GAFFER ' S CORNER | JERAD MOLKENTH I N
‘spider dump’, so we had to scramble and pull out every HMI and Skypanel that we had to match the lighting that had been established during the rest of that scene.” Molkenthin reflects on the scene he is most proud of lighting, when Willard arrives home to Emma and Earskell’s house. “In the kitchen and the bedroom, a gas lamp is the motivating light source. But to be able to actually light that scene and supplement the lamp, we devised a homemade attachment on to the face of an Arri 650W fresnel. I did a Home Depot run and found an HVAC round tee duct that my best boy, Oren Jones, then affixed to a speed rig, so that it could be attached to the front of the fresnel. He also cut pieces of half and full CTO, plus diffusion, which was placed inside the open end of the duct tee, while the other end of the tee was capped. The idea was to have the light beam from the fresnel bounce around inside the metal ductwork, then through the open end so it would be a less direct and softer source. Any light spill was controlled with a black wrap snoot. I think the end result was a beautiful light that convincingly looked like it was coming from the gas lamp.” He concludes, “One other source that we used, to give the actors an eye light in tricky low-light scenes, was a mini Maglite flashlight. I used it with the lens hood off, and my best boy once again fashioned sleeves of varying ‘flavours’ of CTO and ND gels so that we could warm up the bulb and control its intensity. It was a great quick, easy and low-cost way of adding an eye light next to the lens of the camera.” THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME IS CURRENTLY STREAMING ON NETFLIX WORLDWIDE It was completely dark when we filmed the ‘spider dump’, so we had to scramble and pull out every HMI and Skypanel
ABOVE Jerad Molkenthin at Red Mountain Park, the location of the prayer log, with rigging gaffer, Sean Feehan. Photo courtesy of Marc Hammer
provide us with our ‘moonlight’. The other main sources were the period flashlights, which were colour corrected with 1/4 CTO and either 1/8 or 1/4 Minus Green gels.” About the church location, Molkenthin reveals that the windows on each side of the building made placing the HMIs in a way that wouldn’t be seen on camera quite challenging: “We had just one corner of the building where we could place a 125ft condor rigged with an Arrimax 18K. The height of the articulating condor wasn’t needed as much as its length and ability to place the lamp where we needed it to be, in order to light through the windows without the base of the condor being seen. The rest of the lighting was done from the ground using Arri 9Ks and 4Ks on American Roadrunner stands and steel combo stands, which could be moved around and hidden between windows as needed. “We spent a week at the church location filming all of the scenes there, and each day the short spring daytime hours created a bit of a struggle. For the scene where Roy pours spiders on his head, it was completely dark outside by the time we filmed the actual
for certain scenes before the clouds covered the sky.” Two of the most challenging locations Molkenthin faced were at the prayer log and church. “The prayer log scenes were filmed at Red Mountain Park in a section of woods that created a small valley, and the log itself was set between two hills that rose above it at 45° angles. This area was also set back 400ft or more from the road where our equipment trucks and generators were parked, so everything to be hand-carried in. Due to budget constraints, grip and electric crews were kept to eight people per department. I restricted the electric crew to five shooting electrics, including myself, and three rigging electrics, headed up by rigging gaffer, Sean Feehan. Needless to say, we went home each night thoroughly exhausted! For the night exterior at the prayer log, two Arrimax 18K HMIs did the heavy lifting, flanking from either side of the hill and punching through the foliage to
14 DEF I N I T ION | DECEMBER 2020
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