Lighting a room before the actors have walked it is the dearest hour of the shooting day, and I count it a director’s fault. I have ordered it. What follows is how that order looks from the chair, set down for the gaffers who have to hang the result, because I think it can be argued with, and in front of me it rarely has been.

How it looks from the chair

The room is ready, the lamps are on the truck, the actors are in makeup, and to a director a crew with nothing in its hands at the top of the morning looks like money leaving. Lighting is the slowest thing the day holds, so he asks the chef op to make a start. The chef op can answer that he does not yet know where the faces will be. Said to a director with the clock in his ear, that sounds like a request for time, and the director believes he is the one offering to save some.

The step he is cutting is the one that looks like nothing. A rehearsal for marks is twelve people in a doorway watching two actors cross a kitchen while tape goes down behind their heels, and from the chair it does not resemble work. The director has already staged the scene in his head and on his shot list, and he takes that for a staging. What he does not see is that the hour after the rehearsal is built on what was seen from that doorway, and that his own picture of the scene will not survive the first actor who prefers the chair to the window.

What the guess costs

Without the walk, the chef op guesses which way a head turns on the line that matters and whose shadow falls across whom, and the gaffer’s crew rigs the guess. Every other department is left guessing with him. The machino has a frame for a window that may not be in the shot. The mixer wants to know where the boom can live. The first assistant asks how long and is given a guess, which he passes on to makeup as if it were a time.

Staging first has a cost of its own: the actors are on the floor before they go to makeup, and the first has to build his morning around that. Against that there is the relight when the blocking turns out to run the other way, which is a setup dropped from the back of the day, or the overtime to keep it. In my experience the second cost is the larger every time. It also lands on the wrong department. A rig that goes up twice takes the lighting crew’s morning twice over, and by evening the day is remembered as one on which lighting was slow.

Chez nous both chefs need to be in that doorway, since the machinos carry the large frames and the pont lumière and the électros the lamps and the small flags at them; on a British floor it is the sparks, who set their own flags while the grip keeps to the camera, and in Los Angeles the grips, who make every shadow and touch no cable. A chef who was not there is rigging from a description.

Short of time

The director’s defence is the clock, and I think the clock argues against him. An American single-camera television unit averages four to eight pages a day, where a feature unit there may shoot two or three, and a day of that kind has no second hour to give to a room that was already lit once. A unit of that kind keeps the walk and makes it rough and quick. The lamps move while the actors are in makeup, with stand-ins on the marks where a production has them. The actors come back and do it a little differently, as they will, and what is left for the crew is an adjustment.

A prelight changes this less than a director supposes. Where the schedule allows one, the rigging crew has run the cable, placed the distribution and hung the lamps roughly where they will be wanted, and the unit walks into a room that needs aiming. It is rough on purpose, and the walk is still what finishes it. On a small film, where the gaffer is his own rigging crew, the prelight is whatever he can hang before the call, and the same holds: hung for a scene that has been walked, it is an hour gained, and hung for a guess it is the first thing to come down.

The master

There is a reason on the board as well. The first and I start a location on its master where we can, because the wide shot sets the logic of the light and the geography of the room, and every closer size has to match it. Light the master blind, shoot it as lit, then relight the coverage to where the actors really went, and the key sits on one side of a face in the wide and on the other in the close shot. The editor is left to cut round it.

A director who gives that order has decided nothing about the scene. He is afraid of the idle floor, and a fear can be talked to, most easily the evening before, when the first can still arrange for the actors to walk the scene ahead of makeup. In France the light is the chef op’s and the order reaches the gaffer through him, while the clock is the first’s, so an objection has two people it could go to before the chair. What should a gaffer say when the room is to be lit before the scene has been staged, and to which of the three of us should he say it?

That the French floor splits this work between two branches comes from the technicians’ collective agreement as it read in June 2024, and a later text may have moved the titles.