I've become fascinated by lighting lately. It can be used so creatively in setting the mood of a scene in a film.
I started out by experimenting with a 650-watt fresnel. Fresnels have historically been the workhorses of the movie studios, because they throw an intense and beautiful light across a considerable distance.
However, the light from a fresnel is very bright, and what cinematographers call "hard light," because it tends to create intense shadows. To see how beautiful such a light can be, see Fellini's film 8 1/2.
But in general, hard shadows don't look good on the human face. To soften them, something is done to soften the light. There's two ways: Bounce the light off a wall or reflector onto the subject, or put the light through a diffusion material.
I've come to prefer the latter, and for that purpose chose a Chimera light box, which goes around the fresnel or open light and creates a soft surface of light several times larger than the original light source.
Because the light is coming from a larger surface, the shadows it creates become softer and more diffuse, or it may create no shadows at all.
I find that I like relatively diffused light because it's more subtle.
My next experiment was with a Mole-Richardson 750w Softlite, which contains a white metal reflector built in to it, which the light bounces off of. Thus the light scatters a bit and becomes softer.
Like a fresnel, this light also uses a quartz-halogen lamp and thus runs very hot. You need good gloves to adjust it in any way after it's been on for a few minutes. But I found that the light wasn't soft enough for my purposes.
The next experiment was with a fluorescent light, the Kino-Flo Diva-Lite 400. This light is really cool, because it's dimmable.
Normally you can't dim professional lights, because their color temperature will do down (the picture will become more yellowish-orange). But these new fluorescents have been designed so that the color temperature remains constant as the bulbs are dimmed. It's way cool to be able to dim a light to exactly the level you want it.
The other downfall of fluorescent lights, that they look too green (which makes human faces look terrible) has also been corrected with recent designs that use full-spectrum bulbs.
Full-spectrum fluorescents can shine more or less evenly across the whole visible light band, from deep red to blue-violet, so that they can look quite terrific on human faces. With 3200 degree (color temperature) bulbs, they can be mixed quite nicely with quartz-halogen lights such as fresnels. And if you need daylight lighting of 5600 degrees (color temperature), you can just put in daylight bulbs. So they're very flexible.
Recently we've also done tests with the Lowell Scandles lights, which put full-spectrum fluorescents in a cone shape so that the light can be directed better. They're not nearly as "punchy" as a fresnel, but the light they put out is quite beautiful. There's eight bulbs to each light, but they can be switched on or off in pairs, so that for practical purposes the light is dimmable.
And as a bonus, the lights run cool, which is much easier on the actors.
The combination of fresnels and full-spectrum fluorescents seems to offer a great deal of beauty and flexibility for the lighting of sets.
—jim sloman, 9/9/01
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