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Click here to get a copy of the March 2009 Edition, so you can read and enjoy all of the excellent articles inside. Check out this article in the March 2009 print edition of StudentFilmmakers Magazine, Page 4.

Fried Lighting Circuits on the Set:
When Your Genny Fails, and Blowing Granny's Fuse Box is Not an Option

by Jack Anderson

One great thing about working as a Director of Photography is that you never know where the job will take you. I�ve been in the Bahamas � not too shabby � and in the Valley of Fire in summer (just what it sounds like).

One of my completely unexpected jobs landed me in Grand Rapids, Michigan, shooting for a unique film program at a university. Whoever designed the course had the sense to know that you don�t learn filmmaking out of books. You learn by doing, by getting your hands dirty, and by getting yelled at. Usually by me. So in the course, we make a real movie, a fully professional production with students acting as the crew.

It�s a wonderful chance for students to work with professionals � producer, director, DP, writer, actors, editor, and post. They get course credit, and they learn the kind of hands-on knowledge that you can find only on the set.

The script for the first film I shot called for a lot of shooting at farmhouses. One of the locations was a ramshackle place owned by a septuagenarian lady who never missed her Friday night dance parties or her gin, bless her.

But her house was about a hundred years old, and the wiring was commensurate with its age. Of course, to have enough electrical power for even the smallest movie lamps, I ordered a generator. I didn�t want to take any chance of faulty wiring burning down the house.

None of the students had ever used a genny (yes, that�s what we call generators), and I�m a DP, not an electrician. But we found a terrific equipment house in Grand Rapids, they had everything we needed, and taught us all how to set up and use the genny. With luck, nobody would be electrocuted.

Our first day on the set found us in the sweet old lady�s house, doing a flashback scene in which a man beats up his young son. Of course, there were first-day nerves all around, and of course, we had a kid on set. A good kid, but still: you never want to work with kids or animals. They tend to behave rather than act, so it�s hard to get a performance rather than merely behavior; and they�re really intolerant of retakes, so you�d better get it the first time.

The action was to take place in the kitchen. My plan was to light the kitchen as a natural interior using tungsten lamps and using film balanced for 3200�K; I would let the bluish outdoors stay blue to keep the sober, almost sad intent of the script. Then I planted an uncorrected HMI (at around 6000�K) outside, shooting through the window to blow out some of the action. By overexposing the light from the HMI, I could get a stylized look for the scene; the HMI light would seem like an extreme accidental splash of sunlight, even though the fields seen through the window would be only slightly bright, as though the sun was attacking the boy.

Since so many of the scenes with the grown son took place at night, I decided that the flashbacks with his younger self (all set during the day) should have an overbright element to separate the look of the past from the present. I also used my favorite diffusion: an optical flat with a thin coating of Vaseline, rubbed in one direction along a paper towel to give streaks of light. (You may not know: an optical flat is just like a filter � same size, same optical glass, same strict manufacturing standards � but completely transparent. It�s great for protecting the lens from explosions and mud and for making your own filters.)

We were all ready to shoot, actors on the set, and suddenly everything was dark. Our genny had stopped. Why? Who knew? But the child actor was there, and we had to get the shot.

While my gaffer, a dedicated student who is now in the business in Arizona, raced out to work on the genny, I looked at the woebegone face of my director, and I knew I had to figure a way to shoot. Fast.

Let�s look at my lighting plan: I had a few small units � 1Ks and 2Ks � inside to give a low level light to the kitchen. I had left the window ungelled, so it would be bluish and slightly overexposed. And I had my 4K HMI outside to provide the effect light to (slightly) blow out the scene from the past.

Now, without a genny, I would have to rely on the power in the old house to run my lamps. My concern for overloading the house rose to a new level.

[Here�s the most important formula you�ll ever learn if you�re dealing with lighting: W=vA. �W� is the total wattage of the lamps you connect to a given circuit; you add the wattages of your lamps together. �v� is the voltage; household voltage is 120. But to make the arithmetic easier (and give us a safety margin) we call it 100. The �A� is the amperes drawn; amperes measure the amount of the electricity used, and it�s what we usually need to find out, since the fuses or breakers are set to blow when they use above a certain amount of amps, usually 15 or 20. For example, with the 4K HMI, it�s 4000 watts and the voltage is 100. Plugging the numbers into the equation, we get 4000=100A. Solving for amps, A=4000/100, or 40.]

Of course, the HMI was useless for now � that lamp would draw 40 amps, and more than one 1K (10 amps) would probably blow out the house circuits. We checked, and the fuse box (I haven�t seen anything but circuit breakers in forty years) suggested we had two 15 Amp circuits.

I�ve spent a lot of time on big Hollywood productions, but I�ve also done a lot of very low budget work during the slow times. Here�s where all those long hours at short pay begin to pay off. When you don�t have the resources for equipment, you have to be creative, and I�ve seen the most amazing jerry-rigs from my fellow crew members.

I had to shoot, I had to light, and I had only house power. It came to me suddenly: cut down all the lamp wattage. If I could use small lamps that wouldn�t overload the house circuits, I could do some kind of lighting. I decided to cut down the size of the lamps I would use to � the size of the ones I had planned. So where I�d had 1Ks, I used some 250s, and I used a 100W household bulb in a China ball for fill. By staying under 1500 Watts (remember, W=vA, W=100x15=1500max Watts available) and putting those small lamps all on one circuit, I was safe from burning down the house, and the light from them was proportionate to what I had in my original setup. To get my �overexposure� I used a Baby 1K with � CTB � brought inside the house � to simulate the HMI splash I originally had.

Of course I had to shoot at a wider stop: all the way open at this point. Now I still had the window in the shot, and at the new stop it would blow out. We grabbed a couple of 4X4 grip doubles from the truck and clipped them up outside the window, and we were balanced. The window looked bright enough for day, but dark enough to keep it moody.

Thank goodness, it all worked. We didn�t burn down the house. My gaffer got the genny working for the rest of the afternoon so I didn�t have to play Mandrake and pull another rabbit out of the hat. The shot looks just as it did in my original concept. And I got an �Attaboy� for getting the scene.

Jack Anderson is a thirty-year Hollywood veteran. He was DP for “Always Say Goodbye,” first-prize winner at the First Hollywood Film Festival. He did second-unit DP on “Hook,” “Noises Off,” and “Mad About You.” Short films he shot won prizes at the Los Angeles Short Film Festival, Crested Butte Reel Fest, Instant Films (LA), Waterfront Film Festival (Muskegon), and Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival. He teaches Cinematography at California State University Long Beach.

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