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| HMI with Reflector |
A couple of years ago I tried lighting a chroma-key set with Kino cold fluorescents, and inter cutting this with soft and hard sets lit with tungsten in a magazine/news studio setting. Although it was successful the difference in light levels meant that the vision ops needed to be on the ball with the racking.
With the closure of the studio at the National Media Museum, the building of our replacement studio came with some added stipulations. Namely, it had to have a green footprint, which meant it had to be very energy efficient and had to be built within a fairly tight budget. Not having been involved with the build meant that I inherited a lighting rig specified by an estates department to suit their energy requirements and budget, but has been a bit off-the-wall from the point of view of making TV programmes. The salesman must have seen them coming and off-loaded all his surplus soft-lights. Totally impractical for a dynamic TV studio set-up.
The cyclorama is lit by Ianiro cold fluorescent cyc lights which I cannot really comment on as we currently have a Chroma panel light wall filling the studio, which means I haven't seen how evenly they are able to light the cloth. Many manufactures are now selling LED cyc lights that can produce lots of nice coloured patterns but cannot produce an even illumination to a cyclorama cloth which is the most important thing to look for in a cyc light. In addition, many LED lamps produce multiple shadows, making them useless for most TV and film work. Nice idea, but no banana! I'm so glad the estates department didn't buy LED cycs, and I'm hoping that the cold fluorescents will live up to the quality that I was getting from my old Desisti tungstens.
Unfortunately, the rest of the grid has been filled with Ianiro ICE 4 softs which spray light all over the place. They are all fitted with mirrored hoods so trying to cut and flag the light is an absolute bloody nightmare. All four sides of the hood are screwed together so they don't quite work like barn doors. As a result, I have had to be a bit creative with the hoods in order to use them as back-lights. Not ideal, but they have done the job. Apparently, there are honeycombs available for these lights which will help contain the spillage and direct the light forwards which will make the light more controllable for use as soft fills.
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| Bodged ICE 4 used as backlight |
Apparently there are some LED Fresnels on order but as far as I can tell, none have yet managed to get out of the Ianiro factory. The lack of low energy spots materialising from Italy has resulted in me digging out some Desisti 1kW tungstens and becoming creative with the low power feed coming into the studio. After tripping the breakers several times, I eventually sussed out which sockets were on each breaker and managed to spread the load accordingly
Because the softs were already fitted with 3200 Kelvin tubes, mixing in the old tungstens was quite easy. For fills, I have again had to find alternatives to the spray-light-all-over-the-place Ianiros, and I resorted to digging out two Parabeams that I have been using for location work. Like the Ianiros, they use 4 x 55Watt folded fluorescent tubes, but have egg crates on the front which prevents light spilling all over the place. I hope I can get some honeycombs for the Ianiros at a later date, so that I can use the Parabeams for location work again.
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| Kino Parabeams providing soft fills and 1kW Desisti tungsten Fresnels as key lights |
The other issue I have with this new rig is that they chose DMX fixtures rather than using supply sockets on dimmers..It is not as straight forward moving lamps around in the grid because of all the additional daisy-chained DMX cables. That 5 minute job now takes hours!. If I had designed the rig I would have put DMX break-out points all along the bars next to the power sockets.....but hey, remember that tight budget? The riggers even tie-wrapped all the cables to the rig and none of the yolks are pole-adjustable. Thanks guys!
Incidentally, the Chroma Panels were originally used on BBC Look North, and the set has a rear projection screen that I backlit with a gelled up 1kW Desisti and slashed with a Martin to produce a colour-changing pattern.
Earlier this year, I used the Parabeams on location for the first time, and they produce a nice, soft, even light but were a bit lacking in power to compete with bright sunlight streaming through the glass-fronted, South-facing offices that we were shooting in. Lighting wasn't the only issue with the location but, hey.....it cost us nowt.
The problem of God's big light in the sky, was resolved with judicious use of Rosco scrim and ND on the windows, all neatly cut to size by yours truly, but we soon found out that you can't get away with Rosco on HD shoots in the way you could with good old standard definition. It's really noticeable when the action is close to the glass.
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| Rosco Scrim to cut daylight |
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| Moire patterning visible on windows |
Even with the windows gelled up, we still had to get the Parabeams close in to the action. The effect was very subtle, natural and fairly flat looking, which was what was required. For harder, more dramatic stuff, it was back to Redheads and Blondes. Good old tungsten. And for moody low-key stuff, sometimes a bedside lamp is all you need.
Meanwhile, on the LED front...............I picked up a Lite Panels LP Micro camera top light a few years ago and have used it successfully as a fill for talking heads. It lifts the eye shadows just enough without being too obtrusive. It's no replacement for a Sungun though.
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| LED Ring Light |
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| Lite Panela LP Micro |
I've also used it for macro work filming caterpillars in the studio, and night-flying moths on location. It worked fine for the studio shoot, but for the location work, I switched to an LED ring-light that I got off eBay.....one of those cheap unbranded ones from Hong Kong.
It actually out-performed the far more expensive Lite Panels lamp.
The downside of most LED lamps is that the shear number of LEDs required causes horrible, un-natural multiple shadows, especially if trying to use them as an alternative to a point source spot light such as a Red-head or a Fresnel.
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| Ugly multiple shadows |
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