Meeting with the Lighting Director

Today we spoke with George, the school's Lighting Director who will be helping us light our music videos. He firstly gave us a brief talk on what types of lights are possible, and then spoke to us more personally on how we want to light our music video and of what we want our final product to look like.

Our notes from the talk.

The following lights he said would be possible to obtain:

• Beauty lighting — although they are expensive.
• Strobe lighting — only really works with a pitch black room.
• UV lighting — need very bright whites to actually glow.
• Tungsten Spotlight — a yellowy orange spotlight which locks into position, although possible to change the colour of with coloured gels.
• Pixel Range — offers a good cover of light; a complete wash.
• Pixelline — a row of coloured LED lights.
• Hard-edge or frosted Spotlights — can have shapes/fire/water effects.

If we were filming in a studio, this is the type of set up we'd have. However, on location it's a lot harder.

Listening to this and then talking to him, we explained that we wanted our video to have a cold, blue-grey colouring, but given how our music video takes place both indoors and outdoors, he explained that this would only really be possible with a cloudy day, which we may not be able to get. He warned us that we should be adaptable with our lighting and that if it is a sunny day, we should change our lighting and colours to be more yellow and gold like the sun would be. In terms of what lights we should bring, he recommended 4 Redhead lights (which are naturally yellow), a softlight (which is naturally fluorescent white) and some cool gels in case it is a cloudy day and we go for colder lighting. Also, he warned that if we were using an abandoned house, energy would be a problem - and that we needed to start also researching as to how we could obtain a generator large enough to bring with us on the shoot day.

The redhead lighting kit we are hoping to use.

The type of coloured gels we will need to bring with us.

In particular, this colour of lighting is what we're looking for.