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Enter the Dragon Commercial creator Chris Magee is fired up about the Sun Dragon, a new five-colour LED strip light from Atomos C onventional cinema lights come in the shape of point sources, panels or linear strips,
as a cinematographer in film and TV production in LA, has shot high-end commercials for brands including Ford, GM and Mastercard, and worked around the world shooting commercials, documentaries, music videos and even a feature film. “In the corporate world, we have little to no crew and high expectations,” he explains. “I am interested in any kind of technology that’s going to make my life easier and give me an edge. In particular with the Sun Dragon, I was keen to test scenarios that would be tricky to light with other fixtures.” Shape light with ease Instead of a more conventional fixed, heavy and cumbersome form factor, Sun Dragon is designed as a malleable strip. This makes it easy to flex into any shape, carefully controlling reflections and shadows with a precision that’s simply not possible with traditional fixed-shape lighting.
“Sun Dragons are fantastic for quickly getting light into places where otherwise there would be no time to do so,” continues Magee. “Take for example a person walking at night in a shot: I can just lay a Sun Dragon on the ground, on a hedge or on a bench, over a tree branch, or hung quickly on a couple of stands, and cover the distance of the walk needed for the shot. This might typically take six to eight soft lights laid out evenly – and that’s a lot more work.” If you still need a panel source, simply coil the Sun Dragon in a spiral and it behaves like a panel light source. Wider spirals make a wider light throw, and denser spirals form a closer, more intense beam. “Two Sun Dragons can give me light on two sides very quickly. Alternatively, coiled up they can become a portable, lightweight soft fill light which can be walked with the shot,” advises Magee. “They are great to throw out of focus in the background of a shot to add colour that fits into the environment.”
but Atomos has come up with new LED production and cinema strip lights that deliver a new dimension in both flexibility and performance. Sun Dragon is billed as the world’s first sun spectrum-accurate, five-colour HDR LED production light in an LED strip form. Traditional LED strips are typically not accurate in colour and brightness due to poor LED quality, and the end- to-end accuracy drops off significantly, resulting in varying performance on-set. Sun Dragon solves these issues with its precision five-colour arrangement, a CRI of 99 (Colour Rendering Index) and TLCI of 98 (Television Lighting Consistency Index), ensuring faithful colour and brightness reproduction. Ahead of their release this summer, the lights were put through their paces by the Melbourne-based commercial videographer and photographer Chris Magee. He has spent 20 years working
INCREDIBLE SCALE Sun Dragon’s 2000 lumens of output are very accurate, while the strip light form factor
enables more versatile use
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