Vincent Jeannot, AFC, shoots with the LED Lumos Hawk 150 projector

par Groupe Zebra La Lettre AFC n°295

[ English ] [ français ]

Director of photography, member of the AFC, Vincent Jeannot has been in the business for more than 40 years. He has filmed with Henri Alekan, Luc Besson on Le Dernier combat, Subway and Le Grand bleu, among others. With Françis Huster and Jean-Paul Belmondo in Un homme et son chien. In summer 2018, he shot a feature film in Burgundy. To choose his lights, he went to Jacqueline Delaunay (Acc&Led), where he met Régis Prosper (Cartoni France), who offered him to try out the Lumos Hawk 150 LED projector.

What were your shooting conditions ?
Vincent Jeannot : It is a feature film titled Le Retour de Richard 3 par le train de 9h24, directed by Éric Bu and produced by Stéphane Sansonetti, Alexis Bougon and Jean-Baptiste Neyrac. It’s a very low-budget film shot in 16 days, which is more like the duration of a TV movie.
The main difficulty of this film is that we were a very small team, each one holding several positions. So to set up lights, I was assisted by an electrician who was also a machinist.

What were the requirements for the LED floodlight to choose ?
VJ : The choice of LEDs was very quickly made for their lightness, and their low consumption, we shot almost all the film in a rehabilitated farmhouse that had about ten rather small rooms. So I had chosen in adequacy with the small budget and the ultra reduced team, a panel of LEDs going from Celeb 200, small Fomex 600, Boa and also the Fresnel Zoom 200 projector, knowing that I could only use them outside for light inputs because of their internal fan. When I met Régis Prosper at Acc&Led, I was more than interested in the fact that the Lumos Hawk had no fan !

You were looking for your main source. You must have used it both indoors and outdoors ?
VJ : So I was able to use the Hawk both outdoors and indoors and it quickly became a silent and essential source that I used a lot indoors. In addition, on this film, I used DMX a lot to drive the LEDs, which gave me a great flexibility of settings. And thanks to Jacqueline Delaunay from Acc&Led who gave me the DMX virus and then the wireless DMX virus, I invested in a Connect One box from Exalux that allowed me to drive everything on the iPad. Several times I have only had the Hawk in DMX wifi as a source in a room. I just regret not having had the opportunity to connect the Hawk to the battery because I didn’t have the connectivity. Battery-powered LEDs in DMX wifi is magical ! The flexibility that this provides during filming is a very significant time saving.

What has been possible to do, in terms of lighting ? Give us an example.
VJ : Inside I used it either as a reflection on a poly or on the walls to bring up the atmosphere or live through a diffusion cade. Outdoors at night I used it to make a "moon" in reflection on a poly to reduce the shadows cast.

After shooting, what do you think are the strengths of the Lumos Hawk 150 ?
VJ : Silence ! On a fiction you can’t afford to have projectors with fans near the actors and therefore microphones ; it’s impossible and every time I’m offered "Fresnel" with fan cooling and someone tells me : "The noise is very low, we don’t hear it...". I know in advance that I can’t use them in fiction. Otherwise the projector is robust, not too heavy and the controls are clear and well placed. The focusing range is good and the surprising lens does its job well. And the IRC is very good, I didn’t even ask myself the question of colour rendering on this comedy with almost always seven actors on the screen.

Did you expect this from a 150W Fresnel LED floodlight ?
VJ : This is the first time I have had the opportunity to use a projector of this power without a fan. I had already used the Dedolight 40W and 90W without a fan too.

Would you recommend it ? And if so, in which cases ?
VJ : For the 200% fiction because the silence is golden and it is a rare projector, I hope the brand will not hesitate to cool other projectors passively like the 150W which is the only one that does not have a fan. I think of the 200W and why not the 400W !