Is this the Rosco Litepad?

[legrevedotcom]

I first heard / read about that Rosco thing in relations to the movie "Collateral" where it was used to light the interior of the car scenes.

Recently I noticed in the very first scene in "The Raven" that one of the characters was holding a lantern I wondered if that was really enough light to make the scene work. For a split second you get a glimpse of something white added to the lantern he's holding. That was really a nice idea of how to get nice lighting without using the actual pratical.

I'm beginning to think that these little pads are really useful for applications like this. They are small and so on... just too bad they are so damn expensive.

Any of you guys have or have seen any other examples where the Litepad shines? (pun intended)

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[Mitch Gross]

I don't know what was used in The Raven, but it has a diffused quality with fast drop off similar to what a Litepad would give. The "old school" way of doing such a trick would be to place a small light bulb on one side of the lantern covered with diffusion and either run it off a battery or a wire up the actor's sleeve. The nice thing about the wire is that a more powerful bulb can be used and it can be rigged to a dimmer for flicker effects or active brightness compensation. I've done lots of candle tricks this way. Such tricks are going the way of the Dodo bird for many as something like a little Litepad with a battery really is so easy to tape in place in seconds and weighs so little. Depends on what you want the illumination to look like.

For car rigs I used to buy the Christmas tree lights that came boxed layed out flat against a sheet of white plastic. I'd tape that whole thing onto the back of a car seat or on the dash, drop a little diffusion on top and then power it off an inverter. Now I just use a Litpad. Just be aware of the color cast, as I find Litepads definitely green spike more than some other LEDs for our industry.

 

[CharlesPapert]

I use the Literibbon myself vs the Rosco product, but they are similarly amazing in terms of hidability and multitude of uses--and similarly disappointing in terms of green spike. Still though, I recently hid a strip of Literibbon along a tiny 3/4" jog above the dashboard of a Prius that even Xmas tree lights or old lightrope gags would have been too bulky to hide into--it was high enough to avoid the ghoulish uplighting look, almost like a magic trick. But between that and shooting through the windshield, it was a LOT of green.

 

[CharlesPapert]

forgot to mention, for a recent feature that involved a few lantern scenes I augmented with a Gem ball just below camera for one scene with multiple lanterns, which looked great. And for another where one character carried a lantern and the other lagged a few steps behind, I used a pepper light on a pole snooted way down to add a little level onto the back character, the pole was carried by an electric alongside camera and the handheld nature of the lantern sold the moving effect of the light. We actually had to have two poles since the actors took a turn that was too narrow for the pole to make it, so one light faded off as another took over. Elaborate, but invisible on camera.