DEFINITION January 2020

DRAMA | CATS

It was difficult to change, as the only way to pan a light left to right was to bring in scissor lifts

such a distance? Your wide shot needs to see a set that is 80ft wide by a 100ft deep and then your close-up needs to be rendered almost in the same conditions. You can’t bring a light in, because it’s in the way, even if it’s not in the way of the character you’re shooting, the camera is in the way of one of the other dancers who is trying to get behind the actor that you’re shooting half way through the dance. They also have to start in one position and end in another.” A lot of Ross’s work involved watching rehearsals in a dance workshop, then plotting those on his drawing of the set that was being constructed, then formulating a lighting plan according to that choreography. He also had to work four or five weeks ahead, because of how large the sets were. He says: “Just running the cable into the L Stage set took two weeks, just to run power to service the lighting. The pre- rig to get that lighting in took three weeks.” As the Great Windmill Street set was 12 sets connected to each other, Ross worked on one set for the prelight one day and then the next set the next day. “This was a huge challenge, and my gaffer Mark Clayton and my rigging gaffer James Summers did an incredible job,” he says. “I worked with a set drawing from the art department that was hand drawn, but to scale of every lighting unit that I’d like to put on to the sound stage. That would be shared with all of my team and then we roughly placed them in those positions with James, and I would finesse it. If the choreography evolved to send the dancers into a different place I hadn’t previously figured, we’d then make a plan to move something somewhere or make an adjustment somewhere. It was

IMAGES A very challenging light design relied on a number of Dino light rigs giving a long- distance punch effect

difficult to change, because the only way to pan a light left to right was to bring in scissor lifts. It’s obviously not something you can do in between takes.” WHICH LIGHTS? A film production like Beauty and the Beast needed to recreate daylight over a whole village set, so had over 700 Kino Flos in banks embedded on giant rigs. Cats is a hybrid of cinema and theatre and needed a different approach, explains Ross. “The most Skypanels we had, for instance, were part of the long set which was the street. One of the things that happens in the street is daylight – most of the film is set at night until the end. So I had 100 Skypanels in softboxes above the rigging. Because we were scaling our world up so much, the sets went all the way to the Reds in the studio, so we had to put the lighting above

the Reds.

“We made the unusual decision in the L Stage to rig a secondary rig 15ft above the Reds, nearer to the roof of the building, so our softboxes sat above and didn’t dangle down and get in the way of the set. There was about one Skypanel every eight feet in the centre section of the street to give me a very low-level soft room tone concept to the fill light of the street. But most of the lighting was using six, nine and 12-bulb dino lights, which are like collections of Par Cans in an array, because I needed that punch over a big distance. Most of the light positions were 40ft away from the cast, so you need to be able to get the light level to right at that distance,” he says. Another thing Ross had to keep in mind is that, when you scale down your world or scale up your world so your cast feels smaller, you also need to scale your light sources. He explains: “I scaled all the light sources by a factor of two. If you were used to shooting an actor’s close-up using a 1K Reefer light for example, which is 1x1m square, then you have to change that dimension to a 2x2m light in order to keep the same continuity of shadows, so your shadows feel softer. The dinos helped me make these bigger light sources. We dropped a lot of textiles from the ceiling, and we used a light source from quite a long way away to keep the floor clear, then hung a textile much closer to the cast member, so effectively the light source quadrupled in size near the cast member to soften the close-ups.” CATS IS CURRENTLY ON WORLDWIDE GENERAL RELEASE.

26 DEF I N I T ION | JANUARY 2020

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