I'm the lucky guy that got to light and shoot Internet Slutts. This article will give you some insight into how I lit the action, what gear we used, and little tricks along the way.

The direction I was given when designing the lighting for Murks' apartment was that he lived in a dungy, moldy little basement. The first thing I did was scan in my photographs of the unfinished set, and PhotoShop them for a few hours to rough in the colors and look.

BEFORE

This gave Gaffer Ray Mcleary and his crew a basis for our prelight. I just hung up the printout in the studio and said make it look like this:

Lighting "plan"

 

Most of the soft front lighting comes from a new Kinoflo light called the Diva-Lite. It is a biggish soft source, about 26x12. The great thing about it is you can dim it 4 stops without any change in color. This made it perfect for everything from bright daylight to midnight glows. We built a big egg crate over the Diva out of black foamcore, to keep the light from contaminating the dark background walls. In retrospect perhaps we shouldn,t have made the egg crate so tight with blackwrap and tape, because by the end of the shoot we had melted the plastic grid of the Diva light. Oops. The Diva is also very efficient drawing only 1.8 amps, so it is great for locations. I wouldn,t recommend it for cars, though we blew all the fuses in my rental car when we tried to run it off of a 12V inverter for a shot. Oops again.
 

We also hung two 1K softlights from the grid to provide more front lighting. These became known as the "Are you sure lights", because whenever we turned them on, they washed everything out and looked like crap. I trained my gaffer to wake up and say "Are you sure? every time I attempted to turn them on.
 

In order to separate the characters from the background, each of the key action areas has its own backlight from overhead and behind. I intentionally went a little too big on these lights, just in case we ever wanted to blow them out for an effect. Since I knew they would usually be down to 50% on the dimmer board, we put a CTB (blue) gel on all of them to compensate for the warming effect the dimming would give. I also find that bright light looks "brighter" on TV when it is bluish, so the gels worked well for the few times the backlights were on full blast.
 

 

The computer screen is a flat-panel LCD monitor. We chose it because LCDs do not flicker on TV or film. It was one of the biggest rental expenses of the entire shoot. While at the computer, Wally and Murk are lit by 9 inch daylight Kinoflo,s taped to the front or side of the screen. Kinos are great because they dim without changing color and the 9 inch ones are perfectly puppet-sized.
 

We had a few other 9 inch Kinos that moved around the set to provide both key and accent lighting
in areas that weren,t lit from the grid by the furnace or under the sink, for example. When used for front lighting the guys away from the computer, I usually put CTO (orange) on daylight bulbs to differentiate that lighting from the bluish computer area.
 
 

It was important to keep the characters lighting off of the walls of Murks apartment, since dark and grungy was the look. The 9 inch kinos were never a problem, because their soft light falls off so quickly. All the other lights were heavily flagged and boxed in to keep them off the walls. How do you save money on flags and grip gear on a long-term rental like a studio shoot? Well Ray bought a bunch of large aluminum-foil pans, painted them flat black, and used them to make barn-door extensions for the lights. He's smart!

Gaffer Ray with homemade light meter
and radiation suit in his "laboratory"

 

The Florescent light over the kitchen is my favorite in the set. It is actually a Lumiline tungsten tube-bulb with #93 blue-green to give it that grungy florescent look. If you haven't noticed, it flickers all the time, just like a bad florescent bulb. I think the flicker, although surprisingly subtle on TV, adds a nice touch of decay to the apartment. We used a flicker box from Gamcolor. While we are on the subject of the kitchen, there was always a little red glow coming from inside the toaster. I'm sure it never once was visible on TV, but it was fun to do, and Todd dutifully turned it on each morning.
 

 

Our Betacam 537As were set to 3200 degrees preset color temperature, and we called them roughly 320 ASA. The entire set is lit to very low levels, so the lenses were always wide open. Although this made focus a nightmare, the shallow depth of field went a long way to lending the mythical "film look we all wanted. The rental house thought we were nuts for using the 3200 degree preset ("What do you mean you don't white balance?!?) but coming from film, that is how I was used to working you balance the lights, not the camera. In the end this solved a lot of the problems involved in matching the 2 cameras without an on-set video engineer.
 

