Lighting Workshop 2002: Michael Goi
By David Heuring

This article originally appeared in ICG Magazine in 2002

At the Los Angeles edition of the 2002 ICG Lighting Workshop on a sound stage in Burbank operated by Local 80, a dozen cinematographers lit scenes and discussed their thought processes for more than 200 Guild members.

ICG National President George Spiro Dibie, ASC opened the proceedings with his usual good humor, thanking all the volunteers as well as Local 80 (grips) and 44 (props) for lending their time, materials and expertise. Companies donating equipment included Arriflex, Kino Flo, Illumination Dynamics, Chapman and Plus 8 Video.

This is the first of a series of articles excerpting their remarks: The workshop began with Michael Goi. Goi (The Fixer, Who Killed Atlanta’s Children, Judas and Jesus, etc.) blocked and lit a simple scene, and then had various people play the roles of script supervisor, director, producer and others who force a cinematographer to adapt his or her approach on the fly. His point was that a good cinematographer plans ahead for such contingencies.

"I believe there's no such thing as bad lighting," Goi said. "You can use any type of lighting, but it's the way you use it and the way you apply it. There is lighting that works more effectively for certain types of situations than others. But I don't normally look at a setup and say, ‘That's really bad lighting.’ It may be lighting that doesn't feel appropriate for that particular scene."

Goi demonstrated by lighting a subject with a garish low angle. He asked the subject to deliver a line: "I love you." It was obvious that the lighting was wrong for the scene. Then he changed the line to "I'm going to kill you." Suddenly the lighting was appropriate.

"I break my thinking about lighting down into four elements that are really very simple and clearly defined," Goi went on. "The first element is color—the color of the light. Is it a warm light, cool, or pukey green? Color carries with it a suggestion of something emotional. People react to color in a very emotional way.

"The second element is the angle or direction of the light. Where is the light coming from? Is it high, low, from the side, the back, the front?

"The third thing is the intensity of the light. Is it strong and bright or dim and subdued? The fourth element, for lack of a better term, is the quality of the light. By that I mean the hardness or softness of the light. Is it hard, soft, somewhere in-between? Is it specular, throwing hard shadows, or is it soft and ambient, or some other gradation?

"When you're doing a lighting setup, you're constantly thinking about these four things, and changing your light to accommodate the scene," Goi said. "You may be trying to emulate something you've seen before, or to create something totally different you've only seen or imagined in your mind. No matter what, these four aspects describe everything you're going to do in terms of controlling light. Today we're doing a simple setup and then, by varying these elements, we're going to change the mood, the time of day, and the intention of the scene."

Once the scene was blocked and roughly lit, Goi began to deconstruct it, explaining the various reasons why a cinematographer might make various choices. He pointed out that he was lighting based on the limitations of images on the 24P high definition monitor on the stage. He cautioned the attendees regarding monitors.

"You'll notice that not all the monitors here match," he said. "If you're going to be working in the high def realm, you need to make sure that you have a great digital imaging technician, somebody who's going to balance those monitors. What you see on these monitors when you're lighting is your life and death. If they're incorrect, then that's lot of postproduction time and money spent trying to fix everything. You go through a different series of checklists when you're shooting film, because you've tested the sensitivity of film and the color balance. You test the lab that you're sending the film to. You see how they're going to print it, and then you know how to expose for it and how to filter it. Lighting by monitor is different, but you have to be sure that what you're seeing is accurate.

"When I'm shooting high def, I like to have the video village for everybody else, and have my digital imaging technician in his own little tent with a monitor that nobody else looks at but him and me," Goi added. "He's sequestered away, and he doesn't have to deal with everybody looking over his shoulder. Everybody who looks at a high def monitor instantly becomes a cinematographer. That's something you want to avoid."

Another important aspect of the cinematographer's responsibility is the ability to prioritize. "When I start a lighting setup, usually I have 25 things that I'd like to do in that setup," he says. "You never have enough time to get it all done, so you pick and choose. I'll start with the first five. Then when I see what I've got, and if I still have some time, I'll go with the next five until I get to the point where I just have to shoot. After a while you can't play with it anymore. You just have to shoot it. The time pressure means you never quite achieve perfection, but you can keep working towards it as long as you dare."

Goi proposed a hypothetical situation in which the scene is blocked and lit and then the director changes his or her mind. "The director says, 'The character is lonely, so the scene should take place at night.' What does late at night mean, and that she's lonely? How do you translate that into something that's visual? How do you put across that idea? Off the top of my head, I would want to take away some of the warmth. I would want to make it maybe a cooler atmosphere, something that's less homey."

Goi adjusted the scene accordingly, and then added to the mix the protestations of a hypothetical producer, such as, "I would like to see the star’s face." He demonstrated several ways of adding soft bounce fill light to accommodate the producer. At the same time, he advised attendees to not play things too safe. "Take your experimentation right to the edge of not being asked back again," he said. "For a film I did in Morocco called Judas & Jesus, I was shooting a close-up of the actor playing Judas. It was a scene where he had completely lost his face, and his entire soul was just crushed. He was like an empty man. We had set up the shot with a lot of shadow on the right side of his face, the light was coming in from a low angle, and you could see both of his eyes. The director decided that he'd like to do a dolly push in, so we had to move the lights and gear out of the way to get the dolly in. When we got the dolly track in position, the lights came back, and the light was a little more off to the side. All we had was one light, just a sliver of light on the one side of his face, and the entire other side of his face was completely black, including his right eye. The gaffer said 'Let me move the light over to fix that.' I said no, leave it, because it's entirely appropriate for this point in the movie and where he is psychologically.

"It turned into an hour-and-a-half debate with the producers on whether or not we should see one eye or both eyes. They suggested we shoot it both ways. My experience is when you do that, and you give them an alternate, they will always choose the more conservative shot. Luckily the director stuck with me and said 'No, this is more powerful and is the way to go.' So we shot it that way, with one eye showing, and the entire right side of his face—the camera side—black.

"During the course of the take, when he was doing the action, the actor cried one single tear. It was on the black side of the face, so you couldn't see it. I felt so bad. I was thinking maybe I should do that again. But luckily the actor felt so strongly about the way the shot looked that he loved it and wanted to keep it that way.

"That's a really important collaboration for a cinematographer," Goi said. "When you can connect with an actor and they realize what you're doing to make them look good, and they plug into it and help you, it's one of the more gratifying things that happens in filmmaking."

Goi noted that all the technical tools of the cinematographer must be put in service of communicating emotion through the images. "Lighting starts with the script and the individual scene you're shooting," he says. "It's a cliché but it's the foundation of what we do, so I have to say it. All your emotion comes out through your conversations with the director. I believe that if you don't start with an emotional base to what it is that you're lighting, then you're just sort of lighting. It's an empty exercise with expensive equipment. It cannot be as effective as when you cue to the emotion of it. What did I go through in my life that kind of felt like this? What were the surroundings like? How did I feel? What was the lighting like? What was the color of the lighting? What was the mood like? If you find something that affects you emotionally lighting-wise, that may affect others who watch the movie as well. And that isn't merely illumination— that's when what we do moves toward the realm of art."