Robert Primes: Chimera Soft Light

From American Cinematographer, Big City Girl by Stephanie Argy (February 1999)

In spite of these difficulties, Primes has managed to carefully maintain the photographic approach that Reeves wants for the show.

"Almost all of the light is soft, and it's very often shining through Chimeras, or frames of 1000H, Chimera cloth, 216, 250 or opal. Those are the diffusion materials we use... One of the nice things about hard light is that you can really shape it. But how do you cut soft light?"

In recent years, the cinematographer has found the answer in Chimera's honeycomb grids, which attach in front of the company's flexible softboxes to concentrate the light, rather than letting it scatter. The grids come in 30-, 60- and 90-degree increments, referring to the angles to which the light is allowed to spread.

"In the past, I was using the 60s most of the time, the 90s some of the time, and the 30s not very much. Marshall [gaffer Marshall Adams] started using the 30-degree grid, which takes a tremendous amount of light. You need 10,000 watts to get anything out of it, and by golly, there it is, just a soft little spotlight. You can have someone in a little glow, and light nowhere else... Our extra smallest Chimeras use 650W tweenies, while our largest use 20Ks."

- Robert Primes, ASC

John Lindley: Shooting Color and B&W

From American Cinematographer, Black-and-White in Color by Bob Fisher (November 1998)

Lindley made several accommodations to shooting color film for conversion to black-and-white. He used hard light to get crisp separations in scenes with monochrome characters. He also used a dimmer control board for lighting transitions when a black-and-white person left an area and a color character moved in.

"The black-and-white characters would be hard-lit, even though they were occupying the same space where we had soft light on a color character. Almost every light was wired to a dimmer board. The operator watched a monitor with a live video feed from the tap on the camera. We did a lot of cues on the fly as people moved around sets.

Your eye naturally goes to color in a black-and-white world. If you pick up a newspaper that has one color photograph and a bunch of other black-and-white ones, everybody looks at the color one first. It's human nature."

- John Lindley, ASC

He further explains that the same dynamic applies when there are color and black-and-white characters in the same shot.

"That was great if [the black-and-white person] was the character Gary wanted to highlight. But if it was a two-shot and he wanted to feature both characters, I sometimes adjusted the composition to give the black-and-white person a little more prominence."

- John Lindley, ASC

Eduardo Serra: Softlight & Contrast

From American Cinematographer, Dream Weavers by Ron Magid (November 1998)

"I do want modeling and contrast in the image, so my main goal is always to reconcile these two things that people might think are contradictory: softlight and contrast. That's my obsession."

- Eduardo Serra, AFC

Janusz Kaminski: Softlight, Flatlight, & China Balls

From American Cinematographer, Breaking Slavery's Chains by Stephen Pizzello (January 1998)

"Before we began shooting, I watched Queen Margot and Interview with a Vampire. Rousselot uses China balls a lot, and he underexposes in his color palette. All of his colors are a bit pastel, and he gets a bit of grain in the movie. Everything falls very softly into the shadows, and the actors' faces have a painterly quality. While watching his movies, David Devlin and I kept asking ourselves, 'How is he doing it?' We finally figured out that there was always a rather large distance between the object that he was photographing and the background, and that he was often using flat light. We started playing with that, using very flat, frontal lighting and moving the object that we were shooting away from the wall, so the shadows would fall away. We also underexposed by two stops. And sure enough, the magic started happening! It was like reaching another level."

- Janusz Kaminski

"We wanted to have a textural feeling in this film, and the way you'd normally achieve that is to use hard light, We were trying to do the same thing with soft light, which led us to light frontally with smaller units. That gave us patches of light, but we still had contrast in the scenes. If you start using side angles and off angles, things become a bit less painterly, because you don't see the falloff of the light wouldn't break. When you allow the intensity of the light to fall off on objects, it really brings you in form the darkness."

- David Devlin, Gaffer for Janusz on Amistad

"A long time ago I was playing with them, but I never really learned how to use them properly. On a few occasions I would grab a China Ball, look at it and say, 'Nah, I don't like it.' But on this movie we started playing with them again, and I think I've finally learned how to work with them a bit. China balls are very interesting, because you can move them up and down during a take; it becomes a very convenient way to light. But China balls are not really durable, and you still have to shape the light that you get from them. It's also problematic to attach them to C-stands, because they always sway."

- Janusz Kaminski

"If you put a normal China ball on the floor, it will just roll over and burn a hole in itself. To avoid that type of problem, our best boy, Larry Richardson, designed a new type of space light for this show."

- David Devlin, Gaffer for Janusz on Amistad

This variation of the typical paper lamp offered a light source that could be adjusted more easily, as well as a flat bottom to prevent it from rolling over. Richardson also equipped the new units with hard mounts so that they could be attached to C-stands with greater stability. He constructed 12 of these special lights, which were used in conjunction with normal China balls for many of the film's scenes.

Emmanuel Lubezki: Large Soft Boxes

From American Cinematographer, Galloping Ghost by Stephen Pizzello (December 1999)

The crew's grim slog was brightened a bit by Lubezki's lighting setup, which comprised three giant softboxes suspended from a trio of 250-ton construction cranes. The roof of each unit contained six 24-light (Par 64) Dinos aimed downward, while three of the sides contained a trio of 9-light Maxi-Brutes angled at 45 degrees. According to gaffer John Higgins,

"Our initial idea for that set was to have a tank-track road ringing the set, and we did tests with various lighting rigs at positions we could access from the tracks. That idea proved to be impractical for many reasons. Instead, we decided to suspend these very large soft sources on rotating bases that could be positioned at any point above the set and still be kept hidden. The art department built a fantastic scale model of the set, and when we studied it we though there might be three points where we could position our supports. We eventually located a company that had three 250-ton telescoping cranes with a reach of 67 meters [approximately 220 feet]. The art department then made working scale models of these cranes, which we positioned around the model. This test confirmed that the only way to reach all points on the set was to use three cranes. We then did a test with a half-size version of our rig, which confirmed that our theory would work."

- John Higgins, gaffer for Lubezki on Sleepy Hollow

Each of the completed soft-boxes consisted of a 20' x 20' base with sides 12' high built from scaffolding. The units had to be strong enough to be suspended safely with the lights attached, and the set''s roads also had to be reinforced to support the cranes' weight. Each box could provide 250k of light, and full gridcloth was affixed to the bottom and sides of each. Long black ropes were attached to the corners of the rigs so the crew could control their rotation from the ground. The last lamp mounted on the base of each rig was a 70k Lighting Strikes unit, and the power to the rigs was provided by twin 200k generators. The rest of the power for the set was provided by three other generators, while a complete cabling system was wired and then buried during construction of the set. The system enabled the lighting crew to deliver large amounts of power to any part of the set very quickly.

..."In a funny way, using the cranes was cheaper than lighting the sets any other way. When you rig immense softlights up on cranes, you can move them really quickly. Each rig has only one light, and you can put it anywhere you want, which allowed us to do more setups a day. We also didn't have to use much supplemental lighting at all-- almost none, in fact. Sometimes from the ground we'd add a bit of fill light just to see the actors' eyes and so forth. Any extra lights we used on the ground were always aimed through diffusion grids. Bu the time the light reached the subjects it was simply a 20' by 20' gird of light, so it almost didn't matter whether we were using 10ks or Mini-Brutes. A cinematography purist might not agree with that statement, but once you put the light through so many layers, it really doesn't matter what kind of fixture you're using. I would basically tell the crew which stop I wanted, and John Higgins would pick a light and use it to fill a 20' by 20' frame."

- Emmanuel Lubezki, ASC, AMC