It’s no surprise that DP Brian Pratt is much in demand, especially when it comes to lighting and shooting big jobs. Pratt is co-owner of rental house Pacific Lightsmith in Marina Del Rey, and he’s worked on many Disney projects, as well TV specials for GM and Maxim. Pratt recently shot a demanding HD job for Disneyland Resorts. “They’re putting in a new attraction, “The Disney Dreamhouse,” which is a very interactive attraction, created in conjunction with Microsoft and HP,” he explains. “They’re putting in 103-inch 1080p screens and we shot all the video inserts for use in the house’s walls and ceilings, and some of the ceilings will be fitted with 1080p HD projections.”

Pratt used three Sony F900R cameras and a selection of Fujinon lenses to capture coverage of a soccer game filmed on location at Long Beach State University over a two-day period, which will be used on the Dreamhouse screens. “The basic idea was like The Mighty Ducks, but for a young soccer team, and like any film job, HD has its challenges, but I basically light it the same way as film, as the contrast ratio is very much the same,” he says. “I get nice latitude with the F900R, and nowadays with the Sony F23 camera you get 11 stops, so there’s hardly any difference between HDcam and film. The main thing with HD lighting for me is that I’m more concerned with back light than I am with film.”

To properly light his coverage, Pratt went with the biggest lights he could find for the job. “I chose the Arri Max, and I got two 18K lights that are focusable and you don’t have to put lenses in them,” he adds. “And they’re so versatile. They’ve been out about a year and they’re the most powerful HMI that you can get, and they were great. I could use one as a backlight, and one as a fill or key side, and just by focusing them at a different focal length; one became a real intense light while the other became much softer. You don’t have to change any glass in them.”

Pratt also used an Arri 12K and an Arri 6K. “Those were my main guns, and everything else was gripped in,” he notes. “And I thought this’d be a good job to promote those as they’re such fantastic lights.” Pratt rented the Arri Max package through Cinelease in Burbank, “as we don’t own those lights at our company,” he explains. For interiors, the DP used some small 1200-watt Arris. “And we also had to do a night-for-day shoot outside a house, as we were running late,” he says, “so we used 1200s to make it look like daytime. We set up some ultra-bounces, bounced the 1200s into those, and then shot this guy underneath a tree so it looked like it was done during daylight hours. I love doing that kind of lighting and I have no problem shooting night-for-day, and it turned out great.”