With Hollywood moving south, if you're prepared to be the expert when it comes to Georgia film making, you might want to know the positions of everyone on the crew.
Let's see...there's the Director, Producers, Script people, Hair/Make-up/Wardrobe, Special Effects and lighting. What's that 'lighting guy' called again?
In the business of film making, the men and women who design scene lighting for motion pictures are called Gaffers.
The term comes from the word 'gaff', which is a boat tool used to lift fish. But other people are hired to lift the lights, today the term is an unofficial name for a movie's Chief Lighting Designer.
"The Cinematographer and I come up with the way we want the movie to look," said Rob Miller, a lighting designer from L.A.
Rob was working on the horror movie TELL ME YOUR NAME in Flowery Branch, Georgia. He allowed Hometown News Atlanta to tag along as he explained the job.
"...there's a lot of nuances involved," said Rob. "...such as the color temperature of the light, how hard or soft it is, direction of the lights and this plays into important story elements of the film."
The hours of the Gaffer jobs are long. Some staff even sleep inside huge lighting trucks parked near the set, movie lighting is that important.
An entire lighting scheme for a movie can take months to plan. Then, there's what the Gaffer calls 'the Controlling Elements'.
"If the sun is too bright, we may have to put giant frames in front of it to make it look like a cloudy day," said Rob.
Other days, when it is cloudy, artificial lighting is brought in to represent the sun. This doesn't sound very complicated, but imagine you've chosen sunny Georgia to shoot your movie and the week of major production shooting---it rains. Call the Gaffer!
The Gaffer's ability to assist with lighting, is almost magic. On most films, evening scenes are usually shot at night.
To a film buff, lighting is the 'sub-conscience element that effects the emotional resonance of the scene'. That's a mouthful, but in the end the film lighting has to be believable.
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