Lighting a Set: One Piece Flow

• Load in the gear you need first and/or for the location. You do not what to bring in too much extra equipment to set, but you also do not want to send someone to the truck every 20mins.
• Run power to the Key Light area
• Build the key light. Turning on the key light within the hour of the call time, depending on how big of a set up you have or how complicated the load in is, is a great goal to set. Turning on a light literally shows others (Dp, AD, producers) that things are happening in your department.
• Run power to the backlight area
• Build the backlight, if necessary
• Run power for the background area
• Light the background, if necessary
• Run power to the fill light area, if necessary
• Build the fill light ( these days, this is usually the grips job, whether passive bounce or negative fill)
• Think about what is next
• Repeat

Note: Have the Grip Department run in flow with this. example, when your heading up the key light, have the grips building and staging grip equipment for the key light. The Grips might have a higher priority such as setting up the Camera if dolly or camera rigging of some kind is needed.

There are definitely nuances to this flow. example: you might need to build the backlight first so that the art department can land a table and dress it so camera department can line up the shot. this is fine, just one piece flow the task of the backlight. But if there is no need for this then I would follow the instructions above, setting up key light is a higher priority than the backlight.