Creator of new processes and best ways to manage lights while filmmaking, the company chose VRs to publicize its image on the web.

We interviewed David van der Veen, from Het Licht equipment & studio rental, to discover more about the company and the choice made for its homepage. Moreover, we interviewed Bob Groothuis to better understand the project he was involved into.

click here to view Het Licht Warehouse panorama

Can you tell us more about the company?

Het Licht ( literally translated as “The Light”) is traditionally used in the Dutch filmindustry to address the lighting department as a whole. It seemed to make sense to choose it as our company name, because it covered all our services and our identity so perfectly when we started our company.
Later on we included renting out studio facilities as a logical extension of our activities.

Unfortunately it’s impossible to translate the “double meaning” of our Dutch name into other languages. So the least we can do is to explain this “double meaning” to you...

Het Licht rents filmlighting equipment and studio’s for commercials, feature films, television drama series, television, photography and events.
Our intention is to supply the best possible quality standard to our customers.
We focus on providing the best equipment, supplied in the best transport system and our team adds personal service and support to our technical facilities in the best possible way.

Focussing on a wide range of “lighting and studio needs” is our conscious choice.
Combining the needs of all the different disciplines in our audiovisual industry enables us to fill our rental agenda’s more efficiently and offer the best services at the best rates.

Different jobs in different disciplines ask for different approach to meet different challenges.
Our equipment is prepared for just that and our team has the experience and flexibility to add solutions with knowledge in every discipline, either technical, productional or financial, we will be able to offer creative solutions.

You provide lighting trucks for film making. Can you tell us more about them?

The lighting trucks by Het Licht

click here to view Standard LightTruck with 100Kva generator

click here to view Standard LightTruck with 100Kva generator (interior)

All lighting equipment is stored separately in our lighting trucks in such a way that it can be approached and handled by the lighting crew easier and all at the same time.
Because the technicians can work on different tasks at the same time, this saves a lot of time from the start of the shooting day until the wrap.

All our lighting trucks are standard equiped with a broad range of lighting-accessory's, stands and electrical supply equipment.
Most of the equipment is stored in trolleys. Lighting fixtures, stands, cables, and grip accessory's can easily be transported onto the set to create a local lighting base camp.
This can save a lot of time, not having to walk from the set to the lighting truck and back for every piece of equipment needed.

Our lighting trucks are equipped with proper worklights inside the truck as wel as for outside the truck when working or maneuvering.

All our lighting trucks are equipped with a standard correction- and colourgel package and a production stores package, expandable.
Only used expendables and gel’s are charged to the production after specification of usage by the gaffer. This means that production company’s don’t have to invest in taking these articles in stock themselves. Special requests for filters or expendables need to be ordered before hand.
On the order page of our site you can download our list of usage for expandables.

An overview of our different types of lighting trucks, registration numbers, weightcategory’s and other specifications are to be found on the lightingtrucks specifications page of our site.

click here to view Studio New West panorama

Why did you choose VR for the corporate website?
Since we use our website to communicate our passion for what we do in the audiovisual business, it made good sense to choose the HDRI Panorama photography to show our facilities. We where looking for something special, a new technique, something that expresses the fun and passion that we feel for our company.
We were immediately caught by the suggestion of art-director Maarten Butter and his friend Bob Groothuis to use this HDRI Panorama photography.
For us this is a very functional, fun and freaky technique that emphasizes our passion for photography. And it shows how we do our best to keep up with new image techniques and quality standards.

For example, look at the picture in studio 3 which is a large sound-isolated studio, well suited for film-, photography- and television-productions.

click here to view Amsterdam Studio 3 panorama

We look straight into the lens of a 20K fresnel and at the same time we are able to see the structure in the black curtains hanging around the studio floor.... what more can you say?

