Seven Dollars And A Coke Bottle Are All You Need To Learn Lighting

I know little to nothing about lighting, something I always let slide on my checklist of production knowledge. Of all things production-oriented a person could learn in school, I assumed that good lighting equipment was one of the hardest things to get my hands on and therefore, I couldn’t learn. However, while attending AbelCine’s Modern Lighting: An Evening of Tech and Craft class last Thursday, I learned that my excuse didn’t hold up very well.

First of all, what I got out of the class is not the point I initially thought they were trying to drive home — especially since LitePanels co-founder Pat Grosswendt was the speaker. His style was to half teach, half promote his brand’s fairly new ARRI SkyPanel competitor. As helpful as veteran gaffer Grosswendt was in explaining concepts like CRI and Kelvin in beginners’ terms, it was what he alluded to that really caught my interest: you don’t need incredibly impressive lighting gear to learn the basic concepts, because they apply across every piece of equipment you could use in the future.

I knew Grosswendt was serious when he told his audience that they didn’t need one of his products to begin learning how to light professionally. In his eyes, the best thing to do to learn is buy a $7 reflector light at a hardware store, and observe how light changes as you move it around an apple in your room. That’s perfect for someone like me, who lives in one room, alone, with no money. That being said — why haven’t I done it earlier? There’s no more excuses for me to avoid taking light seriously — I don’t need a SkyPanel or Gemini or anything close to that to learn what applies to every single lighting situation I could face in the future.

What also fascinated me more than the products onstage was the makeshift ways in which Grosswendt would work around them. Is your light not soft enough? Are you broke? Get a plastic Coke bottle from the trash and scrape it around so the plastic isn’t clear anymore. Boom. Automatic light diffuser you can put over a small panel. As someone interning for a company with high-quality equipment, I want to get the most out of it. However, once I’m finished at Red Summit, I have been worried about how I will continue to learn as a broke college student. It turns out that familiarity with the basic aspects of lighting necessary to achieve different styles (interview, commercial, dramatic lighting, etc.) is key to knowing how to properly emulate them with your own equipment on your own sets. As Red Summit’s producer friend Tina told us about her own craft: “If you want to make digital video you have to be watching digital video.” That goes for anything else one could possibly produce. Once you watch enough, and start to see patterns in certain styles, you should have a clear image in mind of how you can adapt to make it happen with the equipment you have, even if that’s Coke bottles and hardware store lights.

This workshop totally changed my viewpoint on what a young person looking to work in the production world needs in order to learn. For example, I assumed that to learn anything about cameras I needed the best one around and got the Sony A7Sii. Sure, I’d want it eventually, but I almost wished I had in-depth experience with something less intimidating beforehand. I think a lot of beginners have eyes bigger than their stomachs, buying equipment that has more settings than they know what to do with. Once you realize you can make the most of the basics, then you can move on and use bigger and better things to their full potential.

This was article was written by Red Summit Productions Intern Stacy Andryshak

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