Natural lighting

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or get my latest posts directly in your mailbox. Thanks for coming to the Foo!

One day while filming outside in a park, we were all ready to roll. I had the shot lined up, the actors were in place, composition was nice. Except the sun wasn’t where I wanted it to be. I knew that moving the camera and resetting the shot would just take too much time. So I leaned over, and asked my gaffer if I could borrow his gloves, as I had left mine home. Realizing what I wanted them for, he paused for a moment as they were brand new and he didn’t want them burned. At this point the Key grip caught on to what I wanted, put his gloves on and proceeded to reach up to the sky to move the sun to the left for me.

Well, the gaffer (now putting on his gloves) cleared his throat, causing the Key grip to pause, and explained that the sun being an object of illumination was really a light, and that he felt it was the job of an electric to move it into position.

The Key Grip, with arms already outstretched and gloves beginning to sizzle a little, countered by replying that he didn’t see any power cables connected to the sun, and therefore it really wasn’t part of the electric department’s gear any way.

Just as the Gaffer was about to reply a young P.A. Interrupted to say, while putting on HIS gloves, that obviously because there were no feeder cables attached to the Sun, it wasn’t the responsibility of the Electrical dept. However, since you really couldn’t put a sand bag on it, that meant that it really wasn’t a piece of grip equipment either. Therefore, Quid Pro Quo, i.e., and Q.E.D. (don’t you just love those P.A.’s just out of College) the responsibility for moving the sun belonged to the P.A.’s.

Well the three of them went off into a corner to discuss it. By this time the sun had moved to where I wanted it to be. I signalled the director we were ready. We rolled the camera, took the shot, and the A.D. called lunch.