60 feet and it can be On the beach at to Hyannis Port shooting a summer driven around like scene in mid-winter. 50 or a fork lift. Mar- gulies would put an arc or HMI light or a variety of lights on the platform and station an electrician with a walkie talkie with the lights. Normally high back lights might have to be put on parallels or on top of a truck. Using a scissors lift instead greatly improves the effi¬ ciency of lighting setups. It can provide a moonlight effect over a large area or backlighting on buildings and streets. Margulies' basic ap¬ proach to lighting is to begin with an overall ambient top-light and then add the effects of light in the scene. He observes that different cinematographers will take different approaches to sources lighting the same scene. Some may light the background first and work forward to the actors; others will light the actors first and move towards the background. His first concerns are with the actors rather than the background except that he starts with an overall ambient light level which in the case of a day scene might be just enough to get an image on film. To illustrate his approach he cited two exam¬ ples: the hotel room on location at the Ambassador Hotel in Los An¬ the Oval Of¬ the Burbank lamps in the room. Ideally, light coming through the windows would be supplemented with units placed outside, but the fact that The hotel room in the Ambassador Hotel had ceilings which were high enough to permit this hotel room was on the fifth floor made lighting through the windows impossible. Instead Mar¬ Margulies to rig small units on wall spreaders to provide the over¬ all ambient light. In a situation like this he may just use bare photo¬ flood bulbs with #216 tracing pa¬ gulies had a 1200W or 750W HMI light hung above the window without being in the shot. This light was also diffused with 216 tracing paper. As a rule, Margulies pre¬ fers soft light, which he feels is more realistic than hard light be¬ cause most natural light or light from practical lamps is soft. Ob¬ viously if the light source in a geles and the set for the stage at fice on Studios. per draped around them for dif¬ fusion. He likes the tracing texture of 216 diffusion mate¬ rial and finds it very easy to work with. It can be taped or stapled or paper as a hung in front of a lamp. It cuts down the light by about the same amount gives it as a a double scrim but nice soft quality similar the effect of spun glass. In the hotel room he had four photo¬ flood bulbs rigged to the ceiling, one over each door and two in the center of the room. They created a to light level which was almost enough to expose the film by and lit a lot of the walls. The top light could also provide a highlight on the actor's hair or even a bit on the shoulders depending on the shot. The actor's face was lit from the source In this case the combination of the source. was a large windows and the practical 46 American Cinematographer April 1985 is a hard source and a dra¬ matic effect is called for, Margulies will use a hard light to create the scene effect, but he relies basically on soft light. He prefers if possible to use bounce light when he can get enough coverage bouncing light off a piece of foamcore or a white card. This is especially true of closeups of actresses where he feels the added softness of bounce light is particularly flattering. If the shot is too wide or it is to bounce the light, he not feasible will use dif¬ fused projected light. The only time he is likely to use hard light is in lighting some portion of the set