Film Lighting Page 7
Source Four ETC
(courtesy of Electronic Theatre Controls, Inc.)
M. David Mullen, ASC
The lights that I use the most today are the ETC Source Four ellipsoidal lights, similar in concept to the old Lekos used in theatrical stage lighting. I can easily bounce them, using the internal metal blades to create a pattern that exactly matches the shape of the bounce card without flags. The Source Four lens produces so little spill that unless the lamp is directly pointed into the camera lens, it is hard to get any flare while looking toward the unit, which again saves on flagging. With different lenses on the Source Four, you can have either a very narrow beam that is very bright or a very wide beam that is dimmer but better for larger bounces. I normally use the narrower lenses to create a sharp, hard, and bright pattern of direct light on something in the frame, to simulate a patch of sunlight coming through a small window. You can even use metal gobo slides in the light that create different shadow pattern effects like for tree branches or venetian blind slats, but since there is a faint chromatic aberration issue that creates a slight colored edge to the pattern, it is less useful for close-up shots.
The Source Four normally has a 575-watt HPL [high-performance lamp] tungsten globe in it, but you can put a K5600 Joker 400 or 800 HMI in Source Four as an after-market alteration. ETC doesn’t make the HMI version themselves because the lamp is not really designed to take that much heat, which reduces the life expectancy of the light and the lamp. To convert it to an HMI, you take that back portion of the unit out that holds the tungsten HPL globe and put an HMI Joker unit in its place using an adapter ring. You have to do it well though, because if the back end is not seated properly, the HMI globe is at a wrong distance from the reflector and you lose a lot of light efficiency. With the narrower lenses in the HMI Source Four, you can have the effect of a mini xenon creating a sharp-edged beam that feels like sunlight.
Robert Jason, gaffer
I love Source Four for various reasons; I like to put patterns in them. Say you have a source going through the window and you make it a soft source. And you mix it up also with several Source Fours that maybe have patterns in them. Like a leaf pattern or whatever, and you can hit various places in the set, maybe couches or whatever, and then throw these lights a little bit out of focus so you get a semihard leafy pattern mixing with this beautiful soft light. Or another way that they work fantastically is to put them very, very low, like on a low stand or on what we call a beaver board, a plate on a piece of wood, all the way on the ground, and bounce them into the ceiling. And you have such control on the Source Four because you can put in the slide and have just the amount of top bounce that you want.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
I use Source Four often as a very controllable and coherent light source. Often I use it for ornamental purposes, splashing the room with a sense of accidental or found light, but I’ve also used it as a key light for people with very happy results. Sometimes in a corner of my set you see a little nest of Source Fours; there could be four or five of them. They just help me to pick up things that I want to see and leave the rest of the set in shadow. To the viewer’s eye it looks like one light source.
Matthew Libatique, ASC
I am using Source Four for bouncing. I’ll use the internal blades to make the smallest square of light from it, and I’ll take the tiniest little bounce card, so the light doesn’t go anywhere else, so it is just hitting the intended target. I’ll put a bit of Hampshire frost or opal on the Source Four to take away the colored edge.
Robert Elswit, ASC
Maxi brutes are great for a big ambient source far away at night. PAR cans are good for filling in the backgrounds. But for the actors I’d rather use Source Four. So when I get into an office interior, not to have the overall flat feel of things, I would often take a Source Four and hit the table with its light to get a little bit of ambience from the table, and sort of highlight places. I do it especially at night. So Rifa-Lite and Source Four is kind of how I do it, with Kino Flos as well. I probably do 75 percent of lighting wih these three units: Rifa-Lites, Kino Flos, and Source Fours.
Dedo DLHM4-300 tungsten light head
(courtesy of Dedotec USA Inc.)
Similar in their beam characteristics to Source Four but with a very unique double aspheric lens system are the Dedolights. They have an amazing range of beam angles, from 4.5-degree in spot position to 46-degree when flooded. The smaller units (100 watts) run on 12 volts, hence they can be powered by a camera battery belt or a car battery. Thanks to the dual-lens design, a Dedolight with a 100-watt lamp in flood position has the light output equal to 300-watt Fresnel studio light. In the spot position a 100-watt Dedolight can outperform a 1000-watt studio Fresnel.
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
I love Dedolights. They’re amazing lights with innovative optics. The optics of their whole line of lights are so clean and precise, you can easily control them just by spot and flood and a little bit of the barndoors. They are particularly good in restaurants and bar scenes to down light tables, when you want to see the source and use the bounce of the table to light your subject. If you are hitting a table with a 150-watt Dedo and using the bounce as a source, it usually has enough output and the output is somehow soft in itself. Even as a direct source light, it has the particular quality about it that I like. When you use them architecturally, they have a quality like no other light.
Richard Crudo, ASC
The Dedolights are fantastic. The cinematographer Dedo Weigert [founder of the company] has got a number of different units that are all compact and well built. Most of them come with a focal spot attachment that allows you to sharpen and cut the beam as you would with a theatrical instrument. All in all, they are a very handy, versatile tool.
