DEFINITION April 2018

LIGHTING PHANTOM THREAD

of where things would fall.”

about what we needed to do and how we needed to make adjustments. That was a lot of constant tweaking. There were so many facets of the location that were constantly in movement.” The location was so limiting that as soon as they finished shooting in one room they would move to the next room. Everybody would then put the junk from the new room into the room that they were just in. It was a very compact space, to put it mildly. But because of Mike’s day job of being CTO of LiteGear he was able to call on some of their innovations to help the design. “There is a scene in the film where they have their first dinner date; we had a lot of LEDs in the practical that was on the table,” he explains. “Kino Flo used to have a unit called the Bar Fly series which was a very compact fluorescent with a very nice honeycomb grid on it. We ended up taking those and pulling out the fluorescent aspect of it and throwing a LED inside as the engine to emit light. That proved to be very helpful because we needed a lot of low-level lighting, we were shooting at about 640 or 800 ASA so we were kind of in the digital space as far as our ASAs were. Most of the movie was shot at a T2.5 or T2.8; we were shooting film so didn’t need a huge abundance of light. We were averaging between five and ten foot candles digitally speaking." PREPPING THE HOUSE To give Mike a chance to deal with the

The shooting relationship Mike had with Paul the director and Colin the camera operator did take some getting used to, but it flourished. “Paul is a very strong technical person and he really knows lenses, he really knows composition and framing. He would take a viewfinder and some lenses and be on the set with the actors by himself and the AD. They would spend a little bit of time going over stuff and then the rest of us would come in and we would talk about shots. Paul and Colin would work out what the shots would be and then he and I would have a conversation about the lighting. We did a lot of that beforehand in prep but he still has to direct the movie and all that. “Our conversation about lighting would be a general discussion and he would want more of something and less of something else and then I would manage the exposures and that was generally the super quick gist of the workflow. I don’t think it would have worked with every director because he is very proficient with the language and not intimidated with the technical aspects of it.” Phantom Thread might have been lo-fi in comparison to something like Mindhunter with its incessant corrections and realignment but shows that what is great in filmmaking is that two such diverse approaches can both look so fantastic.

limitations of the main house, he had to leave other locations and go back to London to continue prepping the rooms. “We got into the house about five weeks into the movie and so we would go back from the shoots in the Cotswolds and in York. Any weekend we had off, we would go to London to this building to talk about what had to happen. For instance there are a series of chandeliers in the film on the walls in the main room; they were all replaced with LEDs so we could lower the intensity without a major colour shift. With incandescent you would have had a problem there. “We would take a camera in there a few weeks prior to shooting and do some tests, there was a lot of testing on the journey. I use a Sony A7S MkII camera as my main exposure camera mainly because of its low light and video capability. I took about 11000 photos and some video to get an idea

WE WERE AVERAGING BETWEEN FIVE AND TEN FOOT CANDLES

DEFINITION APRIL 2018

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