Oil lamps on 1917

[Ruairiob]

Good afternoon from chilly Bucharest,
I’m about to shoot a show which will rely a lot on candles and oil lamps. I heard that on 1917 you used prop oil lamps with two bulbs, the brighter one being hidden behind the dimmer one.

I wonder if you could give a little more detail. Did you put something in between them?  so that the effect wasn’t cumulative? Were you using tungsten or LED bulbs?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Topic

[Roger Deakins]

I usually use 150 or 250 watt bulbs to rig an oil lamp in this way but for ‘1917’ I used 500 watt bulbs of the same kind as are used in conventional Tungsten Fresnel lamps. These were all I could find in the UK, although I have a great range of quartz bulbs in my garage in the US.

Once or twice I have used a small strip of blackwrap between the twin bulbs, to hide the one that was away from camera and brighter, but I don’t remember it being necessary to do this on ‘1917’.

[Ruairiob]

Thanks Roger,
Just so you know, the last time you answered a question for me I had been asked to shoot a fifteen page battle with horses and chariots and five hundred extras- all at dusk, in three days.

I was able to say to the producers ‘You guys have heard of Roger Deakins, right? He says it can’t be done’.

You got me right out of jail.

Thanks again.

[Stip]

Haha, good story!

[Roger Deakins]

I guess I am not in your producers good books, though!

So what did you do? Tell all.

[Ruairiob]

I shot some DFN tests and said we can do dusk if we can can control every shot. Shoot the wides at magic hour and the close ups under silks etc…

I also said that if we could guarantee cloudy weather we might be able to make it work- but we were shooting in South Africa so there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Cape Town that that would work.

In the the end, they put the red pen through the word dusk and made it day.

I would have loved to have shot it as written but given the scale and complexity of it – people fighting on chariots etc… it just wasn’t realistic.

But I can’t thank you enough for your message. It made me look like less of a failure.

I guess so much of the job is managing expectations.

[Ruairiob]

Oh and the show sank without a trace, I think there were only about three people still watching by the time we came to that battle!

 

[Roger Deakins]

I’m sorry the show was not a success. So it goes!

[Author]

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