15 May 2018
Tom Van den Abbeele is a gaffer, best boy, lighting designer and CEO of the lighting rental company Watts in Belgium. Together with Cinematographer, Lou Berghmans, he worked as a gaffer on the Belgian crime series Salamander. Because this series involved many car shoots, Berghmans asked Tom to find a fixture that was battery powered and easy to rig. Already familiar with the DMG Lumière Switch fixtures, they hired two SL1 Switch fixtures and one SL1 MINI Switch from the Watts rental inventory.
Tom said: “The great thing about , Switch is that you can power it with just one V-Lock battery and it will last for quite some time. We had a kit of 4 x BEBOB 200Ah batteries and we never ran out of power! The SL1 light output was just enough to battle the lights on the streets we were driving through. The fixture has a lot of rigging options as there are many threads where you can screw in a 16mm stud, which makes it ideal for car mounts! For the night shoots, we used The Dome as we did not need the same amount of light. What was also quite handy for the night shoots is that you can dim the fixture down to almost 1% and still have a nice colour correcting light. We used the SL1 almost all the time on this production. It is so easy to rig and power, so compact, so slim, that you can mount it practically anywhere. We could not have done the amount of car shots needed without the DMG Lumière SL1 Switch.”
DMG Lumière SL1 Switch rigged on a car roof during the filming of “Salamander.”
Photographer: Vincent Custers – VINGTCENTS
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