How A Flashing Beacon Can Save The Day

Designing sets for films, music videos and even stage shows is really all about one thing - getting the best effect for the least amount of money. Nine times out of ten, the set is the last thing anyone thinks about when drawing up a budget; they've got directors, camera crews and actors or musicians to worry about, not to mention extras and special effects; my crew and I are often asked to simply run to the nearest supermarket and 'make it work'.

I recently worked on a horror-themed music video and to say our budget was limited would be being generous. One particular shot was taken at night in a graveyard with the band playing while drenched in fake blood, and a girl running through the fog, trying to get away from something. It could well have been the horrible racket they were making, but I can't say for certain.

From my team and I, this shot needed a graveyard, which was easy enough to find and some fog, which wasn't so easy to find in June. However, an outdoor setting with a fog machine going at night can mean an impossible shot - there's just not enough light around without floodlighting everything which the director was convinced would 'ruin the effect,' so we looked into alternative lighting methods. We took a quick browse through some stores in the town the day of the shoot and I saw the perfect solution - a flashing beacon or two. These would cut through the fog, provide an interesting visual and hopefully provide a bit more light so the cameras could pick up what was going on.

It seemed that three members of my team also had the flashing beacon idea so by the time we met up to discuss the night's work we had quite a lot of them. A motto of mine when it comes to buying props is 'better too much than too little' and we started developing a way of using these to provide all the lighting we'd need if the director was still going to avoid any traditional floodlighting. We rigged up a timer unit to ensure that each flashing beacon would either engage at the same time, leading to uniform flashes like a strobe, or to have it so that there would be different ones flashing at each time, creating more even lighting.

Sometimes an idea as simple as a flashing beacon can really save a shoot which was destined for failure, be it due to budgetary constraints or a director who won't listen to reason, and that's all part of a set designer's job - making things work when they really shouldn't.