Lighting for film and television is an tiring and time consuming process. It often involves a great deal of manual labor and much running back and forth. I recently had the great pleasure of being presented with an opportunity to manage the lighting for American Dance Legend, produced by Karma Butler. For the first time, I was forced to bring on another crew member due to the scale and scope of the lighting for this production. My new crew member had no idea quite what he had gotten himself into. This was a new and interesting experience.
First things first we’ll start at day one. We started our day by cataloging and loading all the necessary equipment for this production. The loading process in itself was tiring. a grand total of 30 minutes were spent loading the gear into the truck. About 30 minutes after that we arrived at location just to pull all the gear off of the truck and stage it inside the production facility, another half hour endeavor.
There is a lot of “hurry up and wait” in the film business, and this shoot was no different. After staging we moved into pre-light, which involved setting stands and rigging lights. This alone can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, and that’s with a decent crew! We spent a great deal of time running back and forth rigging lights and raising them into position.
After all the lights have been rigged the time comes to turn them on and see what you have to work with. In this instance we had a seven light setup all running continuously at the same time. Thus begins the long process of tweaking and finessing the light itself, a process often referred to as “sculpting the light.” This is the longest and most tiring part of any pre-light. The constant back and forth from light to light, repeatedly, took my new green grip by surprise. By the end of the 3 hour process we were both drenched in sweat, but satisfied at what we had managed to accomplish.
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