LIFX, Camera, Action
Tags: Lighting, Photography, Tech, Production, Creative

Creative lighting for a film production company

We’re Stephen Gray & Chris Radtke, two Canadian filmmakers behind At First Sight Films — a film production company. We do everything from commercial work to documentaries. We recently expanded our post-production spaces and built two brand-new studios from scratch. With this came the challenge. How do we keep our space a clean design for clients, but on the same end, making it functional and fun?

Studio 2 — LIFX Z Strips

So when you’re building, whether it’s a home, an office, or in our case two studio spaces, it’s hard to plan for everything. Inevitably, you always forget about something. We happened to forget about some critical areas of lighting. The LIFX Z strips allowed us to install these LED light strips pretty much anywhere, even after the fact. All we needed was a power source and an internet connection.

These LED strips are RGBW, which in the filmmaking world is a must-have. It gives off a wide range of light options from full RGB to so many white light options, which is perfect for post-production studios, designers, or even gamers.

Studio 1 Lighting Set Up

(Stephen) In Studio 1, I have 3 zones. 1 zone set up that’s underneath the desk, 1 zone behind an LG monitor, and 1 behind an Apple Cinema Display. All of these are labeled independently and I can control them all separately. So what helps me is during the day, I can set the monitors to a lower opacity, while keeping it super bright under the desk during the day.

Studio 1 — Edit Suites

Let’s say I wanted to control the entire studio space at once, but there are 3 separate controllers? I can do that by grouping them together and for example setting everything to blue, red, white, or dancing RGB — whatever I’m in the mood for at that time. There is an adhesive strip on the back of each light, which can be placed on just about any surface. Here, we used the adhesives behind each monitor to create a nice ambient light spilling onto the wall.

Left: Studio 1 — White (Daytime) | Right: Studio 1 — Red (Night)

Studio 2 Set Up

(Chris) In Studio 2, I wanted to put them underneath my cabinets which were otherwise dark. So the settings I like to have on is, if I’m watching something like a movie on my projector — I’ll put about 25% at 4000k. If you’re in a room where it’s pitch black it actually is hard on the eyes, so it’s just takes a little bit of that edge off. When I’m editing I like to just blast it up to a hundred percent 4000k. Maybe a little bit of color in there. You can connect these LIFX lights to IFFT. So, here in Winnipeg — the Jets are dear to my heart. When a goal is scored, we can have the lights flash a certain way. It’s just a little fun little thing to do.

Studio 2 — Theatre Projector & Edit Suite

Daytime / Night-time settings

(Steve) When the room is pitch black and I’m doing color grading on a film, if I have a white set to just a low opacity it kind of takes the edge off of the room being pitch-black. I’m able to focus in on all the colors in the screen. When I’m editing during the day, I like to keep the lights set to full brightness. During the evening, I have HomeKit set up to auto-dim the lights behind the monitors to 40%, keeping under the desk to 80%.

Z Strips behind monitors

Studio 1 — RGB control

The nice thing creatively is you can have these things synchronized you can have individual colors change the colors to the mood that you’re editing in or you want to show with your clients or even if you’re just gaming.

In the end, we’re both very happy with the way that our studio spaces turned out and the LIFX lights just open up a lot more creative options for us. Our clients are going to love it, we love working in these spaces. It’s a great mix of work and play.

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