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Lighting 101: Grip Bag and Lights

So we're talking about lighting one oh one I don't know why I said it you could read it uh we're going to talk about grip first, which we got a truck in here somewhere where is the cart? We got the card with all the gear on it josh you want to roll that over for me? Uh so the main sorts of gear that you're going to use sort of the essentials is what we're going to go through pretty much what I use on every project can't put that there on every project that I do regardless of its size just the must haves on the set with you stuff like pony clamps which of these guys right here these are like your savior half the time you can get it from home depot for just ridiculously cheap just get a ton of them you don't have to go toe like a film site to get the film tightened the exact same thing just go to home depot and buy as many of these as you possibly plan can you clamp it anything at all and you've got something there you get, you know homemade matt box for you claiming on and there you go,...

go with it, you can clamp the lights if you have something bigger for just anything, this is sort of your giant c forty seven's, which we'll get to in the second c forty seven so you got the sexy c forty seven which were these guys right here he's the black ones this is just sexy but really they're just clothes pins they're just these guys right here we call him c forty seven there's a ton of stories about why they got the name c forty seven the one that I've heard the most is on the grip truck back in the day one of the drawers was labelled c forty seven that's just the name the drawer and then everybody just started called him c forty seven and since then that's been the deal with these air sex here we got black rap which is this guy right here when I come over open this up it's basically just employed essentially but this stuff just ripped me a piece but this stuff could be a mat box it could be a flag for your life and it's super durable bending into any shape you want it's just going to stay there so you could mount it anything so if I don't have a lens shade or matt box aiken rig it to that is that is that you do flag or even barn doors for your light or anything else you use it for a great number of things because it's totally multiple totally reusable you could hold it up just bring it back together and you're good to go with it stingers and extension cord. So stingers we call extension cords in the layman's tongue. But that's all this is just an extension cord. This one looks beef because it's rated higher for hire lights but it's, just an extension cord if you got like, if you're just using lights around one care less, which on the really low end that's usually what you're doing normal extension cords from home. People are gonna be fine. Just check the rating on it. You're going to be good to go with that power strips and cube test. We don't what's that we don't have any power strips with us now, but we all know what a power strip is. This is a cube tap these great multiple lights in one place. You just got to be careful that you're not going over your amperage, right, or burning these things down. You put like two k's and above it it might become a little bit difficult. Zip ties. We don't have the zip ties, our kind of mandatory for wrangling cables, something of that kind where it's easily to, you know, snap him off, but you could also use gaff tape, which will show in a second, but with a lot of these cables, once you get like a lot of audio and video village you get a lot of cables happening and what's that get all over the place could be hasn't so you want to make sure that you wrangling those subs if times are really great for that and gaff tape was strip a piece of that you got him of all different sizes that's going to be more for rigging and things like that this is getting more remarks which we'll do a little bit later they got all different kinds of color that kind of like cloth tape it's not like duct tape which rip off the body very very harshly like for instance from josh's body a long time ago way had a roll of duct tape just like this on I was just telling you this story and we rigged or somebody else sorry we rigged squibs on his body with duct tape right to his bare chest and then we shot in the heat for about I don't know three hours so at the end I'm pretty sure we ripped any hair that he had on his body off and probably a bit of skin this would've been a lot better I mean doing it how we do it we should have something beneath it probably would've been the smarter out to go but this won't rip paint off the walls like most things would it's a lot safer a lot more workable for most things you gonna need filmmaker pouch we gotta leatherman you want to grab that so if you'll make a pouch it's this little pouch that I got from home depot I call it my filmmaker pouch is about this big and I have it no matter what I'm doing even if I have a dp I have this pouch and it just has the essential things that I'm going to need to grab as I'm going so I'm not stopping and trying to find something leatherman's are amazing it's basically like swisher sweets army knights for adults, right? So you got your you know, your place up there? Uh, a nail file say, stay pretty bottle opener for being at the end of the day, but also, you know, the screwdriver side type of situations that you need a night pretty much anything that you're going to need on the fly you're going to get from this guy, they want me to stay