In the whacky world of Nook, (where I reside as king), I find myself lighting just about anything. This weekend I lit a Celtic folk trio for a PBS TV show. Upstaging lighting offered up my services to a local director (thanks guys) and he hired me to wiggle some lights.
I walked in the studio and immediately was confronted by hands who wanted to know where to hang or place my moving lights. I had not even met the TV director to ask him what he had in mind. So I told the hands to get a cup of Joe while I found the guy hiring me. After 30 seconds of talking with my new favorite director I devised a plan, as he had none. I asked him my 2 favorite questions, “What are you looking for? And where are the camera positions?”
He wanted constant movement with some floor lights and softened gobo images in motion on a white cyclorama. No problem. I placed 8 hard edge lights on some battens that flew above the set pieces and placed 6 moving wash fixtures on the floor in between set pieces. I spaced the wash fixtures so that any camera would always pick up a light beam slowly swinging by in any shot. The hard edge lights lit random sections of the cyc.
From the audience perspective it looked like I was clueless and just focused some patterns in random places on the cyc. But every camera angle would catch a bit of motion on the cyc. The main thing to remember was that I wasn’t lighting this show for the 100 people in the audience, I was lighting it for the 100,000 that would see it on PBS one day.
I had 4 hours from the time I walked into the studio until I had to have looks for 37 different songs. No problem for me. The shoot went smooth as silk.
