Lighting Live

When producers of The West Wing planned the live debate episode on NBC between fictional presidential candidates, they hired an Emmy-winning lighting designer and director as director of photography — Kim Killingsworth of Design Partners, Los Angeles. He helped develop a methodology for shooting the episode HD for the first time in the show's history. The team ran the shoot out of a production truck (a Supershooter 19 HD production truck from NEP, Pittsburgh), much like a live awards show.

The lighting configuration for the West Wing debate stage consisted almost entirely of theatrical fixtures. DP/LD Kim Killingsworth lit the stage as he would for a real, live, televised debate, but not as bright, since there was no need to accomodate still photographers.

The episode's opening backstage segment had to resemble the show's normal 35mm look, while the debate itself resembled a typical news video broadcast. They decided to shoot the opening backstage scenes at 24p, handheld, before switching on the fly to shooting 1080i for the live debate itself, using 10 pre-positioned Thomson LDK 6000 multi-format HD cameras.

“The Thomson camera handled both situations,” Killingsworth says. “Backstage, we shot 24p with the PAL No. 4 setting, Steadicam, and handheld. We went into the Gamma tables of the camera and got a pretty close match to the normal 35mm look of the show. The camera then pans into a monitor as the candidates walk on stage, and we fade from the letterbox 24p format to a 4×3, 1080i look for the debate stage.”

Killingsworth lit the backstage and the debate stage differently, controlling everything through an ETC Expression 3X lighting console.

“The backstage was lit solely by practical fixtures, while we used only theatrical instruments onstage,” he explains. “Normally, on a real televised debate, they would probably go brighter to accommodate still photographers, but that was not a concern for us, so we rarely went past 22ft. to 25ft. candles.”