steady. Good luck. All right, you're gonna vanish like you because me and studied not best friends you got to do that, dude, give me give me some jazz hands, man, come on, expressive way zooming in on that because we got to get that the sexiness, uh, markers use markers, everything also dry erase markers, obviously, uh, voltage tester and receptacle testers, so receptacle tester just looks like a little thing that you played ball with lights on the and if you don't know what it is you can get from home depot just asked someone there super cheap, but what you do with these bad boys when you go to save someone's house that you're filming in you, probably into an outlet, you send someone to the circuit breaker and they start turning off and on circuits so you could take that through the house and figure out where all these outlets are routed circuit wise. That way you can, you know, not kill yourself. Flippen circuits the entire shoot, trying to figure out all not this one or not that's. Why? I know we flipped it again, which is a real pain to me all the time because I'm too lazy to go through and do that. But that's the best idea to do just take that receptacle tester go through, have somebody with walkie in there and just mark where everything is saved. You a lot of headache. C stands. Wanna grab me a c stand there? Uh, I love these things so much. I usually use them as even light stands because they're just so durable, so sturdy light stands get on my nerves sometimes, unless you get the big, big daddy's. But these air awesome you got the hollywood heads or grip heads depending on what you want to talk about on the arm and then the base these air the old school types where these are great, I believe they're called cowboy stands so where you can lift this up so if you're on on level terrain, you know you can adjust that how you need and the one thing that you need to keep in mind with c stands really most important thing is where you have these knuckles you always keep these knuckles to the right of where you're aiming them, so if you have something heavy on this bad boy and you're aiming at this way you've got the knuckles toe right? If anything is pulling down on it's gonna pull in detention if you go the opposite way that's gonna pull against that and it's gonna come loose and somebody can get I am did we get that on camera? The power of hell, josh, can you take that away from everyone? Stay away! I did eat spinach for lunch, it's all true and I have a neighbor who's flipping out and she's like what the who the hell did we just hire way just had and live? I'm not even mad, I'm probably pay for it I'm proud of myself right now there is no spoon all right moving on actually no bring bring me that there's a few of the things ah dimmer he's a more pro dimmers, right? But you could just build these things, save yourself the money you know by the receptacle holders from home depot and then just build a thing that we have an episode on film right on how to build it's really, really easy we'll save you a ton of cash he's got to make sure you're building the right thing to raid it for the level of lights that you're doing, but these are extremely helpful and must have we talked about follow focus over there a little bit but this is like single operator follow focus this is the type of fall of focus that you're going to use if you have a focus puller so they can set marks I meant it onto the rails like this and they'll set their set marks and be able to pull focus for you these air so important when working with if you're working with led erkki knows you don't really need this if you're working with big chunks and lights were like we're gonna be using, they get so hot or even if you're doing d I y it lights like work lights from home depot they get extremely hot you'll burn your fingers off use these guys so you can operate them, move them around without issue and I think we're good there so we got lights I want to bring me over some lights we got aquino's we got for now lights we got leads, we got some d I y lights like a clamp light, which we're putting regular household bulbs in. We're going to take a look at all these real quick he's bringing, bringing more let's. Get that keen over there if you want to come over and help him wrangle this one on what? You come up here, you want to come up with them? Let's just set this guy. Are we good to set the light right here is gonna be obstructive. We put it right here. All right? Let's set the kino right here facing this way and, bill, you wanna come up and when you back here that have come up here you want to come up let's set the camera way, get it right here. So you're just gonna wrangle the cable for him and you're gonna grab this camera, bring right here. Josh, you want to help them? Just get hands on camera. Just go right here out there and josh, you'll stand in for me. Yeah, right no, no, no, let's, let's stay on sticks right now, but we're gonna go about right here just wrangle the cable and you're just gonna help him out so we're not tipping on that and marine you're gonna wrangle the cable start you can come over here with josh I'm gonna look towards josh frame up let's go about three feet this way towards the lava and let's frame up joshing like a medium shot is probably fine and then bill why he's doing that why don't you grab the led behind josh start showing which one that is it's this one here then start once you bring that the mole over here as well so we could just jump right through over there with them so we're going to flip through these