American Cinematographer - May 2000 - 88

Must-See TV
and

deep in the middle of it.
point, I saw 10 guys pushing
a 30-foot crane through the muddy
battlefield while a jeep pulled it
along, and they were surrounded by
knights on horses and hundreds of
period extras - it was amazing!
At

we were

one

"There
in the

MASTER CLASS
SERIES VIDEOS
This unique series, sponsored by the
Kodak Worldwide Student Program,
lias great value to both students and
working cinematographers.Nine of the
world's finest directors of photography

share their experience in a workshop

setting,

as

they guide you through a
lighting problems

series of professional

both in the studio and

on

location.

Computer animation is used to vividly
illustrate the
to

approaches used
solving them.

EEATDRES
INCLUDE:
Lighting Dances With Wolves
With Dean Semler, ASC, ACS

each

one was an entirely new chal¬
lenge. They were all really old places,
and there was literally no access to
them. Of course, they're castles,
which were built to keep people out!
We couldn't even get a pick-up
truck through the gates, so we used
a tiny Army jeep, [which] we'd load,
drive through the gates and up the
windy road to the castles, drive
through another gate and then
unload. Then we'd send the jeep
back for the next trip. It was incred¬
ibly tedious."

inside

Once

Lighting Dead Poets Society
John Seale, ASC, ACS
Studio

Lighting:
A Comparative Workshop
With Donald McAlpine, ASC, ACS
& Denis Lenoir,

Location

AFC

Lighting

With Geoff Burton

Shooting for Realism
With Allen Daviau, ASC
& Sacha Viemy

Shooting for Drama
Robby Muller, NSC, BVK
& Peter James, ASC, ACS, CSC

With

the

met

was

could be neither lit from the outside
nor

physically altered. "I'd walk into
rooms

Shooting for Fantasy

Shooting for B1 ack-and-White
With Allen Daviau & Denis Lenoir

down to
was

a moat! Beyond the moat
huge wall surrounding the

a

the other side of the

castle, and

on

wall

sheer cliff. There

was a

way we'd get any
Muscos? Condors?
to

find another

was no

lights out there.
Forget it. We had

way."

One of Gill's

inspired solu¬
play during a
banquet scene featuring more than
100 extras seated at two long tables
in a large hall. The scene was
designed to have a candlelit feel, and

tions

master

into

came

with

ing literally

a

16mm lens

every

now,

which

cover

means

are

the

reveal¬

-

inch of the

"All of these castles

touch

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and say,

'Wow, this is going to be beautiful!
We can put some lamps outside the
window.' Then I'd look out the
window and see 200 feet straight

the director wanted to

With Sacha Vierny & Denis Lenoir

castles,

by another
challenge: how to light interiors that
however, Gill

these wonderful
With

lot of locations

are a

film," Gill continues, "and

room.

museums

you

cannot

anything," Gill says. "You
cannot screw anything into the
walls, you cannot hang anything on

ledges, you cannot put up wall
spreaders, and it's almost impossible
to bring any large gear into the
room because the only access is an
extremely narrow stairway.
"I was looking at this banquet
scene with 150 people sitting at
these long tables, and I didn't know
what to do. The only way to get a
candlelit feel was to light from the
table. We placed a pair of candles
between every other person on the
table, and I said to production
designer Michael Joy, 'Please buy
cheap wood for the tabletops,
because I'm going to make holes
through them.' We drilled holes and
inserted these little 200-watt bulbs

through the bottom of the table so
they would stick up and light the
actors sitting in front of them, and
we

hooked

dimmer. I

them

was

all

up

on

a

trying to hide each of

the bulbs with these round loaves of

bread the

art

department had put in

front of each person at the table, and
Michael came up with the idea of

cutting a wedge out of the bread and
slipping it around the bulbs, which
worked wonderfully! We could twist
a loaf around to dial in the right
amount

of bounce off the bread

to

the actor's face. We called it the

Bread

Light!"
Gill said the Steadicam and

360-degree work required on the
shoot were especially difficult to
complete in such an unusual loca¬
tion. "Those types of shots are
always tough to pull off, but they're
even tougher when you really have
no place to hide lights," he
says. "I've
found two great methods for work¬
ing that way. One is that I'm always
right beside the camera with a little
bounce card of

some sort to

kick

light into the actor's face while
we're moving. At other times, I'll be
beside the camera with a batteryoperated Kino Flo, a burning torch,
or a rig I call the dynamite
light,
some

which consists of about 12 candles

taped together like a pack of dyna¬
mite. I would position those right
American Cinematographer - May 2000

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