ROUND TABLE
dependability, great support and user interfaces designed by someone that pays attention to what you need. CAWS: Reliability is key, especially in the professional market where product failure can be costly. Nanlite, for example, goes to great lengths to produce accurate and consistent lighting, with firmware upgrades to keep products up to date. What are the essential lighting modifiers filmmakers should own nowadays? CAWS: If a stills photographer has legacy flash kit, especially the universal Bowens fitting, then it makes perfect sense to use their softboxes and grid combinations on LED spotlights. If starting from scratch, a combination of spot monolight and LED panels can get similar results. Nearly all will have accessory options providing softbox or grid solutions. KANG: Eggcrates and any lighting control devices that keep the light from spreading out. It retains a large area source without spilling light everywhere. And reflectors: a few professional brands out there have started to create high-quality reflectors like CRLS or Lightstream. How much should an aspiring filmmaker focus on learning lighting techniques and how should they go about it? KANG: A significant amount of time should go into it because lighting makes or breaks the mood in a story. If something doesn’t match the story you’re telling, you may not know how to fix it because of not knowing how lighting affected the mood. Watch the movies made by master cinematographers like Gordon Willis or Harris Savides. Study painters and photographers and try to replicate the lighting in images that resonate with you. CAWS: An understanding of the basics in most areas, especially lighting, leads to exceptional imagery – which I would have thought any aspiring image creator would want to achieve.
CAWS: The purists would say DMX, or the latest wireless versions, as ultimately in the professional arena this would be the tool of choice. However, for most image creators, easy-to-install apps like Nanlink offer a wide range of control. With the shift to Bluetooth rather than 2.4G wireless on all the most recently introduced Nanlite models, all you need is a phone to be able to control your lighting. KANG: It depends on the level of budget and production. On smaller productions, something like Blackout Lighting Console app on an iPad is going to offer the longest-term value for most sets. It’s a professional console, but not hard to learn. It doesn’t rely on Bluetooth – it uses DMX- based control, so you get immediate and responsive changes. To do on-set image-based lighting, apps like Madmapper and Resolume give video pixel-mapping capability to fixtures. On larger productions, professional consoles out there like Hog 4, EOS or GrandMA3 – as well as media servers like Disguise, Mbox or Pixera – are the big kids in town. They offer all technical bells and whistles to run large shows. GAMMONS: Blackout is a professional Art- Net/sACN DMX lighting console app that’s popular among filmmakers as it offers the most features and the best control. The Rotolight range can be controlled via Elinchrom triggers, while the Titans have Bluetooth connectivity for app control, LumenRadio CRMX, wired and wDMX – and the Neo 3 and AEOS 2 are controllable via the new Rotolight app. Lots of lighting fixtures seem to offer the same but at a wide range of prices. What do you get for investing in a high-price, big-name brand? KANG: You get what you pay for. If you’re buying lower-cost goods, that will most likely get either lower hardware quality, worse support or customer service and terrible user interfaces. A higher price buys you better product stability and
lost in the weeds. No one in an audience ever cares about what happened on-set. They’re only thinking about the story that they see. The biggest myth is that lighting doesn’t matter: it does. CAWS: Probably thinking that someone can create things better than you can. With the kit available today, anything is achievable. Will LED lighting ever be as powerful as the largest HMIs? KANG: Yes, but it most likely won’t take the shape and form of a typical 18K HMI. LEDs don’t exist in a singular point of space to generate a large amount of light like an HMI globe does. LEDs are individual pieces of semiconductor with certain limits, so a dense array with a massive amount of cooling will be how this manifests. CAWS: Given time, yes. Many motion picture industry experts say that they already prefer the latest, more powerful COB spotlights over their traditional HMIs.
With so many ways of remote control for lights, what’s the best and why?
ART AND SCIENCE Higher-end tube lights such as these Quasar Science Rainbows have advanced computer control and well-engineered mounting solutions, making them a delight to work with on-set
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