lights real quick look at the different quality of light were getting from each one of these fixtures we gotta grab a stinger you wanna grab a stinger for me remember what those are right in the cart josh you want to help him okay, we're gonna plug in this kino here okay, so this is the ballast for the keynote okay, so you're gonna grab out there and you're gonna run it where's uh where's a good place that we could plug that in we help show him a good place to plug that one in and then we'll just swap between the three real quick one after the other all right good to go marine you wantto help hold that ballast so it doesn't go flipping over way okay you're good to go right now we're gonna set this guy up you open these doors and saying you won't operate the ballast and now we have set up in this this kino so we could flop easily between them we have two tungsten bulbs in two day lightbulbs write one right after the other so if you look here we get that on camera somewhere stepped aside just a little bit so you can operate this way little so you can operate each bulb from these switches here right so each switch represents one of these bulls who got two tungsten into daylight so we're gonna flip two at a time and right now we got daylight or we could switch over to tungsten only right so let's go with uh tungsten for now so go ahead and put that on for me so you got the one the closest then we're gonna skip one and go to the middle there you go okay yeah we condemn them down a bit right now don't you guys come a bit this way right there's good let me go little this way truck this in just a touch give me like a super sexy pose you know what sam let's flip over to daylight we're set the daylight over here on then you're going to switch off the other two they go great good way get it on the tv okay are you are you not getting signal here so I think that's understand it's good to have different sorts of people because different people will have different face structure, right? So the light is going to react different teo to their faces going wrap differently some people's faces really hard tto light for me more rounded face the light is rapping I can't quite mold it the way I wanted to it's a little more difficulty got you some more tricks but people with more defined edges to their face could be just a the light toe light josh land somewhere in the middle, stark has a little more defined edges, so it's cool to see the different skin tones and you like that you're so defined more so what you want me to say so josh somewhere in the middle and start with chiseled out of marble and I'm hercules we discovered that already, so it's good to see the different skin tones and even their skin tone looks off camera just normally it looks very, very similar, but when you really dive into, especially when you start grating it, you see that there are very subtle differences that that make a big difference in the end, but aquino is ah is a very, very soft light it's already soft, you could defuse it even more to make it more soft and start rapping even further which is what diffusion will do it'll start wrapping around your subject harsher lights are going which we'll see in a second when we jumped to the mole harsher lights are going to have a lot harsher shadows mohr of a cut in those areas where's aquino I love it it's somewhere in the middle of lycan led and tungsten leaning more towards that led but the quality of light you get from a kino it's just gorgeous I love putting in places it doesn't really get hot so you can hide it in areas like for instance and tell the tub scene have you seen it uh my lead is leaning into the tub but it was really difficult to light and I just brought a kino put it inside the tub and somebody's like holding it there was no way to even rig it but he's holding it so what you call hollywood there's no standing just holding the thing called out hollywood in the thing uh and it worked really really well let's bring that uh maureen you wantto help bring that just a touch closer so that's good right there try to get a bit more harsh. Uh, you know what the other thing is let's let's go ahead and put this sideways so you want to put that down and get hands on the light right here and you're gonna just twist this loose a little bit we're gonna rotate it on the ball and go ahead and lock that up great so now we're wrapping a lot more because we got a much longer light happening so we're gonna wrap around their faces more and we're also going to take it up a bit, which I always like to take my lights up a touch you get a much more pleasing angle from the light when it's dead on it feels a little artificial unless there's something in the scene to motivate it that way this always feels a little nicer it always plays nicer on the face for me great we got that so you could see the quality of light that we're getting from it where it's got a nice sharpness to it but it's also feeling very soft to me and this is this is just one of my favorite lights I don't use them as often as I'd like, but I just love the look of it and once you've worked with it you kind of always call it out films you just know it's keynote has a very, very specific look to me but let's go ahead and flick that off let's swap over to the mole you could just bring the balance right here let's bring them all in yeah that's the one k tungsten calling it a mall because it's a mole richardson light I know my that strength down way got it you can you can go ahead and untie me school and sam you want to kind of wrangle these cables