© 2008 Maarten Butter - RedPost BV

Bob Groothuis

Bob...How did the project start?
What happens if the Dutch start to believe they can no longer fight the sea?
The Sci-fi short "Luctor" tells the story of environmentalist Hans Brink: for years, he declaimed that evacuation of western Holland would be necessary. “One weak spot, one breach, and everything will be flushed”, he warned. He knew he was exaggerating, but in his fight to reduce carbon emissions, scaring people seemed to be a good tactic...
The movie was an initiative of Maarten Butter and Ferry Piekart and produced by their foundation: "Making the Movie". The movie is currently in postproduction and worked on by people from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden & the United States.
Luctor was shot without any money entirely in a green-screen-studio. It was captured in uncompressed HD in six days. "Het Licht" supplied lighting equipment and a large studio for free. When asked to return the favor, art-director Maarten Butter suggested "Het Licht" to use HDRI Panorama photography on their website. Butter hence asked me to help out and we shot approx. 15 HDRI panoramas in two days.

Please tell us more about the shooting and the HDRI workflow?
The project took about 2 day to shoot. The first day I shot the pano's in 19 exposures per angle in JPG format (this is absolute overkill but better more then lesser; and I could do so many exposures because there weren't problems with time and weather.
With the precision panohead + Nikon 10.5 lens you need 7 angles too shoot a complete panorama. The second day, I shot in RAW in about 12 exposures. Every pano took about 12 minutes to shoot and I used a remote cable control for the camera: the problem with wireless remotes is that the connection between the camera and the remote is completely unreliable. All the JPG exposures per angle were merged to a .EXR file with Photomatix and stitched with PTGuiPro.

When shooting RAW the process is a bit different because the need to convert the RAW image into 16 bit tiff files before merging into .EXR's. To do so, I used the tool BibblePro.
The panorama's were rendered at full resolution 4119 x 8238 (spherical projection) in .EXR format. The .EXR pano's were tonemapped with Photomatix and color corrected with Photoshop. To fill the hole on the place where the tripod stood, I used CubicConverter to change the projection from Spherical to cubic. Then I placed a logo in the bottom shot. Again, I used CubicConverter to change the cubic images into a QTVR. For the Flash version of the pano's I used the tool pano2vr. Pleinpot finalizes the pano's for publishing them for the web. More info about HDRI.

What equipment did you use?
Here's the Hardware and Software list:
Nikon D70s, lens Nikon 10.5, head 360 precision, softwares: PTGui Pro, BibblePro, Photomatix, Photoshop, CubicConverter, Pano2vr and Pleinpot.

Bob Groothuis was born and lives in the Netherlands since 1969. Now it makes 25 years that - as he says - he's playing around with several things (but he prefera to call it in Dutch "lekker een beetje prusten"): Bob did some painting, sculpturing, photographing and a lot of other things but always in personal projects and worked several years in the film business. Then, he joined the Pixelcorps and learned a lot, specially things about Visual effects. Now his love goes to matchmove (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_tracking ) and rotoscoping and when he has time, he learns always some more about 3D. In the Netherlands Bob is also member of the Dutch inventors organization called the Novu, thanks to his extensive knowledge of Visual effects, which provides him pure fun and he hopes to spend some more time on those projects in the near future. He's always interested in new visual effects techniques and stays up to date with new software and technical developments. Shooting panorama's is what he likes to do. He's now completely hooked into HDRI in combination with panoramas. He has a partime job on Monday, Tuesday & Wednesday working with pleasure for a Dutch company in the postal office. He has much more things on his sleeve, but they will be shown on his website, whose launch will be at the end of this year.
Some of Bob's current projects include: living for about 15 years in Scheveningen (The Hague / The Netherlands), made to showcase the beautiful places in that town. He's planning to collect VRs and put them on http://www.scheveningen360.com. Bob is still busy with Luctor post-production, doing rotoscoping, matchmoving & cloud photography for that movie, voluntarily. For more info see project Luctor; as well as HDRVFX Post-production, where work as freelancer for HDR-VFX, LLC doing post-production on a huge virtual tour project for one of the world's largest automobile companies.

The project for Het Licht was created by the following companies and people: Site Design: David van der Lely; Text Het Licht: David van der Veen; HDRI Panorama photography + color correcting: Bob Groothuis; Art Direction + color correcting: Maarten Butter - RedPost BV; Production: Bas van Oers - Vocom.

Links:
HetLicht.nl
BobGroothuis.com
Mail: mail at bobgroothuis.com