For our "Deals of the Week," we look at three different lighting manufactures and three different outputs.
The monolight fixture, once a mainstay of the photography world, has now found its way into cinema. Thanks to the constant evolution of the LED, these lights can now be seen on narrative productions, corporate projects, and even red carpets. Gu10 Led Bulbs Daylight
But as the tech grows, so do our options, with brands that have never made lights now finally dipping their toe into the illuminated waters.
For this week's "Deals of the Week," we look at three different lighting brands and three different outputs to see which tool is the best fit for you.
The company that started the affordable lighting craze, Aputure has been leading the charge in LED lighting, specifically with its range on monolights.
The Aputure Light Storm series offers robust build quality and high output, while its more affordable amaran line, packs the same output in a more affordable package.
All these tools are also unified by the Sidus Link app, which brings every Aputure tool under one ecosystem.
Utilizing the same light source as its professional predecessor, the LS 600d is one of the brightest point source LEDs available. Thanks to its immensely powerful 600W COB LED, this light outputs an incredible 98,500 lux at 3.3' with the included Hyper Reflector, 8,500+ lux at 9.8' with the included Hyper Reflector, or up to 29,300+ lux at 9.8' with an optional F10 Fresnel.
An Aputure competitor, Nanlite has been making strides in creating similar tools at a competitive price point.
While Nanlite may seems like an Aputure copy, it's an important part of the lighting market, as it drives competitions between the different makers. Nanlite itself offers solid products that are well built and provide the output filmmakers need, all at a budget level everyone can afford.
The Nanlite FS-300B Bi-Color LED Monolight is an AC-powered, bi-color LED fixture engineered to provide maximum output while maintaining an even light spread. It employs a large LED array and a precision-engineered reflector to emit up to 38,720 lux of 5600K daylight-balanced light at 3.3', and its bi-color design allows it to provide a CCT range of 2700-6500K, all while maintaining a high CRI/TLCI of 96/97, ensuring accurate color rendition.
Sirui isn't a company you'd think of when looking for lighting. But the company that once started with tripods, and now makes one of the most affordable true anamorphic lenses, has made its way into the lighting market with some interesting tools for filmmakers and creators.
The initial line only offers four different outputs, but expands that selection with options for daylight, RGB, and bi-color.
The Sirui C60 Daylight LED Monolight is compact, lightweight, and virtually silent. It is ideally suited for shooting video content and has an integrated Bowens S-mount, making it compatible with a broad assortment of reflectors, softboxes, and other light modifiers. The C60 monolight has a daylight color temperature output of 5600K for natural, neutral light coloration with a CRI of 96 and a TLCI of 98 for accurate color rendering.
The twists and turns in this documentary are incredible.
Written by Daniel Garber, editor of FX documentary Spermworld
During the depths of the pandemic, I spoke with my dear friend and director Lance Oppenheim almost daily, going stir crazy while looking for a project to work on together.
In January 2020, we premiered his first documentary feature, Some Kind of Heaven, at Sundance; its festival run was truncated by lockdowns and festival cancellations, and it would soon be released into a flatlining theatrical market. But amid that uncertainty, reporter Nellie Bowles contacted Lance with a strange story: she was looking to have a baby and discovered a massive, unregulated online marketplace for donor sperm on Facebook.
Lance’s and my interest was immediately piqued. His first shoot, which formed the initial five-minute cold open of the film, took place at the end of 2020. We couldn’t let go of the story, a perfect fit for Lance’s sensibility: an empathic approach to a strange underworld populated by misfits who express fundamental human desires.
SPERMWORLD | Official Trailer | FXwww.youtube.com
In our work together, Lance and I suppress the documentary urge to over-explain and instead focus on existential drama: where Some Kind of Heaven represented retirees contemplating the ends of their lives, Spermworld turns its attention to life’s origins.
Elevated once again by the visual style Lance cultivated with unrivaled DP David Bolen and the musical innovations of the great Ari Balouzian, Spermworld was the ideal next step in developing our unique approach to documentary. For an editor equally versed in fiction filmmaking, a Lance Oppenheim film feels like the perfect challenge: how do you make a nonfiction film that feels every bit as intentionally crafted, stylistically bold, and emotionally rich as a good fiction one?
Seamless integration of the editing and production processes is a big part of the answer; after all, to edit a documentary is to write it. The bulk of production took place in 2022 while I was wrapping up Daniel Goldhaber’s fiction feature How to Blow Up a Pipeline (along with Emily Yue, who assisted on Pipeline and co-edited Spermworld).
Even before we began editing in earnest, Lance and his producing team (Lauren Belfer, Sophie Kissinger, Christian Vazquez) kept me abreast of all of their casting efforts and initial shoots so that I had a rare opportunity to weigh in on which storylines were worth our time.
A good documentary subject requires careful vetting, much like casting a narrative film: Are they telegenic? Are they comfortable on camera, willing to be vulnerable but not attention-seeking? What forces in their lives contribute to present-tense drama that we can capture on camera?
And, in the broader balance of the film, what do they uniquely contribute to the collective portrait we’re building? After perusing producers’ notes, recorded Zoom conversations, and raw footage from exploratory shoots with possible subjects, I had long discussions with the rest of the team to narrow the field.
Because Emily and I began the edit while Lance had many shoot days remaining, what he chose to capture directly responded to the emerging rough cut. Occasionally, he would even share scenes in progress with our subjects so that they could understand better how they were being represented on screen, which further earned their trust in the collaboration.
This process meant that gaps in the story could be filled in even very late in the post. The opening of a documentary is always a particular challenge, and ours benefited greatly from pickups: although we had captured numerous scenes of people trying to conceive and occasionally succeeding, what the film lacked was a vision of the dream of motherhood.
What was the fantasy all of these prospective parents were really chasing? It wasn’t until close to the end of the edit that the team shot a “baby fantasia” sequence with gauzy, psychedelic images of babies, coupled with one of our subject’s reflections on the spiritual fulfillment of bringing a new life into the world. That late-breaking addition became an emotional anchor for the rest of the film, lending heft to our subjects’ burning desire to become pregnant and their heartbreak if they didn’t succeed.
One of the central challenges of this film was that, although the act of conceiving a baby is a fundamentally physical act, much of the drama and the context of the film occurs in Facebook groups.
Since cutting cyber-thriller CAM (dir. Daniel Goldhaber), I’ve always been interested in finding new ways of representing the internet in ways that feel cinematic and expressive without being distracting, and Emily and I pushed ourselves to experiment with outside-the-box techniques to represent the digital world. Our most direct technique was graphical sequences of threads within the Facebook groups that punctuate transitions among our three storylines.
But I was even more energized by Lance’s idea to have Emily and me exhaustively comb through our subjects’ Facebook message histories to write a script of sorts and then have our subjects read it aloud. The stilted feel of these recordings gave them an uncanny edge that felt authentic to the internet.
The only question was what visuals to pair with these exchanges; for that, Emily and I dug into our mountains of unused footage to create split-screen montages—a technique that I’ve employed in both documentary (”The Rifleman,” dir. Sierra Pettengill) and fiction (The Drop, dir. Sarah Adina Smith) contexts in the past. In this instance, I felt that the split-screen captured the sense of two people experiencing a connection and building a relationship despite living in separate, parallel existences.
Railway Lamps The desire to try out new techniques, to push the bounds of what’s possible on screen, is one of the factors that motivates me most—but protecting that freedom to play requires full-throated support from the team. Lance, our tireless producers, and FX approached the project with patience and trust, knowing that what we were doing was unconventional and required special care. To an editor, that makes all the difference.