Hi! I am Mike. This is the Film Lab here on the Substream.com. And I’m super freak and excited because today, we get to talk about actual film making equipment, real gear that we rented from our friends in production services here in Toronto.
What we’re going to talk about today is one of my favorite lamps, the thing that I love to take off at the back of the truck when I was working—Grip and Electric Kino Flo. They are absolutely great when you want a whole bunch of really soft, nice even light and you don’t want to draw much power and might be working in confined spaces.
So, where do you get when you rent a Kino lamp? Well, first of all, there’s a whole bunch of different sizes and configurations. There’s two-foot lamps, there’s four-foot lamps and each one of them has a different number of bulbs. This is a two-bulb two-foot lamp. Now, I’ve kind of busted everything the part actually. This is the head and it’s going to come with a bunch of bulbs, this cool grid that works like a neutral band’s lid that filters my work and in the other way around, the mounting plate, the head cable and the ballast.
So, what you do is we’re going to stick Tungsten bulbs in here as you just snap them in to the holder like this and you attach these clips. One of them is short and one of them is long. And the short one goes to the nearest bulb, so you clip them in and you should have this little dangle over here which is where the head cable attaches.
So, you take the side, the female side of the cable which goes onto the male side of the head. And you can see other like so and screw it close. Anyways, it’s the same thing over here where you take a male into the cable into the female receptacle like they are having sex on the ballast, and you screw it to let it secure. Then you close up the “barn doors” doors on this baby and put on the mounting plate.
Now, this thing works. It’s got this little thing in the middle that goes in that little hole and it kind of goes like this and you’re going to make the whole thing go down swift. Pull this pin up then release pin, find thing in the middle so that goes in, put it in an angle, let that go down, spin it, that pops down and it locks in the plate. And your cable and you’re up into the air, put it on your system, open it up wide to the world and hit power on the ballast. That’s right, striking.
It also comes with this grid looking thing which Velcro itself on to here and also works like a neutral dancing filter and lessens the amount of light that’s coming through. And these things always, always, always get lost and you’re going to get in big trouble if you don’t include them back in the package when you return them. A bit of this thing get lost or broken more than anything else almost in a grip lighting package so be careful.
So, what we’re going to do now is I’m going to flip it around. It’s going to cause me to really blow out because the exposure setting—on the camera then we’re going to cut and magically in the next shot, I’m going to expose this properly because we’ve only changed that only now. Are you ready?
So, I’m standing basically within 12 inches of this thing and I’m doing that for one reason. And what I’m saying before about these things being good for using type confined spaces. It’s not just because they are light weight and you can tape the stuff and they are portable, it’s also because they produce no heat. If this was a thousand watt Tungsten bulb, my head would actually be on fire right now. I would die. And you couldn’t put a lamp just close to somebody without murdering, and then you would go to jail for murder.
This thing isn’t hard at all and I’m not exaggerating. You could make toast on this thing if you put a piece of bread on it for nine and a half hours and it’s also dead quite. It makes no, no way whatsoever, they’re just cool, quite, chunk of soft light that you can put within a couple of feet of an actress’s head or even interview subject’s head and not freak them out and also relatively cheap. We rented this one for like a 150 bucks Canadian—if you’re shooting a bunch of interviews and you can get a bunch of stuff done in all occasion any day, this is really cost effective, it really works really well. I love Kino Flo.
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