Big fan of using wind machines. Now you don't necessarily always have to go out and buy a fancy wind machine fan. You can also get away with using, you know, a simple floor fan or a cyclone fan. A really good option if you wanna swing for it and you're on location, is going and buying a cordless blower from the home improvement store. Battery operated so that you're not on location you're not worried about having to plug a fan in. You wanna get the move of the dress or the move of the hair, you just have an assistant go (motor running sound effect) and throw it in and you get the nice movement and you're not worried about tethering to electricity. Really useful to use. The fan, you can use, buy a regular floor fan. Doesn't have to be anything fancy. We use one on location. There are all good options as long as you can move enough. If you are having to worry about audio, that's a very different story. But I love the cordless blower. I think it works really well, and they're relatively s...

mall and easy to kinda maneuver with. The other thing that I use all the time is a haze machine. And I wanna make a point to say that a haze machine is not a fog machine. They're different. They're really different. And so yes, they both create these particles in the air, but a fog machine creates clouds of smoke. A haze machine is not really supposed to. Haze machines make white show up, and so it shows streaks of light. It creates an atmosphere. Think of it's kinda like lowers the contrast of the room and it makes lights glow. We call this bloom; it makes lights bloom, highlights bloom. It also shows you shafts and streaks of light. And I'm gonna show you what this looks like a little bit later in a room. Again, not about showing you clouds of smoke, it's about making the lights show up and glow in the scene. Spielberg uses these all the time. And once you know it's there, you never unsee it in a film. But cinematographers use the haze machine all the time. But know that it requires a lot of, you gotta run it for a while when you're using it and then not run it because you could use it too much. It's all about like gaging what's too much, what's not enough. You also don't want the plumes of smoke to show up. You just want it to be kind of hazy. And so like when we're doing a big space, we had to come in and run it for an hour or two before the shoot to make sure everything was dissipated and moved around in the space evenly. So it didn't look like there was a toxic cloud across part of the theater, which it does for the first bit. Like, you'll see it in the behind-the-scenes video, but you can see it just kind of accumulates on the bottom floor. So we're actually having to move it around the room and use fans to spread it out, because we want it to be consistent across the space, not just lingering in one area. When you're in a small space, when you're in a studio you run it for 15 minutes and you're fine. It's just when you're in a huge environment it's a very different consideration. Also if you're in a small environment, haze in a can gives you a really effective use of this. But haze in a can gets expensive. I mean, I think one can is 15, 18 bucks. I'll do a shoot and I'd run through two cans. So it gets expensive, not as expensive as a haze machine. I think at the entry level they're around like 400 bucks. Entry level. The industrial, like commercial ones, I think start at, they're 12, 1300 bucks. I've got this one, which was around four something, and it's awesome, I love it. I think it's great. Does the job that I need. It's not filling cavernous spaces, but for the studio, for normal rooms it's totally acceptable. And they last forever on juice. I think I've had it for a year, probably run it 20 times and I've not filled it back up since the first time. So yeah, they'll run it for a while. But that's a really good one and I like that a lot.

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Chris Knight - Cinematic Lighting for Portraiture Grip Quick Reference Guide

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Chris Knight

Chris Knight was born in Wiesbaden, Germany and grew up in Florida. He combines his unconditional love of art history with his love of technology, topping it off with a flare for the cinematic and an uncompromising eye for light and detail

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topics covered in this class

Lighting Portrait Photography Digital Photography

Ratings and Reviews

Bruce Walker

This course is simply terrific, and I highly recommend it. Firstly it arrived at the perfect time for me as I am soon to do a studio shoot very much in keeping with a cinematic or theatrical aesthetic. Secondly it's taught by Chris Knight who I swear is like a long-lost twin brother. :-) There are so many parallels in the way he thinks and works to my own style. So I avidly watched this as soon as it was available for anytime streaming. This is the first time I have made extensive use of the CL iPhone app, btw, and I love how it pretty much enabled me to seamlessly switch back and forth from desktop viewing to my iPad that I carry around the house during the day. I was able to make coffee and still carry on taking in the course, uninterrupted. The content is fantastic, delivered succinctly yet entertainingly. Some material and ideas are already in my repertoire and were reinforced and validated by Chris' demonstrations. But he also introduced a lot of ideas and methods new to me and very welcome. I was particularly glad to see how practical it is to stitch a series of tripod shots into a wide pano. I have been afraid to try that but I will now be using that in my next shoot, for sure. As alway, his post production practices revealed all kinds of tips about Lightroom and Photoshop I didn't know. Negatives. The volume level mastering is iffy. It started out at a decent level then midway through one of the early lessons dropped so much I had to turn up my sound system to compensate. And as I write this one lesson (34) is missing and in its place was a duplicate of the next lesson (35). I expect CL will have that fixed shortly though (I sent support a note).

Jeph DeLorme

One of the best classes I have viewed at Creative Live. Definitely worth the investment of time and money. The pace of the class allows you to learn extra tips and tricks throughout the process. Great instructor, highly recommend this class to anyone looking to step up their creative game.

a Creativelive Student

excellent class in all regards. outstanding instructor with experience in complicated cinematic shoots but who also is willing to thoroughly cover the basic nuts and bolts. i wish all creative live classes were of this quality.

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Grip Tools: Wind and Haze Machines

Grip Tools: Wind and Haze Machines

Lesson Info

13. Grip Tools: Wind and Haze Machines

Lessons

Class Introduction

What is Cinematic Lighting?

Motivated & Practical Lighting

5 Cinematic Lighting Tips

Low-Key & Upstage Lighting

Control Your Fill Lighting

Show Depth In Your Image

Pre-Production for Cinematic Lighting

Grip Tools: Clamps

Grip Tools: Apple Boxes, C-Stands & Grip Heads

Grip Tools: Pins & Portable Gear

Grip Tools: Scrims, Silks, Flags & Tape