COMEDY | AVENUE 5
pushed him towards the combination of texture, tone and lighting he used. “I love to light the wide shots and let the actor’s work within that. The challenge was to light a room cinematically in a way that could be cross shot by four cameras. That was a challenge I relished.” So it became more about integrating lighting into such a huge sets. Bolter explains: “I was using things like RGBWW LED strips – we actually had 5km of LED strips across the spaceship. That gave me complete control and you didn’t have to hide it, you could look straight at it in-shot and it looked integrated into the set. I could live dim it with my gaffer from an iPad, so in a take, I could say that this light needs to come up 10% or add a bit of colour to that – it just gave us complete control.” As such, Bolter was able to incorporate the LED strips over the curved walls of the internals of the spaceship design. “We looked for these LED strips all over the world and we found these in Japan. In fact, we bought them straight from the manufacturers. It was a pretty massive order, there was no other way really, and some of the stuff that was a bit more off-the-shelf or just cheaper I found had problems. For instance, if you dimmed them down too low you would get a bit of flicker, or there would be a little green
We actually had 5km of LED strips across the spaceship. That gave me complete control
spike, or there would be various things that weren’t great. The ones we picked were versatile and had a diffusion option, so it wasn’t just bare-pixel LED – we were able to diffuse it quite nicely so you could just look at it in shot,” he recalls. As for practical lamps and other things, they were able to hide them in shot. “There would always be a rig hidden in almost
every shot with some of the 180 Skypanels we had on the show,” says Bolter. “The atrium, for instance, was our major set, it had three storeys on either side with an area in the middle with all kinds of rooms going off to the side. It was pretty much like a massive shopping mall. In the atrium, I had two 40x40ft softboxes filled with S60 Skypanels, so that gave me the ability to completely control a soft-top source.” IN SPACE, YOU STILL LIGHT One of the challenges that Bolter encountered during prep was that, in space, the time of day doesn’t change, as he explains. “There’s no atmosphere, no weather, outside is infinite black.” That means no daylight, so they had to light every set for three different states: daytime, evening time and night-time. “Daytime was bright, warm and neutral; for evening we increased the contrast a little bit, warmed up some of the practical fixtures, which gave it a bit more of a lounge type of feel and then for night-times, we took it into a sort of moon-lit feel. We gave it a little bit of blue and a little bit of green and just darkened it down again, giving it an ‘after hours’ feel.” With such huge sets, it became all about the prelight, says Bolter. “I had a two week on-camera prelight to light all of the sets. We’d start with a really big wide and dial in a daily setting, then work our way around the ship with that setting, making sure it didn’t just work for the wide, but did for close-ups and everything else in various areas of the ship. We could get problems, like when there were too many shadows, we found a way to fix that and balance everything out. We repeated that again
LEFT Frame grabs from Avenue 5 show how beautiful the Leavesden sets were
36 DEF I N I T ION | FEBRUARY 2020
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