Back in October 2021, right in the middle of the premiere events for Parkway of Broken Dreams, I joined a crew of local (mostly Orange County) filmmakers to help make a short film directed by Megan Welch called Miracle Baby (alternatively, #miraclebaby). And now, more than two years later, after five official film festival selections and a Best Short Award, Miracle Baby is now available to watch online:
Although I’m officially credited as key grip/electric on the film (overseeing the folks who set up lighting and camera support gear), I was also functioning (as I have on several other shorts) as the gaffer/chief lighting technician, which for the non-filmmaking nerds out there, means I worked directly with cinematographer Sean P. Malone on designing and executing the lighting plan to help shape the look that he was looking for in each scene (I also provided a lot of the gear out of my own hodgepodge kit).
I thought it might be fun to give a glimpse behind the scenes and break down some of the lighting setups to explain a little more about the typically unseen work a gaffer (or a grip, or any other below-line crew member) contributes to the final product on screen.
This shot (starting around the 5:00 mark in the video) is a good example of a variety of things happening, lighting-wise. First, you can see the café lights strung up above the buffet table in the right side of the behind-the-scenes photo. That was an idea I/we had to a) distract from an otherwise kind-of blah wall and b) provide some practical (visible in-scene) lights to add some “pop” in the background, approved by set decorator Livia Lozoya (and how good is that set dressing? Such attention to detail in an indie short is rare).
Although we were filming outside, we were under a patio cover, which was good for controlling light and shadows, but also meant we needed to create some artificial (but diffused) sunlight for our actors in the scene. So I pulled out my trusty continuous 800-watt daylight (5600K) softboxes (which were also used together to create a flood of matching daylight in the kitchen scene starting around 2:13 that was actually filmed around sunset), which you can see one was used as a key light directly on the actors and another pointing upward to bounce off the ceiling as a soft fill.
I also set up a slightly-warmer LED panel behind a sheet of diffusion (pretty sure this was an old shower curtain liner) to enhance the actor on the left side of the shot (Heather Halavais, who played Brooke). And Sean wanted a little hair light on the actors (particularly David Mudge, who played Craig and was furthest right in the scene) to separate them from from the background, so he had me rig up his small Fresnel light (not sure of the wattage) with a blue gel on it to better match the daylight.
Let’s look at one more setup, from the last scene of the short. This scene (starting around 6:43 in the video)–which began with a handheld camera following Kimmy Burns’ character Sara walking down a hallway after the baby shower that serves as the core of the film–is meant to create a feeling of unease and contrast with the festive setting earlier in the film, so we moved away from naturalistic toward more impressionistic lighting.
To accomplish this, I busted out my then-new 256-color Neewer 530 RGB LED panels that could be dialed either to individual or paired colors, placing one in a bathroom adjacent to the hallway to flood it with a cyan hue and a matching one bouncing off the corner of the master bedroom where the scene would end. We then used warm-colored bulbs in the practical lights already in the room to provide some classic orange-blue contrast (which was colored to more of a green-yellow in the final film).
Despite this being a beyond-microbudget, mostly volunteer project, it was one of the most professional productions I’ve had the pleasure of working on, in large part thanks to producer Xander Montes (who I originally met over Zoom during a pandemic-era Orange County Filmmakers virtual meetup) and producer/director Meg Welch, who not only ran an incredibly organized operation, but also provided space and support for creative collaboration. Everyone–from seasoned pros to amateur hobbyists–put in tremendous work and made the set (which was a family’s house in Orange, Calif. generously donated for us to use for two days) a pleasure to work on, even when rare inclement weather forced us to move previously planned outdoor scenes indoors. We all moved quickly to restage scenes and dress and light interior spaces we never planned to film in.
Filmmaking is a collaborative craft, and that oftentimes makes professionalism and compatibility even more important than skill or talent to make a production happen not only smoothly, but enjoyably (especially when you’re putting in early mornings or late nights for little or no pay). I’ve worked on projects that had talented people involved but who did not jibe well or did not have clear direction, and that kind of chaos is neither enjoyable nor produces a good final product–so working with a team like we did on Miracle Baby was certainly an example of the opposite of that.