Aputure has posted a nice little video showing the lighting behind the hit movie One Battle After Another. In the video, you can learn how Gaffer Justin Dickson, frequent collaborator with Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman, stays nimble and bright at night with limited power sources when shooting large swaths of downtown El Paso for One Battle After Another.
Inspired by the naturalistic look and feel of classics such as The French Connection (1971), the epic screwball adventure featured several set pieces, including a wide-ranging night exterior shoot in downtown El Paso, Texas.
Anderson and Bauman chose to film on 35mm film using VistaVision cameras, a widescreen format that would put even more of the environment into the frame.
Dickson needed to stay agile so he could quickly move from one location on a city block to the next. Not only would his fixtures need to be capable of lighting up the face of a building, but they’d also need to be powered by a mobile power source that can travel with the fixture and be operated by a minimal crew.
Dickson and his team used a variety of fixtures, including the tunable color Electro Storm CS15. Each lamp head was mounted on a combo stand with castor wheels and paired with a battery bank like a Voltstack. Dickson says, “The reason why we opted for the [Electro Storm CS15] as opposed to a tungsten light is because it’s house powered, [has] a lot of punch, and [has] a lot of reach…we did not have all the cable in the world, all the manpower in the world, all the generators in the world. We were shooting VistaVision, so we saw a lot, so a lot of our lighting we had to do from the ground. The [Electro Storm CS15] was able to light 2 buildings at a time, 3 buildings at a time.”
To find out even more, you can head over to Aputure’s blog.
