American Cinematographer - December 2017 - 96

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Timeless Romance

Goldblatt embraced LED lighting for the production's location work. "Traditional lighting gets so
hot and uncomfortable," he says. The LEDs, on the other hand, were "completely cool to the
touch. It takes a lot of the work and complexity out of rigging."

the movie, when Louis and Addie's relationship is in trouble. "I was able to
balance the light to them according to
whatever the streetlights were doing,
and I could do it as we were traveling in
the car," the cinematographer remembers. "I was very pleased with the
results."
Throughout the production,
Mathis adds, "We used the LiteTile
prototype for fill and as a soft source.
But the coolest thing we did was putting
up Velcro and using the LEDs and
dimmers in Bob's truck - especially the
free-driving stuff in the daytime with no
insert car."
Most of Our Souls at Night was
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December 2017

shot on real locations rather than sets,
and Goldblatt feels that the LED lighting provided another benefit in this
regard. "Traditional lighting gets so hot
and uncomfortable, and here I could put
up a soft bank of LEDs," he says. "The
light source was maybe 8 feet across and
12 feet high. I could place it outside of a
window, it could angle down and
bounce, and it was completely cool to
the touch. It takes a lot of the work and
complexity out of rigging; you're often
able to control lights wirelessly without
necessarily having anybody go up on a
ladder."
On the subject of LEDs' impact
on
motion-picture
production,
American Cinematographer

DeMayo - a former gaffer - offers, "I
believe that LED lighting has really
made an impact in two areas. The first is
the ability to adjust the brightness of a
lighting instrument without the negative effects of color shift. This was a key
turning point in cinema lighting, as it
finally allowed for accurate blending of
multiple colors. But dimming two
colors of white - tungsten and daylight
- really changed everything. You could
finally choose the intensity and Kelvin
temperature on the fly without the use
of scrims and CTO or CTB gels. There
was no turning back after that. This was
only possible because of the unique
characteristics of the LED technology
itself. Let's say an LED dims to 50
percent; it does that by turning on at
100 percent, but for only 50 percent of
the time, resulting in half the light. Do
that correctly, and it's suitable for use
with cinema cameras.
"The second impact is in the use
of many smaller LEDs arranged over a
large area, thereby creating soft light
without the need for diffusion or filters,"
DeMayo continues. "The modern trend
is to light mostly with soft light -
Steve and Stephen used the LiteTile as
a soft source that is thin and provides a
very wide output. If you want hard light
from an LED fixture, that's a greater
challenge, especially if you really want a
5K Fresnel. There are some options, but
they require heavy heat sinks and fans.
My generation grew up using incandescent Fresnel lights pushed through a 4by-4 of silk, muslin, or 216; modern
LED fixtures from nearly every
company offer soft and easily controllable arrays."
Goldblatt says that the strippeddown production was in perfect
harmony with the simplicity of the story
and what Batra was trying to achieve
visually. "Ritesh was insistent, in the
nicest possible way, that this film be
humble," the cinematographer notes. "It
was about two elderly people drawn
from loneliness into companionship and
then a love affair. Therefore, if the film
was going to be successful, it couldn't
and shouldn't be flashy - that would do

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