“Reality TV definitely has its own special lighting challenges,” says DP and lighting designer John Gumina. Gumina should know, as he’s a veteran of the genre and has lit such well-known reality series as The Osbournes, America’s Next Top Model, Top Designer, and The Real World.

He recently worked on MTV’s The Real World Hollywood, a show in its 20th season, which is produced by Bunim-Murray Productions. He reports that the ever-popular show has an added twist this time out, “It’s gone green and since they first began planning it, MTV and the producers got the cast involved in an environmental awareness program. The idea,” he continues, “was for the cast to do stuff to help the Green Initiative, and use things like bike-powered generators to power up their computers. So if they even wanted to just check their email, they’d have to get on the bike.”
 With all this in mind, Gumina then suggested to the producers that he should try and, “light the whole show green as well. It’ll look a bit different, as we’ll try to eliminate as many of the usual tungsten units as possible, but it’ll match the overall green plan. And they were very into that approach, so we decided to run with it.”
 For the production side of the lighting, Gumina and his team used a lot of Kino Flos. “They’re ultra-high frequency fluorescent units that are color-correct for daylight and tungsten, depending on what you’re trying to shoot,” he notes.  “And they’re very low-power, very efficient, and give you a very soft base level light, which is very flattering for this kind of reality show. We also used some compact fluorescent tubes made by GE and other companies, which are also very efficient and are higher output.”
 Additionally, the show made a “green deal” with TCP, Inc., the energy-efficient lighting innovator and the world’s largest manufacturer of energy-saving, compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).  “I went through their whole catalog and selected all the bulbs that I wanted to use on this job, and they ended up giving us literally hundreds and hundreds of bulbs, ranging from compact fluorescents to flood light bulbs and candelabra bulbs,” he says. “So we got all different types of bulbs that we could even use in household lamps and fixtures.”
 The company contributed a lot of LED units that were, “in bulb form and a par form, which were a little more punchy, and which you could put on a track light,” he reports. “I also used some color-changing LED parcams. Instead of being incandescent par globes, they’re hundreds of LEDs inside the parcams, so we lit it accordingly with all that.”
 Gumina admits that, “halfway through the shoot, we all realized that some of the green approach wasn’t really cost-effective. They wanted to build the house using recycled material and low-energy appliances, and go really green, but then the reality of time and budget set in, so we had to scale back a bit. But I’d say that 99 percent of the production lighting was all done with energy-efficient lighting, so although it was a big challenge, we ultimately did what we set out to do on the show.”