Lighting

This little bastard will stop at nothing to make you miserable.

In every book on filmmaking or electronic media I’ve ever read, at some point the author attempts to dispel the rumor that all media creation is simply ‘Lights, Camera, Action!’, and that it is, in fact, quite difficult. There are so many other steps – scripting, storyboarding, funding, editing, catering – that make the process so much more difficult, thereby explaining why there is so little worthwhile content on the Internet.

But lights, man. They’ll get you every time. Fucking lights.

In spite of how far we’ve come as a civilization in terms of camera technology, the amount of light put out by the lamps and overhead fixtures in your house is still not enough to properly light a scene for multimedia production. Video cameras are, apparently, cooler than everyone else, because they are perpetually wearing sunglasses, which means that if you want a scene you’re shooting to look normal, you have to give all your actors long term eye damage with a variety of different heavy duty stage lights, working in tandem, set up in the correct order.

Today I shot a project for my Intro to Electronic Media class in my living room. The leadup to the project was not especially daunting for me – I knew my way around a camera, thanks to Writers, and I had a good plan for what I was going to do and how I was going to do it.

But lights, man. Fucking lights.

On one of the first days of my Intro to Electronic Media class, our professor pulled out one of our battered, aging light units and explained its inherent difficulties and dangers.

The stands are flimsy and prone to collapse. (You can damage journalism school equipment and incur serious fines without even trying.)

The lights reach temperatures of a billion degrees within fifteen seconds of being turned on, so don’t touch them or keep them near curtains or other flammable materials. (The lights will not hesitate to kill you and then destroy the evidence by burning the house down.)

Don’t touch the lightbulbs – if too many people do it, the accumulated grease from fingerprints will boil and make the lightbulb explode. (Using one of the 20-year-old lights from the journalism school is essentially playing Russian Roulette with everyone who has used that light since Desert Storm.)

They’re the most dangerous, finicky, and unpredictable part of your shoot. Fucking lights.

Lighting is about two things: The proper illumination of the subject, and the complete genocide of shadows. Ideally, you will have three lights (a spot, a fill, and a backlight) set up in a specific triangular pattern that, somehow, will make stars align and completely eliminate all traces of shadows (because shadows don’t happen in the movies, just like people going to the bathroom or minorities living through an entire horror movie).

This is all fine and dandy if you know the order in which to set up your lights. If you’re me, who can’t find his textbook or his notes on how to create this shadow destroying power-stance, the best you can do is flip on all your lights and play musical chairs until the shadows are as small as possible, at which point you turn on the camera and hope for the best.

Fucking lights..

Shadows are resilient. Today we had shadows so strong and beefy that even when we shined other lights directly on them they refused to go away. It was a lot like Independence Day - our adversaries were powerful and seemingly invincible and we had no idea how to kill them. Only in Independence Day Jeff Goldblum and Steve Jobs save the day, whereas I just said, “Fuck it. It’s my first video project – she’s bound to grade us easily,” and went with it.

For something that I consider to be a chore at best and an incentive to give up on film at worst, lighting has a surprisingly strong cadre of devotees. I’ve met plenty of amateur filmmakers who are obsessed with lighting, people who treat sets full of craggy, shadow-prone objects the same way my parents treat crossword puzzles – fun problems waiting to be solved. Up until 2005 there even existed a magazine, Lighting Dimensions for people with a severe hard on for lighting.

Thismakes me wonder if they have a magazine for people who make those toothpick and paper umbrellas that they stick in tropical drinks, because I find them and lighting to be about equally interesting. Unfortunately, you need to light your scene properly if you’re going to make a good film, whereas a Pina Colada is simply strongly encouraged.

Fucking lights.

I spent the better part of our shoot today fretting about the state of our lights, which has now made it impossible for me to enjoy scripted television anymore. Every time Don Draper stands against a wall and tries to explain why cigarettes aren’t bad for you, all I can think about is how difficult that scene must have been to illuminate, given the fact that there’s no room for a backlight or a fill.

Lighting has ruined television for me.

Thank God you’re not a journalism major.

Truman Capps would like to welcome his J472 class to his blog – why don’t you take a picture? It’ll last longer!