Last night, our group grabbed all the lights we owned, a couple of cars, Michael’s Ronin and a small smoke machine and flooded a church carpark with smoke and light. So much smoke, in fact, that a long range drone flew overhead at one point, just to scare the crap out of us. We were very lucky to be using a camera that works amazingly in low light, as my biggest concern was always light level.

Michael’s script was simple enough but really well constructed for the space we were shooting in, which is rare but welcome given the task was designed to give us the opportunity to experiment with lighting.

We arrived at the space and discovered a number of things, firstly that my battery powered LED panels are the greatest invention ever because you can pick them up and put them literally anywhere, they’re bright and have a CRI of above 95, which is really necessary for LEDs, especially when shooting with other lights that are the correct temperature and you can dial the Color Temperature from 3200K to 5600K, as well as a luminance level from 10% up to 100%. This meant that we could get the lights really close to the actors for close ups inside the car and control the lights easily to look the same as the long shots with the really massive “moon” key light.

We decided a few times to diffuse the already very soft light, for the sake of creating some spill on the pavement with which to bounce back up on to the subjects to give them a little bit more illumination.

I have consistently found when shooting at night that the background just disappears completely into the darkness behind the actors. To combat this, we used Michael’s smaller on-camera LED panel and moved it onto a tripod and just pointed it at the background of the shot to illuminate it just enough to be visible behind the properly lit subjects. We still wanted to maintain a good amount of separation between the subject, the car and the background.

The DJI Ronin, was beautiful to work with, it was very heavy after a while operating it, as we discovered very quickly. We didn’t have enough crew to operate sound properly, especially after Alec had to run, so we mounted the microphone to the rig as well as the recorder. This added a substantial amount of weight to the entire rig and made it somewhat top-front heavy too which meant that the most natural way to operate the Ronin was from the bottom with the ring handles. I detest mounting microphones to the camera, its never good audio, but hey, it’s a lighting exercise and we needed a free someone to smoke the place up. The other thing that I would have loved was a wireless focus puller, when operating the camera on a gimbal, it’s extremely difficult to keep the shot in focus and autofocus only does so much.

If there was anything I think we could have improved, we should have done a wet-down of the location before we shot. That would have added even more depth to the scene. However, all things considered I feel that we did a fantastic job and I hope that Michael is able to edit the scene and make something awesome (really just I hope we had enough coverage).