Let There Be Lighting: Andy Ciddor
Lighting for EFP
 |
|
Ampex VR-3000
|
Lighting for electronic field production (EFP) must
surely date from the first portable broadcast-quality video camera
system: the Ampex VR-3000. At 50-odd pounds for the battery-powered
2-inch quad recorder alone, the term "portable" was possibly
a slight exaggeration. Nevertheless, this was a video camera/recorder
system that could be taken into the field for production work.
What differentiated this form of production from all
that had gone before it was the combination of portability and immediacy.
Large-scale events could be covered live-to-air by fully equipped,
outside broadcast remote facilities, provided there was time for
moving crews, trucks and setting up of the necessary program links.
Major production work was shot on film, in a style
not entirely different than movie production, while news events
were covered on 16mm film with rapid processing. The style of production
that these new cameras enabled was all about speed. Get in. Shoot
fast. Get the tape back to the replay machine.
This encompassed such things as interviews with the
coach after the game, late-breaking news stories, segments for topical
comedy shows, prize inserts for games, shows and commercials for
"Honest Phil" on his used car lot – showing this
week’s "bargains."
PILING ON THE PROBLEMS
For the lighting director, technician or engineer
– my title was lighting engineer in those days – the problems
were an amalgam of those faced by the movie director of photography,
the news cameraman and the studio lighting director.
The tube camera suffered from the same lack of sensitivity
and limited contrast range as its larger brethren. Available light
sources were frequently mixed in both color temperature and color
rendering. Setup time was negligible. The lighting crew was usually
one person and the power sources were whatever utility outlets you
could see: if you were standing still long enough to plug anything
in.
The lighting instruments assembled to meet the demands
of these conditions were also a mix of those used by other productions.
That collection included sun-guns and open-faced quartz heads from
news and documentary production, molefays and reflectors from movie
production, as well as inkies and pups from the studio.
The most conspicuous absence from the list was an
efficient daylight-matching source that could be run from available
power. While the molefay, when fitted with FAY lamps – overrun
lamps with dichroic correction to bring them to 5600K – produced
something akin to daylight, it was not very efficient.
The FAY lamp has a rated life of 20 hours, and every
pair of lamps in these multiheaded beasts required their own, separately
fused supply socket. Everything else had to be corrected with color
temperature blue filter and the consequence was the loss of half
of the light.
POST-GAME WRAP
The only battery lights then available used tungsten
lamps – and would just last for a brief post-game interview
with the coach in the stadium. Forget about having enough side-fill
on the close-up of Honest Phil for three attempts at the phrase
"and what about this classic ‘58 Chevrolet Impala,"
as he tried to vault into the driver’s seat.
From a picture-quality standpoint, the most devastating
absence was the unavailability of a softlight source that could
go into the field.
Although soft reflectors and bounce boards were available,
the absence of grips and the speed of operation frequently ruled
out their use. The advent of the umbrella reflector as part of the
Lowell Tota system was the first opportunity I had to take softlight
out on an EFP shoot. It’s just a pity that the damned things
fell over so often!
The later development of the wide range of softbox
systems from such companies as Chimera, Lowel, Westcott and Photoflex
has made softlight at reasonable levels available even to those
of us with little time, no crew and scant available power.
More recently, the development of color-accurate,
broad-spectrum phosphors for fluorescent tubes has precipitated
another major step forward in the quality of what we can achieve
with EFP.
The combination of these phosphors with high-frequency
electronic ballasts has resulted in a new range of very portable
high-efficiency softlights with flicker-free output from such companies
as Balcar, Kino Flo, Lowel, brightline and many others. (The tubes
for these fittings are generally available to match either studio
or daylight color temperature.)
Add to these the simple – but very effective
– soft egg crates to control the spill, and the LD in the field
has tools as powerful as anything in the studio.
REVOLUTIONARY TACTICS
Perhaps the greatest revolution has occurred in the
area of the battery-powered luminaires. The batteries themselves
have undergone a range of developments in terms of cost and charge
characteristics since the VR-3000’s silver oxide batteries,
which achieved reliability for the price of a small motorcar.
The commodity rechargeable cell systems that are at
the heart of field production equipment and portable appliances
today are mostly invisible to us in their reliability and availability.
The other half of today’s battery-powered luminaire
is the metal halide discharge lamp – most particularly HMI
– that has been steadily improving in stability and efficiency
for about three decades.
The vastly improved efficiency of electronically ballasted
metal halides compared with tungsten filament lamps has made the
battery light a practical possibility for field production. That
they also happen to run at a daylight color temperature is a major
convenience for most applications – ‘tis a far cry from
my 150 W, late ‘60s’ Sun-Gun!
The strangest thing about it all is that today, increasingly
more field production is electronic, as movie producers begin to
adopt high-definition video cameras for principal photography. We
will find that, while the streets are closed for shooting a movie
with a full crew, 30 trucks, 6 caravans and a fleet of buses –
around the corner we will be using the same camera and one fluorescent
lightbank to shoot a segment for this week’s local lifestyle
program.
Andy Ciddor has been involved in lighting for more
than three decades as a practitioner, teacher and writer.
|
