Making of Cainné Angste — david likes lights

I worked with cinematographer Moritz Uthe and Høvn film production on this passion project a couple months back. They pulled together a great team and the vibes were great, despite there being plenty to do in one shooting day! Moritz used some extra Kodak 35mm which he had left over from another shoot. We shot Kodak 5219, 500T stock.

We shot at Dopplinger studios in Vienna, Austria. They have large cyclorama walls which are about 5/6 meters high and 12 meter long. They meet in the corner and make a quarter bowl-like shape. Moritz shot wide and we needed as much background as possible, so we shot toward this corner. Cyc walls are cool because they can give you a white void look from various angles. Especially if they are lit right; evenly.

Here is an example of a studio cyc wall!

studio shoot — This is Dopplinger’s studio in Vienna. This is where we shot

Moritz wanted the white background to be an F8. I took two 5kw fresnels and rigged them symmetrically to the left and right side of our centered background.

TIP! Before rigging the lamps we put them on wind-up stands with wheels and cranked them up to the pipe grid area where we would hang them. We turned off all the other lights. We wheeled the lights back until we measured an F8. I wanted to add more spread to the lights so we fully flooded them and clipped a ¼ white diff to each of them. They were about 4 meters (13 feet) from the cyc and maybe 9 meters from the corner.

The sides of the cyc were lit evenly now. When we walked back to take a look at the center, it was clear that we may need a bit more soft boost for the center. So we added 3x 2k openfaces above so we could even out the background.

We also made sure to put all of these lamps on dimmers and placed all the dimmers all next to one another. We would eventually need to dim all the lights during shots in various combinations. We labeled all the dimmers and called this place “dimmer village”.

Now with our background out of the way, we would now add a soft overhead. We used an 8 by 8 frame skinned with magic cloth and a snap grid to control spill. It was table topped above the area which the actors would be performing. I rigged 4x 2k blondies above.

Next step was adding our key light. We took a 10kw fresnel on a crank stand. At half flood/spot we tiled it about 30 degrees and stemmed the stand up to 2.5 meters (8 feet). The lamp was stage right. We then brought in our 12 by 12 butterfly which was skinned with a full grid cloth. It was tilted to be parallel to the angle of the lamp.

TIP: We used 3x large duvetyne T-bars to clean up unwanted spill. We needed two to stop the spill next to the 12 by 12 and the 10k.

Now we had our lights sorted and in place. For some special shots like this one below. We used a dedo 650 watt with a projection mount. With the blades we could fine tune and shape this line on his face.

We also wanted to have light movements during some shots. As a group we would dim various lights up or down on different calls from Moritz. In addition to that we panned a Lightbridge 50 by 50 Reflector across the set during one of the transitions. We shot an Aputure 600X into the reflector.