We used peppers, mostly 200s and 420s for little hits of accent light here and there the dartboard behind the computer, the back of the couch, the "boob-wall," etc.


The rare times that light streams in through Murk's window, it is yellow-green, with Rosco #07 Yellow and plusgreen gel. When they watch TV, it is a 420 pepper with blue gel and diffusion on a flicker box making the TV light.
 
 

The bathroom light gets it's nice grungy texture from a sheet of clear gel that my gaffer took outside and stomped into the mud.

We experimented for a few episodes with projecting slides of cool skies outside Murk,s window, and although it looked great, it was time consuming and limited where we could place the B camera. We settled on using fresnels to put a wash of color on the back wall 2 full CTBs for daytime skies, 4 full CTBs for night, with the occasional warm sunset effect.
 
 
I really like to use filters to enhance the images. We often used ND grads to direct the viewer's attention to the appropriate part of the frame, or as a quick and dirty substitute for complicated light control. You can get a lot of mileage out of cheap Cokin P-size grads! I was glad I talked the money people into springing for real film-style matte boxes because they allowed us great flexibility in positioning filters, and helped with flare as well.

Everything is shot through a Tiffen #1 Black Pro Mist to take the "video edge" off and add to the filmishness. We dialed down the detail of our Betacams to minus 25, the rental house thought we were nuts for that too.
 

We used my selection of "wacky glass" for some of the dreamier / trippy sequences. These are pieces of weird and wonderful glass I have collected from stained glass shops, antique picture frames, and old photocopiers.

 

 

The hardest thing about shooting a puppet show is that there are actual people underneath!
I know that sounds obvious, but Frank and Ron are both such talented puppeteers that I would frequently forget and treat Wally and Murk like little people. I was reminded of that fact when asking the guys to move into positions that are easy for puppets, but not for the people holding them up. "Hey Poindexter, the guy with his hand up my ass says he can't contort into that position, you hack." Ron and Frank really liked me.

 

Because of Wally and Murk's need for human operators, all the sets had to be built on 4 foot risers, the props had to be raised up on grip stands, and the cameras were on their own platforms. This made for some difficulty in moving cameras around, placing lights and generally staying balanced while hung over.


Something we tried to do with Wally and Murk was to not shoot them like puppets.
You will note that there are hardly any "Ernie and Bert" style shots with the boys seen from the
waist up behind a low wall. Doing interesting things with Wally and Murk without seeing their puppeteers was the biggest challenge of the shoot. If you happen to have an underscan monitor, or the ability to zoom out your TV, you will see that there is occasionally a black blob floating underneath the guys - these are Ron and Frank's black-hatted heads.
We often kept the humans right on the edge of frame, or strategically placed a single prop in front
to block them out, like the stapler above.

My friend Gavin Smith helped us vastly improve the production value of the show when he let us use the jib-arm he invented. From about the 5th episode on, the A camera was always mounted on a 4 foot arm that enabled us to do cool moves and get into more interesting positions.

We looked into shooting the entire show on Canon's awesome little DV camera, the XL1. Although we all loved the look these cameras gave, they weren,t suitable for studio shooting for the following reasons: no way to precisely match 2 cameras, no user settable timecode, no manual control of focus and zoom, and no professional-style viewfinders. I understand Canon has fixed the last 2 things and has come out with a real Betacam-style lens and viewfinder. We did use an XL1 for our location shooting. We chose it over the Betacam simply because the Canon looks so great in
low light, / "available darkness" situations. This allowed us to keep our location lighting small and affordable, while still producing nice looking shots.
 

See the original Internet Slutts lighting gear order suitable for framing.

See the world,s fastest lighting crew in action - (cool)
 
 

Do you have questions or comments about shooting the Slutts?
Email me: IShotTheSlutts@sightz.com