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Alex Schwindt is an independent filmmaker based in Raleigh, North Carolina. On a recent shoot at Duke University’s Goodman Chapel the lighting was beautiful, but impossible nearly impossible to film. He explains, “The stage area is back lit by windows that are probably 100-foot wide by 40 foot tall. And then on the far wall is another set of windows. And we rolled in and we were shooting the scene and it was the first beautiful day of spring. It was, the sky was blue. The trees had bloomed and the light outside the windows was just gorgeous, but it was crazy bright. And so, we had a hard choice. We had to decide, are we going to expose for the people in the room? Or are we going to expose to the sky and really underexpose the people we were supposed to be filming?”
Learn more about how a single lighting fixture can offer a wide range of solutions for filmmakers in this DAVE.video interview with Filmmaker, Alex Schwindt, Randy Ready, Specification Sales Manager with ARRI and Brian Blackmore, editor of Church Production.
But Schwindt just happened to have new piece of lighting equipment that he was reviewing for Church Production Magazine – the ARRI Orbiter. “So, we weren't really planning to use the Orbiter, but we had it with us. We threw the Orbiter up quickly. I think in four minutes we threw a diffusion panel in front of it and just punched through it. And we were competing with the sun and it worked! We didn't lose the sky. We didn't lose with people. We were probably shooting from 30 feet away, just kind of pretending like we had another wall of windows with this light, and we didn't have to choose between the sky and the people. And I can count on no fingers the number of time a single light source has ever let me do that. So that was a surprise. That was really great.”
"...we were competing with the sun and it worked!" - Alex Schwindt, filmmaker
Randy Reed is the sales manager with ARRI lighting and he explains that the Orbiter is much more than a very bright light. He says many call it the Swiss Army Knife of lighting. “One minute it can be an open faced 60-degree light with a hard light coming out of it with sharp shadows. The next minute, it can be a light with a Chimera Dome on it and doing an interview with it. And then it’s got all kinds of sensors and things like that on it,” Reed says. “You can bring it into any room. And if you don't know what the color temperature is in that room, it's got a sensor on top of the fixture and you can go into the menu and turn it on and it will turn the light to whatever the color temperature is in the room. So that makes it a lot easier trying to figure out and get your camera light balanced.”
"The ambient light color temperature sensor is a differentiator that I've never seen on a light and I loved it." - - Alex Schwindt, filmmaker
Schwindt says the color temperature sensor and matching features were one of his favorites on the Orbiter. “One of the things that really impressed me, I do a lot of documentaries and so the ambient light feature where it would just kind of give us a reading of the room and tell me what the color temperature in the room was, was really impressive,” he says. “I could basically turn on the light, use that feature and then just dial in the amount of light. And the matching was really fantastic. And that's one of those features that kind of seems like an extra cool bonus add on if you're doing independent fixture filmmaking, where you're running fast, or you’re doing a documentary, that's a differentiator that I've never seen on a light and I loved it. I was very, very impressed. It was very functional and worked really well.”
Schwindt’s CPM review of the Orbiter can be found here https://www.churchproduction.com/gear/arri-orbiter-led-luminaire/.
