 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rubidium. Today we're talking about a really interesting new tool that I've been using a lot in my narrative work and that is Follow Fill. Often when you're shooting a scene with two people talking and the camera is moving, there's no way to get the lights far enough back that they won't get in the scene. This can be a real problem, especially when you're shooting outside or somewhere that's really dark and you want that extra little bit of fill to bring up the level on your subject so that you separate them from the background. The answer to this is Follow Fill. Follow Fill is a light, usually an LED, on the end of a boom pole that a grip or a gaffer carries above camera powered by battery. They try and keep the light as close to the axis of the camera as possible so that it doesn't create extra shadows and you don't see it moving around. Often it'll be in some kind of china ball or diffused setup so that they can carry it right above camera and it sort of acts like you're just getting that much extra light on your subject that your subject is that much brighter. This is great for when you're outside, say on a city street and there's no way to rig lights along the pathway of the camera move to give that extra illumination and if you did, they would keep illuminating the background and it would cut into that separation that you have between character and background. The great thing about Follow Fill is because of the inverse square law, the light only travels at the level you want it a couple of feet. So if the person holding the Follow Fill keeps it, you know, two or three feet in front of the actor, you're going to get an actor that pops out of the background that really is this much brighter. You see here them using it on Deadpool when he's running down a city alley that there's nowhere that they could have put a light that would have been soft enough and bright enough that you wouldn't see as the camera pulls back. Another one you see here being used in Black Swan when she's walking around the streets at night. The only solution for this would be to rig a soft light source above the path over 20 feet, which would be super expensive, really hard to power, probably quite loud. Just having this light source in a china ball above Natalie Portman's character means that she is separated from the background. You get all the great things you want to do with light very conveniently. And since there's usually a boom operator holding a microphone almost at that same place, you either have to negotiate between the to the mic and the light, or you shoot these kind of scenes MOS meaning without sound on the day and you add the sound and later this allows the person holding the Follow Fill to get as close as possible to the actor with just staying out of the frame lines. Pretty much anyone who knows how to swing a boom on set and keep it out of the shot can do this job. I've used the IntelliTek LC 50 on a boom pole because it's light because it's battery powered. You can run the cable down the boom pole onto the operator's belt and have a really bright light that will run for hours off a 98 watt hour V-mount battery. I used it on a recent video where we wanted a walk and talk through a alleyway that was almost totally dark. We had the actor stop at different positions. They would have gone into complete darkness in between the different lighting setup. So this is a really cool tool to experiment with in both daylight and darkness, especially if you're shooting something like exterior night scenes and you want your character to be visible as they're walking around. I've also seen it done with a piece of poly board and having someone off screen shine a bright Fresnel style lens onto the poly board that the grip is carrying with the actor. So there are a bunch of different ways to do it, but really what you're thinking about doing is just holding a light behind camera and adding that extra sense of illumination so that as the camera swings around you won't see any lights in frame. That is my look at the follow fill, a really interesting tool, one that I've been using a bunch and one that I plan to use a bunch more. Please let me know in the comments below if you've ever used a follow fill, what lights and fixes you used, what your results were and really how we can get the most out of this. Thank you very much for watching. Links to the products seen here in the description. Leave your questions in the comments and I will see you next time.