The Leko Bounce
Tiny hallway, 6 actors, 3 camera's, boom operator and… a light? Here we are on "The League" doing a daytime scene on location. Three camera shoot in a real hallway with absolutely no space. I have about 10 minutes to light this scene and I somehow need to get a light behind the camera as a fill. No space for a Chimera or a Jem Ball or… well, we have a white wall.
So I decided to hang a 800 Watt Joleko with a 50 degree lens in front of the actors and shoot it back above the camera's for a bounce. We got ourselves an exposure and it looks.. hmmm.. okay. The real issue with a bounce is that it does go everywhere and spills all over the walls. For example, there's way too much light spilling on the front door which looked a bit odd. Unfortunately I never saw a blocking or rehearsal of the scene and we had no time or space to flag the spill and shape the bounce light. Given the time and space constraints, the Leko bounce was a viable solution. If not the only solution.
As you can see from this angle on the actors above, it's also a great way to get a backlight in. Because we have three camera's and we're looking 180 degrees, I often have no place to put up lights and stands or run power. Thus a Leko bounce is great way to quickly sneak in a back light behind the actors. One other important note to make about Leko bounces is that you can control the amount of light by blading it inside the lens of the Leko. Meaning that I could have made the amount of light less by making the bounce smaller so that it was more of a sliver of light. This is important because I am not dimming it and thus not changing the color temperature. Often with tungsten bounces, you dim it and it starts getting very orange (warm). Often we like that but sometimes you want a very strict color temperature and a Leko is quick way to control the amount of light without changing the color temperature.