Len Levine, gaffer
Dedolight has a great spot. It is nice for accents. It is the cleanest light for architecture. They hide so well. The only time I used the bigger Dedo was for the focal spot. The focal spot on the Dedolight is genius. The small Dedo (150-watt) is one of my favorite lights. It has a tremendous flood/spot range and it is fast to use.
M. David Mullen, ASC
Dedolights are ellipsoidals with a tremendous spot-to-flood range; for their low wattage (100 or 150 watts) they can put out a lot of light. And it’s a very sharp 3200K light that can be cut easily with barndoors, snoots, or a projector attachment that takes gobo patterns. The light is very small and lightweight, making it easy to rig and/or hide behind objects.
XENON LIGHTS
When a very powerful beam of light is needed, it is hard to beat the xenon. It is a daylight source, operating on a DC voltage and dimmable electronically. Among cinematographers and gaffers there is a wide range of opinions about xenons.
Xenon 4–7K light
(courtesy of Strong Entertainment Lighting, division of Ballantyne Strong)
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
Many people use them as heavy backlights and sun sources. I always find xenon light to be very obvious. It always looks like a xenon, rather unnatural to my eye. The optical pattern is awful. When you flood it out, there is a big dark spot; when you spot it in, it’s misshaped and very harsh. When you have atmosphere [smoke, fog] on the set, and you see the structure of the beam, the poor quality of light is clear. However, xenons do have their application if the scene requires a clear shaft of light. I would opt for using a MoleBeam (tungsten or HMI) over a xenon.
Robert Jason, gaffer
Xenons were immensely popular after Blade Runner. Everyone was imitating that look. Now they’ve become just a tool that should be used for certain situations. They are terrific for a very, very strong backlight. You can project them from a further distance than you can with any other light that I can think of right offhand. Of course to me they are not much use for anything but backlights or lights through smoke, because they don’t have an even light. We all know that there is a big black circle in the mi
ddle.
Janusz Kaminski, cinematographer
Xenons are unfortunately very labor-intensive; they are not fully reliable because they flicker and they shut themselves off. You get a limited angle, you cannot point them straight up, or straight down, you have to use mirrors. But it is the only light if you want a sharp sense of sunlight.
M. David Mullen, ASC
I use xenons when I want a powerful, sharp, projected beam of light. An ellipsoidal light like a Source Four creates a similar effect but on a much smaller and dimmer scale compared to a xenon.
Xenons are very finicky; if the wind is blowing at all, you see a dancing beam pattern. It is just like when you are reflecting the real sun off a mirror, back into a room; if the mirror vibrates, the sunlight pattern will shake. Even the heat wave that the xenon generates can cause the light itself to slightly shimmer and dance. There are all sorts of problems with xenons, but since they produce sharp light whose rays are parallel, the effect is closer to the look of sunlight than what any other lamp can do.
Wally Pfister, ASC
We used 7K xenons in The Dark Knight. Whenever you want that beautiful hard push, sunlight coming in, I bring out the 7K xenons. My gaffer doesn’t like to use the 10K xenons because they are much bigger and the 10Ks are not so reliable. So we use the 7Ks every once in a while. We use the xenon torchlights all the time. Anytime we have a flashlight scene, we use xenon torchlights.
Mauro Fiore, ASC
I am not crazy about xenons anymore, because of the fluctuation. You see the bulb burning in the shaft of light and they are very delicate when you move them, or if there is any wind, you actually see the light moving in the shot. So I try to stay away from xenon unless I need it to get a specific shot.
Richard Crudo, ASC
Xenon units are very handy when you need a hot, sourcey, sunlight-type effect. But they’re a bit delicate in that you can’t rig most of them in a downward-pointing position. To counter this, generally we use mirrors placed at a specific angle and then focus the lamp upward so that we get the downward effect. The mirror also helps preserve the hard quality of that light.
James Plannette, gaffer
Bouncing xenons into a mirror avoids many of their problems. I think it is also good to have an additional light right next to the mirror so the whole window is covered with light and the beam doesn’t look like just a shaft. One thing you have to be careful of when lighting through windows is that window glass sometimes has quite a bit of green in it. It is hard to see because our eye corrects it quickly.
Len Levine, gaffer
In xenons I primarily use the 7K and the 4K. The 10K is too big and a little less reliable but it is a titan when you need it. The 7K is the workhorse and the 4K is small for tighter spaces. The problem with xenon is always the same. It is a circle beam, and if you put it somewhere where you can’t hide that circle, you can get busted. But if you take it around back, or use a breakup to mask the circle, it works great. The bulb is magnified by a parabolic reflector and creates a collimated beam, so it’s ridiculously efficient and sends that beam a long way. You can send a beam of light from incredible distances, like across a river or from one skyscraper to the next or from a pier to the shore or bounce off the top of a building and pan it to create a traveling edge. It’s in a class all its own. The 4K can be plugged into a putt-putt [generator] for a powerful remote unit.
