Rory, our guest at today’s session, is a gaffer with all his own gear (and A LOT of gear). After we all helped bring it all in, we were pushed for time as we made our way through many different and fascinating discussions about lighting. I learned so so much from Rory and he was so open about talking about everything and didn’t talk down to us as if we didn’t know things which was fantastic.

One of the things that I was really puzzled by was that companies have restrictions on what types of lights can be used on productions for environmental reasons. As Rory pointed out, the lithium that’s mined to make batteries and the processes to make LED lamps is just a different sort of environmental hazard. The only reason someone could actually want to restrict which fixtures you use would be people who are concerned about power consumption. Even then, some LED technology requires a hell of a lot of power.

Rory brought in a couple of different fixtures of note, the first, the Creamsource Doppio LED Panels.

I thought for certain, these things can’t have that much light output, they have so few LEDs. My understanding of LED Panels was, essentially, the more LEDs on the panel, the brighter it is. But these are big LEDs! It’s amazing just how soft they are, especially compared to my LED panels, which are similar in that they have a CRI of 95+ (same as the Doppios) and they’re temperature controllable, except that, they don’t have the reflector behind the LEDs and they don’t have as big LEDs. The effect is a beautiful soft panel besides the fact that it looks awesome as well with the metallic dark blue aesthetic.

Next was the HMI light, the history of these things is of course fascinating, but what was more fascinating was the sheer output of the light was staggering.

For the first time in class we had equivalent light inside the room to the level of light coming in through the windows which was extraordinary. The hardest thing for me was figuring out what possible reason you would have to use a light of this scale.

Perhaps if you really run out of time on a shoot day and need your own personal sun when the real one starts to dissappear.

And finally, this guy. This is the most amazing light I’ve ever seen. The number of possibilities with this thing are literally endless. I think, if you have three of these things, you can basically get any lighting effect imaginable, except perhaps a hard light source. Police Sirens, Any gel you can think of, you just pick it out. The only thing it really needs now is Bluetooth so you can control it from an App, cause the whole $1000 controller thing is ridiculous.

Aside from the amazing gear that Rory brought, he also brought a wealth of wisdom. It was awesome to hear him talking about the different setups he had done on Like Minds and other films.