Gear Log - For the Nerds - Part 2: Lights and Sounds

When I discussed this movie with DP extraordinaire Ryan Chambers, he gravitated towards wanting to use mostly Kino Flo lights for everything.

Meet your new master.

The reason for this was that we didn't want to spend a lot of time setting up a million hot lights in this small space when one daylight balanced Kino could achieve this easily. We would be shooting a lot in the evening and needed to fake mid day sun, so these were perfect.

Our main sun faking instrument was this bad boy:

The Kino Flo Wallo light: have the brightness equivalent of a nuclear fission blast on your own film set.

This light is 10 separate 4 foot long Kino tubes and puts out the equivalent of a 2.5k fresnel light. In layman's terms: it's massive. We'd only kick this guy on once the sun had actually gone down and we had to fake it, but now our night shots look more believable for mid day than our day shots! It's absolutely insane.

We also rented a couple of standard hot lights, but I think we used them all of twice. They were only like $15 for a week though, so whatever.

As for sound, we made a stupid expense mistake. We rented a decent mic and boom and some audio recording kit that I don't remember the name of. Remember, kids, your DSLRs have crappy sound cards, so don't try to go direct with your microphone! Not that the D90 has an XLR port on it, but some others do. Just don't use them.

So anyway, the kit worked just fine and all, but the recording unit alone cost $300 for the week. Why was this dumb? Well, when we needed to do post sound, we had the option of renting something like that again...or we could just freaking BUY a Zoom H4N for the same price.

The handiest little audio recorder on the planet

So that's what we ended up doing. And I could have saved $300 by doing it earlier.

That little guy can take in two XLRs, has two of its own built in mics, and can record in just about any format and bitrate you can dream of. Records to a standard SD card, so if you have a couple, you'll never need to break to dump sound.

One of the problems we had with our giant, stupid, expensive sound box was that it used some sort of non standard card, so dumping required a firewire cable. Of course, the rental house forgot to pack one, so I got to make a 1AM trip back to my house to find one in the middle of shooting the scene I was in. Awesome.