Russell Carpenter, ASC
I use xenon lights to help create or define an architecture in the camera frame using intense beams and a tiny bit of finely diffused smoke. We did a scene where I wanted to get a two-for-the-price-of-one effect, so I had these mirrors around the set, and I bounced a 1K xenon beam into them to get multiple beams from one source. Hampshire is my diffusion of choice for xenon lights because any heavier diffusion usually knocks the guts out of the beam.
BEAM PROJECTORS
A more stable but less powerful equivalent to a xenon is the beam projector manufactured by Mole-Richardson Company as the MoleBeam. It comes in a few sizes, from an 18 in. diameter, 2K tungsten to a 36 in. diameter using a 10/20K tungsten or 12K HMI.
Robert Baumgartner, cinematographer and gaffer
When using a tungsten MoleBeam, you do get a pretty significant filament shadow, a blessing and a curse. The filament shadow can create a very interesting pattern on the background, while maintaining a sharp shaft through atmosphere. That breakup on the object that the light ultimately hits is far more interesting to look at than with a xenon; it also helps to make the light look more natural, as if sunlight is passing through the branches of a tree. However, if your lit object is a bare wall or a floor, nothing is going to hide the fact that the light is artificial.
Michael Bauman, gaffer
Beam projectors are great for shafts of light. They are also great for creating a very realistic ambient bounce off the floor as if from the sun. Often they are hung outside the window so they create a great shaft and then bounce off the floor. It fills a space very nicely. Beam projectors give you a quality similar to xenons, but unlike xenons, they don’t have the flicker problems at extreme tilt angles. In tungsten they go up to 20,000 watts and in HMI to 12,000 watts.
5,000-watt 24 in. MoleBeam Projector
(courtesy of Mole-Richardson Co.)
Dion Beebe, ASC
On my last film, Nine, I fell in love with the MoleBeam beam projector. It is just a beautiful light. We used the 5, 10, and 20Ks. It is a warm beam as opposed to the cool xenon. Xenon is effective for that cool dramatic light. The great advantage of the MoleBeams is that they are dimmable. You can take this big beam and dim it down to a very low level and get this beautiful warm value.
Richard Crudo, ASC
Beam projectors are great for their ability to deliver a very narrow beam of light. Mole-Richardson has a wonderful line of these lamps that I’ve often used in conjunction with smoke to create sharply defined shafts of light.
David Devlin, gaffer
The light that comes from a beam projector is square because the filament is square, and the mirror is magnifying the filament. The round light of a Fresnel when it hits the ground looks like an odd dollop. So it requires a flag to square it. The beam projector light you can use almost like a big Leko light. Point it on something and you get selective lighting that already has its own natural breakup. And the light that comes out, since the filament is a coil, when you point it at a wall, you see the filament. So it looks like it is coming through glass or something already.
Mauro Fiore, ASC
Beam projectors are beautiful. I really like these lights quite a bit. I used them extensively on futuristic films, even HMI beam projectors. It is a really beautiful light source because it creates just enough directness and doesn’t look artificial like xenon does.
M. David Mullen, ASC
I’ve used the tungsten MoleBeams on sets; the beam you get is not quite as sharp as from a xenon. It looks a little more like a Fresnel at full spot. The main advantage of the MoleBeam is that I can get a more intense spot effect than with a Fresnel of similar wattage. A 5K MoleBeam can create a very hot slash of sunlight comparable to what a 20K Fresnel can create, just without the same spread. The downside is that the MoleBeam pattern is a little strange; it sort of looks like a fuzzy grid.
MOVING LIGHTS
Contemporary lighting techniques freely cross over the borders between the various entertainment industries. Moving lights, also called automated or intelligent lights, used for years in rock concerts, are now very much present on many film sets.
Dion Beebe, ASC
On Chicago we used the Vari-Lite system. These, what I call theatrical lights, are used a lot for rock ’n’ roll concerts and Broadway. When I am working with this system, I have a separate board operator as well as a technical crew to support that aspect of the lighting. The real advantage in using theatrical lighting systems is that they are designed to run remotely through a desk and allow you to program multiple cues through a scene or musi
cal number. I think that there is a tendency now, even in regular film lighting, to use remote controls, where you can take conventional fixtures and you can pan, tilt, as well as spot and flood them remotely. Which makes a lot of sense because quite often the lamp is rigged high and suddenly you’ve got to get somebody up to the gantry or in a lift, just to tip the light down.
Michael Bauman, gaffer
There is a major sea change happening in lighting instruments used in our business. A few years ago I never used automated fixtures on a film set except for a concert or club scene. These instruments have advanced tremendously in the last few years and now are a valuable tool on the set. They have the functionality and versatility in creating color or movement. I often use lights from an Italian company called Clay Paky. They came out with a series of lights called Alpha Profile, which are very quiet. They have remote-controlled shutters and color-changing patterns. They not only allow a quick way to focus lights but create subtle movement in the light, to give it some life. Clay Paky Alpha Profiles we use a lot.