here so we don't get too crazy the cables for the the kino gino great all right marine maureen sorry I'm saying your name right right it's close enough all right let's uh let's take it up you go on and keep on and on it great perfect all right now before you kick on lights especially like this and you have stand ins or actors standing there the first thing you're going to say his eyes everybody knows this thing's about to go hot because the stakes are really, really bright so here's a switch right here to turn it off before you do and that's just all kinds of bright spot flood or were just crazy over exposed yeah a lot of power to monitor way uh get might have died okay just can you see what she's got for me let's let's actually truck this back of it all right if you want to help her just get hands on it let's take it back let's say three to four feet let's go four feet watch that cable there. Can you wrangle that cable axel that's good right there. Oh, god all right, why the monitor's coming on just right now with you know, your eyes and with the cameras here you could see it much more higher harsh on the skin right it's not rapping as much it's not as pleasing but this could be a good thing depending on the tone of film you're going for you might want this really harsh sort of baked by the sun look let's flip over two tungsten weigh on the front hold it down okay, hold on I got you oh, you gotta click this guy play mood over which it hasn't been wanting to yes I think the cable might be loose because this isn't quite got responding so you go over find the way balance okay? And you could see how harsh it is right here, right? Like we're getting a lot of contracts, especially on his nose right uh so let's actually raise that a little bit start which is like using an underwear ad give us like red steel or whatever it is blue steel my god, those cheekbones most cheekbones and we're getting some bounce that's filling in their faces. But still you could see how harsh alight like this is going to be in the difference between an open face life for now like this one because you've got the lens on it which is focusing the light a lot more so it's gonna be a lot cleaner life then you're going to get from an open face also par which I have with the light like this one that's what I mean by open faced you could see right to the bull there's no lens there right and if you look in the back you got that uh that reflected that I see that okay as you spot and flood the light which we all know what that means right? You're focusing in the light where you're flooding out light for ah a wider range you could see that the reflectors actually moving back and forth some of these lights the bulb will move back and forth in the reflector will stay stationary with it for now it's a fixed difference between the bulb and the reflector so as you move it both of them are moving back and forth so it's not going to spread as much it's going to be more focused in you can control the light on these guys a lot better you can see it's a very spotlight look with this light it's gonna flood out everywhere let's go ahead and kill that light bring down actually you wanna help her out and uh careful using pull on one second with that light let's just move this right here careful let's bring in the led you wanna grab that axl you could take a seat for now thank you let's just go ahead and uh put that up I'll grab this and then you can go and play that one and this one is, uh both tungsten and daylight's you can switch between him and the way it does that is if you look at the lens of the light you see you have all those different little ladies they're lined up right so jumping from one of the other you're going to have a daylight balance tunks and balanced daylight balanced hunks of bounce all throughout so you're either switching between daylight or tungsten so you're not getting really the full power of this light unless you're doing both at the same time what you can do if you go full tanks in full daylight you're getting half of what a pure daylight appeared tungsten led of this size would dio want to switch over to daylight and we're still a little harsh here I think the kino is a little bit more soft and what do you guys think? Right? King has got a softer you know more pleasant look for me than even this does but we could throw diffusion on this guy and my favorite thing about these lights is how you know cool day steak they don't get even remotely hot and they're super easy the handhold so you could take us to take it off the stand really easily and just walk around with it sorry we're all doing a bit how's that and so you know if the characters walking around I could sit here maybe you know as a grip and walk with them they're stark walked towards me towards me, and I could just boom the light on him. I did something very, very similar with tell where we actually mounted. I wish you had led is at the time we mounted, eh? I believe one fifty tungsten on the end of ah light stand, and we just boom the lights and over walking down hallways just like this, because, you know, we had tight corners where we couldn't get the lights into. So, as much as you know, choosing the type off camera matters to your project, choosing the type of light that you're working with matters, too, because each life is going to have a totally different quality. So working with them and figuring out what exactly you want for that moment, you're an interrogation scene you probably don't want, you know, soft light, if you want to get really harsh with it.