picture.

DIY Lighting
On many days of the shoot, Darryl chose to use home-made lights for different purposes. The most popular was the China ball, which is exactly what it sounds like. A regular tungsten bulb inside a china ball to soften the light and spread it in all directions. Good for a fill, but it’s a bitch to gel because you’ve got to get a sheet of CTB inside the ball and clamp it into position without hurting the paper on the outside.. c’est difficile.
Another DIY light I saw on set was the spacelight. It consisted of 4 long incandescent bulbs arranged on a metal cross inside a cylinder of diffusion. You unzip the diffusion like a tent if you need to gel it or change the bulbs. I’m fairly sure that you hang the spacelight high above the scene to provide a reasonably soft toplight and/or fill. It’s a lightweight construction, easy to hang, and provides quite a bit of light as it’s made from 4 redhead bulbs.

Frames, grids and diff
Lowdown is an ABC comedy. Lighting on set required a great deal of softening compared to what I was used to on student films. To simulate the sun, we’d run the big 1.2K HMI behind a mammoth frame of grid or diff. Essentially, you piece together a large metal frame and tie a large square of diffusion material to it, then clamp the frame onto two C-stands and set it up in front of the light. The diffusion material comes in various strengths, and ‘grid’ is different to straight diffusion (or ‘diff’). Softness also varies depending on the distance between frame and light source. The further away you move the frame of diffusion, the greater the softness, but light output lessens dramatically as well. Hence you need huge lights behind the frames if you want to make the scene ultra-soft. And the larger your frame, the softer the lighting quality, hence the huge frames that must be broken down into separate components to fit into the truck

Lighting safety
Shotbag everything.
Gaff down cables where people are likely to walk
When lighting indoors, watch for water sprinklers, and if necessary, tape a cup over each sprinkler to make sure it doesn’t overheat and destroy your equipment. (when taping things to ceilings, stick the tape to your shirt a few times to make sure that it won’t pull paint off the walls)
When lighting outdoors, prepare for rain by pegging rolls of hogwire over lights and ballasts. Hogwire is a robust mesh coated in waterproof resin.. it’s very noisy, so you’ve got to be careful with it during a take.
When hogwiring ballasts, make sure that there’s enough space for them to ‘breathe’.. they need some space around them to prevent overheating.
Don’t touch lightbulbs that draw more than 200W of power. It’s a universal rule.. I previously thought it only applied to Quartz-halogen bulbs, but the deal is that anything drawing so much power will run extremely hot— touching these bulbs impregnates them with natural oils from your skin, and said oils will superheat and may explode the bulb.. so many potential explosions in lighting dept..

TV2. An Overview

This is a media course. TV2. Sometimes I forget to look at it this way, to consider what the course is doing to me, how it changes my brain from semester to semester. So I’ll look at it now.

TV1 and TV2 have been by far the best courses on offer in this degree. The most relevant, the most engaging, the most rewarding. And it has nothing to do with lecture content, or selected readings in the dossier. It’s just a framework. TV1 and TV2 are structures that force you through the production process, force you to grow and meet people, force you to ‘know your stuff’ or learn the hard way. The most important part of the course is the final due date. It may sound ridiculous, but these courses are catalysts, the due dates are catalysts. And during the last two semesters, I do feel that my production knowledge has grown exponentially. We’re not spoon-fed. We get the basics of production locked down, and from there it’s only a matter of choice, a matter of how much further you’re prepared to go. Then the course itself becomes more about ideas, pacing, narrative, structure, characters, those elusive elements that are difficult pin down and talk about in concrete terms. That’s where the course gives us guidance. It gives us creative fuel, creative feedback and assistance. And that’s great. Anyone can find technical information online if they want it. It’s the creative direction that’s difficult to develop, that sense of knowing what feels “right” after you’ve been numbed by hours upon hours in the edit suites. That’s where this course helps.

Still, after attending the screening, I do feel that just a slight increase in our technical schooling would have saved so many films, made them so much better. RTN monitoring.. configuring levels on the wireless lapels, the apparent discrepancy between slate levels and actual dialogue levels when monitored on the camera, turning off the auto-gain on the Z1p, recording both mixer channels on the Z1p… all of these things are easy to mess up, to forget. It’s difficult, striking a balance between the conceptual and technical elements of production. I’m not blaming the course, that would be utterly stupid. But sometimes, sitting in the lecture theatre, I do get this hunger for some horrific blast of technical information to take onboard, and I wonder if maybe the technical briefings need to be slightly more indepth. I always need to know why I should monitor via RTN, or why I should export the widescreen project as 4:3, or why I shouldn’t draw more than 2400W from a household circuit, etc. Without knowing exactly why it’s necessary, I’ll forget it. Probably that’s just me. I’d like a bit more of that in lectures. But at the same time, I know I can just buy more production books over the holidays and learn everything to the nth degree.. so why have technical lectures? It’s true. It’s fair enough. Tech knowledge is easy to acquire and goes out of date. Conceptualising.. that’s where the party’s at.

Anyway. TV2, specifically, has opened my eyes as to how strong a documentary can be. You’re watching real people. In essence, that’s the appeal. That’s where “Beyond Explanation” works.. Gitta’s so powerful to watch, and I don’t think it’d be possible for an actor to recreate what Gitta gives us. It does scare me a bit.. how can anything fictional be as strong? How can I go into PP2 knowing that whatever I end up making, it will fail to be as compelling as Gitta, because she’s real. I’ll have to go back to silly little films with gags and comical characters.. and after TV2, that does seem a bit small, a bit depressing. But I’m not a documentary person.. it was a great experience this semester, but it’s not where I want to end up. I want to construct something visually powerful. I was lucky enough to get a chance to construct something visually this semester.. but I don’t think I’d be afforded this luxury in most docos. You go there.. you shoot it. That’s how it was, that’s how it will be. Simple. You might move a prac light, or shift the flowers a bit further into frame.. but that’s the extent of your “construction”. And I don’t like that idea. It’s real.. it’s more honest. But I’d take “aesthetically pleasing” over “honest” most of the time, I must confess.

I must wrap this up. This is meant to be an ‘overview’.. hmm. Well. In summation, TV1 and TV2 are great courses. I’ve gotten a taste of both fiction and documentary. I feel comfortable on set, in various roles. I’ve had great guidance from Paul. And this semester especially, I’ve had the chance to work in a great production group with driven, enthusiastic and creative people. I’m just worried about how next year will measure up. It’s going to be difficult to top 2009.